Reliability is not a slogan at Shepherd — it is a system. And every system needs someone who closes the loop between when something goes wrong and when we can prove it will not happen again.

We run on a continuous improvement loop. We call that loop ShepOS — the Shepherd Operating System. Not a process. Not software. The operating environment that keeps Shepherd reliable as we scale toward one billion in revenue by 2030. ShepOS has five pillars:

• The Compass orients us — vision, mission, and values. The fallback when no play exists for the moment.
• Playbooks and Plays define what good looks like — judgment frameworks for each function, with specific moves for specific situations. The right call lives in the system, not the person.
• The Reliability Standard holds us to it — Shepherd’s five-metric operational scorecard for what reliable looks like in numbers.
• UET (Unquality Event Tracking)shows what to fix — how the system learns from what goes wrong, one filed gap at a time.
• Above and Beyond Recognition shows what to repeat — how the system learns from what goes right, one named moment at a time.

The Operational Excellence Lead is the position coach who watches the film at the place where the UET pillar meets Playbooks and Plays. The role that names the patterns, drafts the plays that need to exist, and makes sure the loop actually closes — so the same broken pattern does not open into next quarter, and the quarter after, and the quarter after that.

A Shepherd Standard — what we call a playbook — is the working guide for how a specific function at Shepherd operates. Shipping. Inside sales. Branch expansion. Each playbook contains the individual plays — the specific, repeatable actions a team takes in a known situation — and defines who owns what, how decisions get made, what good looks like, and what to do when things go wrong. A playbook is not a procedures manual. It does not replace judgment; it builds it. The person on the floor still calls the play. The playbook tells them what plays exist and when to use them — and it is the standard we measure against when something goes wrong.

A UET — Unquality Event Tracking — is a broken play. A wrong pick. A missed delivery. A quote that went out wrong. Any documented gap between what the Reliability Standard requires and what the customer — internal or external — actually received. “Unquality” means the work did not meet the standard we promised. Every UET filed is someone on the team saying: we did not keep our promise on this one, here is what happened, so we can keep it the next time.

In the first quarter of 2026, UETs logged grew from roughly 150 in January to over 700 in March. That growth is partly because we are getting better at catching errors — and partly because the operation is moving faster than our ability to close the loop on what we find. The Operational Excellence Lead owns that loop.

Every error logged is a customer who felt friction, a contractor whose job got harder, or a Shepherd team member who had to stop what they were doing to fix something. Filing one is an act of ownership, not blame. But signal without follow-through is just noise — and when the same pattern repeats next week, next month, next quarter, we lose more than time. We lose the trust that took years to build.

This is the role that makes sure that does not happen at Shepherd. The closer. The position coach who watches the film so the people running the play do not have to figure out what went wrong twice.

The Error Lifecycle, End to End

• Own the daily, weekly, and monthly cadence of how Shepherd reviews its operational errors. Triage volume, surface patterns, and route the highest-impact issues to the right person with a clear close target.
• Partner with the Business Process Optimizer to maintain and evolve the UET dashboard that gives leadership real visibility into where the operation is breaking and where it is healing.
• Hold the close-the-loop discipline that makes “reliable” an actual measurement, not an aspiration — every customer-impacting pattern gets traced, addressed, and prevented from recurring.

The UET Playbook

• Serve as the named owner of Shepherd’s UET playbook — the document that defines how errors are categorized, escalated, and closed across the company.
• Own its versioning, its quality gates, and its evolution as the operation grows. This is the one playbook that exists to serve the system itself, and it lives permanently with this role.

Identifying and Drafting New Plays

• When error patterns trace back to a specific functional playbook — shipping operations, inside sales, VMI (Vendor Managed Inventory), branch expansion, or any future Shepherd Standard — identify the play that needs to exist and draft it.
• Route drafts to the Playbook Owner — the functional leader who is the named subject-matter expert and decision-maker for that playbook. They sign off on what stays and what changes, and they own adoption with their team. This role drives the cadence and the close date.
• Influence without taking ownership away. The functional leaders we have should be stronger because this role exists — not bypassed because it exists.

Training That Reinforces the Plays

• Partner with Playbook Owners to turn each Shepherd Standard into something teams can actually run — not just a document on the shelf. The Playbook Owner stays the voice of the work; this role brings the structure.
• Build the training infrastructure — formats, cadence, materials — so adoption looks consistent across branches and is not dependent on each owner’s individual style.
• Co-deliver where it strengthens the play. Step back where the Playbook Owner is ready to lead.
• When a new play is drafted to address a recurring error pattern, training is part of that play’s definition of done — not a follow-up someone has to remember to schedule.

Manager Accountability Through Visible Data

• Build and maintain the structural data that makes manager performance against our playbooks visible. Trends per branch, per role, per playbook section roll up to leadership-visible metrics.
• When a Playbook Owner does not engage with a documented gap after the target close date, escalate. The accountability mechanism is structural, not personal — the data tells the story; this role makes sure leadership sees it.

Coaching Managers on the Error Conversation

• Coach managers across all six branches on how to read UET data with their teams — how to lead a UET review meeting, how to talk about errors without blame, how to use the data to develop people instead of punish them.
• This is coaching delivery, not curriculum design. The job is to equip the managers we have to lead the error conversation well.

These are checkpoints, not aspirations — observable, specific, and built so this role and the VP can sit down at the end of any quarter and have a real conversation about progress.

First 30 Days

• You have spent time in every branch, met the Playbook Owners and the people closest to the work, and can describe in your own words how Shepherd actually operates today versus how it is supposed to operate.
• You have completed a full pass through Q1 UET data, identified the top recurring patterns, and brought leadership a working diagnosis of where the loop is breaking.
• You have a published 90-day plan with named priorities and target close dates.

First 60 Days

• The UET playbook has a v1 draft published, reviewed by leadership, and is being used by at least two functional teams as the standard for how errors are categorized and closed.
• You have drafted at least two new plays in partnership with functional leaders to address top recurring error patterns, and the leaders own adoption with their teams.
• Each new play has a training plan attached — built with the Playbook Owner — and the first round of delivery is scheduled or underway.
• Branch managers have a defined, repeatable cadence for reviewing UETs with their teams, and you have observed at least one review at every branch.

First 90 Days

• The UET playbook is in active use across all six branches and on a quarterly review cycle.
• Leadership has clear, regular visibility into error trends and the maturity of our closure loop — repeat patterns, close rates, and Playbook Owner engagement are all measurable.
• There is a measurable downward trend in repeat error patterns — the same gap is not surfacing month after month after month.
• Playbook Owners across the company are engaging with documented gaps and closing them within target timelines, with escalation as the exception, not the norm.
• Training tied to Shepherd Standards is happening on a predictable cadence, and managers can point to specific plays their teams have been trained on this quarter.

Year One and Beyond

You are not just running the loop — you are making it tighter. You are spotting the patterns that lead to systemic redesign, not just new plays. You are building the continuous improvement muscle of the entire company. Operational Excellence becomes a permanent capability that scales with us.

• You are energized by closing loops, not just opening them.
• You believe systems should serve people, not the other way around.
• You can hold a hard conversation with a senior leader without flinching, and follow it up with a constructive path forward.
• You treat every error as a question worth answering, not an incident to file. You look for patterns where others see noise.
• You hold the line on closing gaps, even when it is uncomfortable — you do not let things slide because the owner is busy or senior. The play only means something when it costs something to keep it.
• You see the pattern before leadership has to ask. You bring the play, not just the diagnosis.
• You can take a playbook someone else wrote and make it land with the people who have to run it — without taking the work away from the person who owns it.
• You are not looking to inherit a finished function — you are looking to build one.

Required

• 5+ years of experience in operations, supply chain, process improvement, quality management, or a closely related field.
• Demonstrated track record of leading process improvement work where you had to influence people you did not directly manage.
• Strong analytical capability — comfortable working in data, identifying patterns, and translating findings into recommendations leadership can act on.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a one-pager that an executive will read and act on.
• Comfort with structured friction — you can hold peers and senior leaders accountable to commitments without making it personal.
• Bias toward action and follow-through — you do not let things drop.

Strongly Preferred

• Experience in distribution, wholesale, or industrial supply.
• Eclipse ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) experience (Eclipse is Shepherd’s core operating system; SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, or comparable ERP experience also valued).
• Power BI (Business Intelligence) or comparable BI / visualization tools.
• Lean, Six Sigma, or similar continuous improvement training.
• Experience designing or delivering operational training in partnership with subject-matter experts — turning a process document into something a team can actually run.

To be clear about scope:

• This role does not own the functional playbooks themselves — functional leaders do.
• This role does not own performance management decisions or disciplinary action — people managers do.
• This role does not design leadership development, career growth programs, or product/vendor education — operational training in this role is always tied to a specific Shepherd Standard and a specific error pattern.
• This role does not own Eclipse data infrastructure — our Business Process Optimizer does.

What this role owns is making sure the operation gets better, measurably, every quarter — and that our playbooks actually evolve, and actually get adopted, based on what the data tells us.

The Shepherd Compass is the values framework we use whenever the right path is not obvious. It is how we evaluate tradeoffs, coach behavior, and make judgment calls across every role and every function. Every position at Shepherd is anchored to it.

Vision

To be the first c