Name: Alex Harte
Job title: Operations Director
Describe your role:
My role has two primary elements. To co-ordinate our operational teams (Production, Quality, Test Engineering, Process Engineering and H&S) to satisfy all our existing customer expectations. Secondly, to continually drive improvement in the business to ensure our business processes are suitably safe and lean to meet all future business expectations.
How would you explain your job to a member of the public?
My role is to ensure the team who build our products, clearly know their job role and the critical processes required to ensure we build and ship quality products on time, every time.
What could you not do your job without?
The process ownership and honest feedback from all our team. When we embark on build activity or team improvement activities everyone engages in the task to ensure the goal is achieved. Additionally, the team understand that to get truly improved processes, we need a robust feedback process. Our feedback loop continually drives value add and sustained improvement for CB Technology and our customers.
What is the most important skill you need for your job?
To continually challenge the status quo. We can all be very busy in our day to day jobs therefore it is very important to continue to test for process weaknesses against existing customer needs and future customer requirements.
Describe how your role relates to others/fits with the end to end solution at CB Technology:
My role takes the Customer requirements and ensures our Production and Engineering processes are designed to build and test as the customer requires.
How do you add value to the customer:
Translating the customers requirements into clear value add processes that ensure products are delivered as required.
What advice would you give your 21 year old self? (assuming you are over 21!)
Be more confident, positive and in business, question everything (in a positive way, of course), in order to better understand every situation you encounter. Understanding builds knowledge; knowledge and positive drive builds success.
How do you relax?
I love eating out, watching movies with my family, walking our dog and annoying my family with my attempts at playing the guitar.
What superpower would be most useful in doing your job at CB?
Time travel would be pretty useful. I’d love to see what improvements businesses have developed in 20 years time. If anyone knows, please drop me a line 😊