Ambient OEM R&D Lead

THAI UNION GROUP PCL. (Bangkok Metropolitan Region)

Bangkok, Thailand

We are a global seafood leader with ambitious growth goals and a dedication to sustainability and innovation. Our portfolio of brands includes convenient consumer favorites that have brought nutritious and tasty seafood to tables around the world for over a century.

About this position

The Ambient OEM R&D Lead is responsible for defining and executing the global Ambient OEM R&D strategy, ensuring optimized product development, facilitating collaboration across teams, and leading the R&D team to achieve business objectives.

Responsibilities

• Define and execute global Ambient OEM R&D strategy, driving effective execution of customer development and new product development projects globally
• Ensure optimized product development costs, increased speed to market, high quality product specifications that meet customer needs, a robust new product improvement & development pipeline. Develop good relation, understanding and way of working with Ambient Branded BU R&D and GIC, and develop / deploy best in-class OEM R&D practices
• Ensure smooth and efficient coordination between project managers and R&D teams to ensure customer requirements are being met and consumer insights are flowing from commercial teams to NPD team. Find the right balance in customer driven projects, tenders, product improvements and NPD.
• Facilitate seamless coordination with local R&D at plants throughout product development process, ensuring on-time and on-spec delivery of products from sample through to full production scale-up phases and successful commercialization
• Work closely with Global Innovation Center (GIC) and Branded R&D team for big-win, advanced, innovations and ensure constant communication cadence between GIC, Ambient Branded R&D, and Ambient OEM New Product Development team. Find clear big wins for value engineering product/production improvement to be more competitive on existing products and tenders coming up.
• Motivate, lead and challenge team members to reach / exceed BU and individual targets and objectives. Improve and sustain employee engagement scores for R&D team to be within the top quartile. Build longer term view/plan around people; prepare succession plans at different levels. Set a positive working culture within R&D team and with teams across Thai Union. Be an ambassador of one Thai Union Group thinking

Requirements

• Set strategic direction
• Define and drive execution of Ambient OEM R&D strategy (incl. targets / KPIs) and strategic priorities, ensuring effective and efficient customer development projects and strong pipeline for new product development and value engineering of existing products.
• Oversee all ongoing BU R&D projects, intervene as-needed to manage customer development resources in exceptional cases (e.g., Discuss with customer development leads and commercial teams to manage timelines)
• Develop and own NPD R&D product roadmap; collect inputs from NPD team lead, GIC, Ambient OEM commercial team and Ambient Branded R&D as-needed to adjust roadmap targets and timingsSet budget for Ambient OEM R&D Lead’s approval, targets; define budget allocation and overseeing overall R&D budget management
• Develop clear and compelling vision on packaging, with specific relevance for OEM, improving in either sustainability or cost competitiveness
• Work with Category Customer Development Leads to ensure developed products meet customer briefs, including product specifications, development ti