In this role, we are looking for a leader who has a broad range of custom casegoods and seating manufacturing experience, has mastered the design for manufacturability concept, and understands how product specifications optimize product profitability. The right leader must have experience in seeking out new opportunities to streamline product development and costing, improve the speed of process engineering, and design for manufacturing optimization. As well as possess an affinity to work with our marketing team to compete and win.

This role is highly collaborative with touch points across multiple functional groups. The leader for this role will look for new and innovative ways to solve difficult customer design specifications that can be translated to a cost-effective manufacturing approach. The Director of Design and Engineering provides functional/and business expertise related to custom product, product costing, and product design systems and processes. 

In addition, the technical leadership of the team, this role has full management responsibility and oversight for the cross-functional group of design and engineering professionals. They will create and implement processes and procedures to increase the speed of the product development and process engineering activities that can be applied productively, predictably and with high quality to obtain customer satisfaction and profitability.

Role Description:

• Leading all aspects of the company’s product development effort and overseeing all manufacturing processes, including; Product Design, Prototype development, CNC, BOM’s and the manufacturing portion of the ERP system.

• Building, leading, managing, sustaining and scaling a highly skilled and motivated product design and process engineering team.

• Establishing and/or improving technical standards ensuring adherence to them for product development and process engineering to be aligned with customer and market needs.

• Creating and implementing methodologies and best practices to ensure that design and engineering resources are being allocated efficiently and goals are achieved.

• Prior experience leading a team of product designers and process engineers with wood, metal, and upholstered products.

• 7+ years of design, engineering and manufacturing technical leadership.

• A sound working knowledge of hospitality furniture design and manufacturing, including cabinetry and millwork; wood casegoods, Metal structures and upholstered goods.

• Must have extensive hands-on experience in Microvellum, Excel, and PowerPoint. Experience with AutoCad and/or solid works preferred.

• Must have good experience in CNC machinery (wood and wood finish equipment)

• Must be experienced with product launch, design control and integrated ERP manufacturing process.

• Demonstrated ability to build, mentor and coach high-level teams to meet professional and performance goals, cultivate strong relationships with team members and attract and retain the very best engineering talent to grow and transform the organization.

• Working with multi-location providers, local and off-shore. Experience with furniture suppliers in Asia, Mexico and Latin America.

• Solid understanding of mix-materials product manufacturing, including Wood, Metals, Plastics; Mass assembly (manual and robotic); and wood and metal finishing.

• Working with safety and quality standards and regulations (regional and international)

• Experience in Lean Manufacturing, Value Analysis / Value Engineering projects 

• Must have extensive hand on experience in PLM (product Lifecycle Management), Engineering and manufacturing BOMs.

• Partner with cross functional leaders to drive a holistic custom cost/ quote process

• Deeply understand material strategies, and manufacturing techniques. 

• Track, report, and analyze costing accuracy and refine the tool to improve cost estimates

• Build a design for manufacturability practice that will allow potential problems to be corrected in the design stage

• Support the Customer Quality Assurance team to deliver customer satisfaction and serve as a CI voice into the product construction and specification work

• Partner with IT to improve technology advances to enhance estimating and pricing methods that are sustainable and scalable

• Advocate for continuous improvement to maximize process efficiency and speed

• Lead with a strong sense of ownership as it relates to rapid quote response with accuracy focused upon the customer experience and differentiating our service from the competition

Job Requirements

Educational

• Bachelor's Degree in related field or 10 plus years of relevant business experience

Travel Requirements

• Occasional customer visits to facilitate design development and finalization.

• Suppliers visits (local and overseas) to assure product quality and design collaboration.

Experience

• 5-8 years of experience in the combination of the following areas:

• Product Design 

• Product Engineering

• Quality Assurance

• Materials and Costing

• Process Engineering

• CNC manufacturing

Program knowledge

• AutoCad

• Microvellum

• Solidworks - preferred

• Wood Wop

• Cutrite

• Microsoft Office

• G Suite