Head of Supply Chain Operations

Your role and your team:

You will report directly to the head of Procurement and work closely with our Procurement, Engineering and Production teams.
You will have the unique opportunity to shape the Supply Chain Operations Organization and establish robust processes and digital solutions that will ensure superior Supply Chain performance of Lilium in the fast-growing Urban Air Mobility market.

Procurement at Lilium means to work within a team of highly skilled experts managing the creation and establishment of a professional aircraft and non-aircraft supply base with the highest quality product available in time – while meeting technical corporate standards based on a complete new worldwide market eco system.  

Your Day to Day:

• Recruit, support, train & lead a lean organisation of Supply Chain Operations managers and specialists.
• Participate to the definition of Procurement strategies and supplier Selection, based upon Competitiveness, Aerospace Qualifications and good performance records
• Define Strategies, Policies, Processes and Digital Solutions to secure the performance for all the suppliers of Aircraft items. Participate to the Procurement Multifunctional teams
• Ensure compliance to the international regulations, and to the Customs processes
• Contribute to define and deploy the Lilium ERP as well as cloud-based solutions for collaborations with Suppliers (including PO placement, OTD management, Invoicing, Non-Conformities declarations, Statistical Process Control, Advance Shipment Notice) Deploy
• Define, implement and deploy Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) solutions where appropriate in order to optimize cash and warehouse space
• Lead the team -and get personally involved as required- that will:
  o Drive or Support APQP (advance product quality planning) activities at Suppliers
  o Ensure the readiness of the supply base by launching Industrial Process Capability Assessments, as well as Capacity Contingency Planning audits at the relevant suppliers.
  o Look after Supplier Approvals to ensure that only approved suppliers are used, and purchase orders are only issued for qualified items. Seek deviation approval from Quality.
  o Place purchase orders to suppliers to meet the demand generated by the MRP
  o Ensure a proper Risk Management practice is implemented to avoid any disruption to the Supply of items.
  o Implement data collection at the Supplier and transparency on Quality and Productivity performance
  o Drive recovery actions at Suppliers in case of non-Performance
• Implement a control room with visual monitoring of the performance and risks in the Supply Chain
• Ensure all internal root causes of Suppliers non-performance (eg: demand patterns, technical specifications...) are identified swiftly and addressed in an efficient collaborative way.
• Lead by example with uncompromising business ethics and respect for People
• Ensure adequate participate of the Supply Chain Operation teams to the various Production forum where the voice of Supply Chain is needed

Your Profile:

• Minimum qualifications / Education: Masters of Engineering and/or business administration degree
• Minimum 10 years of experience in Supply Chain roles out of which 5 in in a similar position within global, high volume automotive or aerospace environments required
• Proven experience leading “End to End” implementations of Supply Chain organizations, processes and systems
• Pragmatic leader with sound technical skills, analytical ability, good judgment and strong operational mindset.
• Good knowledge and practice of cloud based solutions for end-to-end collaboration with Suppliers
• Strong leadership maturity and ability to lead through others
• Excellent communications skills to build and sustain credibly with all levels of the organisation
• High sense for urgency with can-do mindset and customer orientation
• Eager to learn and adopt his style to a start-up environment; puts the team first; robust and passionate to follow given objectives; uses failure as learning experience
• Fluent English required, German or any other language desired