The Production Strategy Lead is a high-impact role responsible for the end-to-end architectural design and execution of our production planning framework. As the founding leader of this department, you will bridge the gap between long-term capital investment and daily operational delivery. You hold ultimate strategic ownership of the annual, monthly, and weekly production cycles, ensuring that our asset portfolio operates at peak efficiency while maintaining uncompromising safety and regulatory standards.
This is a build-and-scale opportunity. You will be expected to establish the governance structures, hire and develop a high-performing team, and integrate disparate data streams into a cohesive, centralised production strategy that balances complex supply-demand variables against maintenance requirements and outages.
Key Responsibilities
* Departmental Architecture & Strategic Optimisation: Greenfield Implementation – design and implement the department’s standard operating procedures (SOPs), selecting the necessary toolsets and establishing KPIs for the production planning function.
* Integrated Planning – develop a dynamic production model that synchronises demand forecasting with resource availability to maximise cost-efficiency and asset longevity.
* Outage Governance – serve as the final authority for the Outage Management System (OMS), ensuring that all planned interruptions are strictly vetted for risk, necessity, and strategic alignment.
* Capital Alignment – act as the primary interface between the Investment Delivery Process (IDP) and Operations to prevent conflicting capital schemes from compromising service resilience.
* Regulatory Stewardship – ensure 100% adherence to abstraction licences through automated monitoring and early-warning systems.
* Resilience Engineering – create data-driven contingency plans and stress-test network and production assets.
* Asset Integrity – oversee centralised management for critical infrastructure, including borehole refurbishments and reservoir inspections.
* Team Development – recruit, coach, and lead a team of specialised production planners, fostering a culture of technical excellence and accountability.
* Operational Direction – provide centralised strategic direction to Production Managers across both Process and Maintenance functions, ensuring siloed activities align with the overarching company strategy.
* Stakeholder Management – influence the wider business by presenting complex risk-reward scenarios and strategic options to the executive leadership team.
Qualifications & Experience
* Degree-level qualification (or equivalent) in Engineering, Supply Chain Management, Data Science, or a technical discipline.
* Extensive experience in high-stakes production planning, ideally within the Utilities or Water sector.
* Proven track record of organisational design – building, mentoring, and scaling technical teams.
* Advanced analytics skills, mastery of predictive modelling and data synthesis to translate raw SCADA/Prism telemetry into actionable long-term strategy.
* Exceptional influencing skills with the ability to navigate boardroom-level discussions and gain buy-in from cross-functional stakeholders.
* Deep expertise in resource optimisation, balancing short-term tactical volatility with multi-year asset health goals.
* Advanced narrative presentation abilities to distil complex risk profiles and performance metrics into clear, executive-level narratives.
* Legal right to work in the UK.
Benefits Package
* Excellent stakeholder pension scheme, up to 10% employer contribution.
* 5 weeks holiday plus bank holidays per annum, increasing to 6 weeks with length of service.
* Flexible annual leave policy to buy or sell holiday leave.
* Cycle to work scheme.
* Health cash plan.
* Life assurance.
* Wellbeing related benefits.
Note on Flexibility
In an evolving utility landscape, the incumbent must remain agile. You will be expected to adapt the production strategy in response to emerging regulatory requirements, climate variability, and technological advancements.
Equality & Diversity
South East Water is enthusiastic about creating inclusion across age, race, gender, ethnicity, religion and identity. We are committed to equal opportunities and fair treatment for all through recruitment, employment and career progression.
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