Continuous Improvement Specialist

About the role

Locke Solutions, a 2024 Best Places to Work winner and Aggie 100 honoree, is a premier provider of custom precast concrete solutions. Led by a two-time Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist, we’re Houston’s #1 Fastest Growing Company, expanding rapidly while maintaining our mission: “To make our customers’ lives easier and our employees’ lives better.”

This hands-on role is ideal for a curious, observant, and proactive individual who wants to learn how a real precast manufacturing business runs—focusing on identifying operational problems, facilitating root cause analysis, implementing improvements, and verifying that improvements produce measurable and sustained results. The Continuous Improvement Specialist supports Locke’s operational excellence by improving how work gets done across the organization.

Responsibilities

• Improvement Opportunity Identification: Complete GEMBA walks; observe and document work at the point where it occurs; review quality, production, delivery, billing, and operational data; gather employee and customer feedback; prioritize improvement opportunities based on business impact.
• Root Cause Analysis and Problem Solving: Facilitate structured problem-solving sessions; conduct Five Whys, fishbone analysis, Pareto analysis, process observation, and cause-and-effect analysis; distinguish symptoms from root causes; develop and test countermeasures; document findings and recommended actions; escalate systemic or cross-functional problems.
• Manage and Report Continuous Improvement Projects: Define problem, scope, baseline information, targets, and owners; facilitate rapid improvement events; coordinate cross-functional improvement teams; maintain action plans and project timelines; remove implementation barriers; track measurable results; confirm that improvements are sustained.
• Quality and Corrective Action Support: Review recurring quality events and nonconformances; support corrective and preventive action investigations; identify systemic causes and recurrence risks; help teams develop practical corrective actions; verify the effectiveness of completed corrective actions; connect quality findings to process improvement actions.
• Standardization and Sustainability: Coordinate with the Process Specialist to update procedures and training; conduct follow-up observations and audits; identify when a process is reverting to previous practices; create control plans and process checks.
• Continuous Improvement Culture: Coach employees and supervisors in practical problem solving; encourage employee-generated improvement ideas; facilitate improvement discussions without blaming; recognize improvement contributions; help leaders build improvement into regular operating rhythms.

Requirements

• Strong curiosity, problem-solving mindset, and willingness to learn
• Clear communicator with the ability to ask thoughtful questions
• Comfortable interacting across multiple departments and roles
• Highly organized, dependable, and detail-oriented
• Manufacturing or process exposure is a plus but not required

Successful Results

• Established employee improvement participation
• Developed department-level improvement champions
• Validated ROI from improvement initiatives (time saved, cost avoided, or cost reduced)
• Demonstrated sustained improvements in multiple departments
• Positive feedback from teams supported and engaged
• Active portfolio of prioritized improvement initiatives
• A repeatable continuous improvement operating system