Purpose Statement: The Sr. Vice President of Quality curates a best-in-class culture that champions our Quality Begins with Me promise to do the right thing, the first time, every time. This leader is responsible for developing and executing a comprehensive global quality strategy that progresses our winning aspiration to become unmatched in quality and that serves as a proactive driver of business growth, profitability, and customer trust. This leader also acts as a strategic business partner to operational and regional teams, ensuring that the products we help create are reliable, safe and trusted in the moments that matter most. By driving a culture of continuous improvement, leveraging predictive quality engineering and integrating transformative digital technologies, this role ensures we execute to the highest level of standards, regulatory compliance, and global operational consistency to guard the organization's irrefutable reputation for delivering excellence.
Key Job Accountabilities:1. Strategic Quality Business Partnership
- Proactive Global Strategy Alignment: Develop and execute a comprehensive quality strategy that accelerates our winning aspiration to be unmatched in quality and drives the organization's growth, margin expansion, and business objectives.
- Advisory Mindset: Shift the Quality function from a compliance gatekeeper to a collaborative strategic partner. Foster a culture where operations owns quality execution, while the Quality function acts as the trusted advisor providing proactive insights and recommendations to create customer success and solve business challenges.
- Value Creation: Identify operational inefficiencies and quality trends, collaborating with business leaders to translate quality data into value creation and cost-reduction initiatives.
- Data Democratization: Drive the democratization of quality metrics and insights across the organization, ensuring frontline operations and leadership have the real-time visibility needed to make informed decisions.
2. Technological Integration & Predictive Engineering
- Digital Quality Transformation: Partner with operations and functional centers of excellence to lead the adoption of robotics, automation, and generative AI within factory quality processes and testing environments to solve complex problems.
- Predictive Risk Mitigation: Shift the functional paradigm from reactive defect tracking to predictive quality engineering, utilizing data-driven analysis to identify and mitigate risks before they impact execution.
- Technical Problem-Solving: Foster a deeply analytical "problem solver's mindset" across the technical workforce, encouraging creative solutions and technological differentiation.
3. Global Consistency & Operational Excellence
- Globally Consistent Standards: Embracing a "We are Plexus" mindset, champion global manufacturing consistency by institutionalizing standardized, scalable quality best practices across all sites, maximizing the compounding benefits of global best-practice replication.
- Continuous Improvement Deployment: Support the Plexus System of Operational Excellence (PSOE) by embedding modern Lean, Six Sigma, and digital-era methodologies into daily manufacturing workflows.
- Escalation & Resolution: Serve as the functional anchor for complex global quality issues, engaging customer and supplier executive networks to ensure rapid, root-cause resolution while solidifying Plexus' position to become the most trusted partner at all levels of leadership.
4. Resilient Governance & Risk Management
- Forward-Looking Compliance: Lead the design and implementation of quality management systems (QMS) to ensure continuous compliance with all relevant industry standards (ISO 9000, AS9100, TL9000, ISO 13485, FDA GMP) while proactively adapting systems to evolving global regulations and geopolitical trends.
- Operational Risk Reporting: Maintain rigorous, data-driven reporting on operational quality risks, capacity constraints, and site performance for executive leadership.
- Reputation Stewardship: Act as a vigilant guardian of Plexus' corporate reputation, ensuring that quality standards consistently meet or exceed mature OEM customer expectations.
5. Future-State Talent Bench & Cultural Stewardship
- Talent Bench Strength: Execute a proactive talent strategy focused on succession planning, building an exceptionally strong pipeline of future-state quality leaders.
- Collaborative Influence: Build deep trust across functional lines, modeling authenticity and interpersonal savvy while encouraging open, respectful debate to solve business challenges.
- Culture Carrier: Exemplify Plexus' values of delivering excellence and creating customer success; lead with humility and transparent communication while refusing to tolerate cultural derailers like arrogance or silos.
Education/Experience Qualifications:- Education: Bachelor's degree in an Engineering or technical discipline is required; an MBA or post-graduate degree is preferred to support strong business and financial acumen.
- Experience: 15 or more years of progressive leadership experience, preferably in the Electronic Manufacturing Services (EMS) industry, with a proven track record of managing large-scale, multi-site global quality or operational functions.
- Technical Expertise: Comprehensive knowledge of ISO 9000, AS9100, TL9000, ISO 13485, and FDA GMP Quality System requirements through hands-on experience, including an understanding of modern EMS operating models (JDM, ODM, vertical integration).
- Methodology & Digital Fluency: Demonstrated experience with Lean Sigma deployment (ASQ Black Belt or Master Black Belt preferred) paired with practical exposure to deploying automation, robotics, or digital manufacturing analytics.
