Africa Foundation Area Field Manager at Bayer

Role purpose

Lead planning and coordination of the seed production activities in South Africa (~70%) and Zambia (~30%) with Field managers, Seed growers, Plant operations, SPI, Pre-Foundation, Crop planners and contractors, in order to meet the seed availability and quality standards required for all the production regions.

Planning and ensuring the efficient use of human resources, equipment and materials.

Key responsibilities and tasks

• Lead building and maintaining a reliable and sustainable grower base, to ensure consistent supply.
• Foundation team for all internal and external customers.
• Lead analytics for field processes, to ensure the correct decisions for planning.
• Lead the pre-season planting planning to ensure a consistent supply of product to the different plants.
• Lead the planning and coordination of production activities, Grower contracting, Planting, In-Season Processes, Detasseling and Harvesting.
• Lead the coordination with seed growers field managers and the Operations Leads to ensure a smooth transition and flow of product from field to plant.
• Lead HSE efforts according ISO45001 and Bayer2055 standards focusing on legal compliance and identifying safety risks applying the HIRA methodology.
• Lead the development, update and compliance with quality assurance standards and management system set by the applicable QMS (ISO9001) standard.
• Create, manage and continual tracking and compliance of the Operational budgets.
• Identify and deploy operational improvement, tracking and best practices and processes to continually seek improvements in reliability and cost efficiencies.
• Promote and coordinate the Velocity data management tool, to effectively analyze and utilization of field data to manage productions effectively.
• Manage Velocity and SAP data, to ensure correctness for contracting and field processes.
• Utilize onePSS as a platform to implement best practices, for example, Visual Management to track Operations KPI`s on Tier 2 and 3 meetings.
• Actively laisse with Government and Seed certification bodies in industry decision making especially relating to certification of Seed produced by the Foundation teams.
• This role will dedicate roughly 70% of its time to South Africa Foundation Field Operations and roughly 30% to Zambian Foundation Field Operations.

 HSE RESPONSIBILITIES

• Motivate field employees to wear the correct PPE.
• Follow Safety Operations procedures.
• Report all accidents or incidents immediately.
• Participate in identifying hazards.
• Participate in Tier meetings and monthly Health and Safety Meetings.
• Maintain a safe and orderly environment.
• Upon request participate in emergency response teams and any other safety or health group established by the site.
• Participate in all required HSE trainings and educations.

Experience, Skills and Qualifications

• Minimum a diploma or bachelor’s degree in agronomy or 5-year experience in seed production.
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills.
• Results focused with ability to work on ow n initiative.
• Good organizational skills.
• Strong teamwork development capability (flexibility to work across the areas and positively influence others).
• Establish clear direction.
• Effective and timely decision making.
• Fluent in English.
• Excellent MS Office software (Excel, E-mail, Word, Project etc.).