Process Improvement Lead

Overview

Home. There’s no place like it.

And there’s no feeling like helping people create the joy of feeling truly at home. At Dunelm, that’s what we do. We’re the UK's number one choice for homewares because we make home life lovelier for our customers. And we’ve crafted a workplace that feels just as welcoming – where you can bring your ideas, be yourself, and feel right at home.

At Dunelm, we are focused on making it easy for customers to feel at home while running a simple, efficient and well controlled business. Our ambition is to unlock near-term value and enable scalable, sustainable growth over the next five years through a customer-centric transformation driven by end-to-end systemic thinking. This will deliver a substantial productivity benefit and improve our operating cost-to-sales ratio long-term. The Process Improvement Lead will play a key role in delivering this ambition by improving how value is delivered across the organisation through a connected system of processes – identifying and implementing improvements that make our processes simpler, faster and more effective.

The role will focus on optimising end‑to‑end value streams to deliver measurable value by reducing cost, improving productivity, and enabling better experiences for both customers and colleagues.

The role will help to embed a system thinking approach at Dunelm—viewing the organisation as a set of linked processes that collectively deliver outcomes—ensuring improvements optimise end-to-end flow rather than isolated steps.

Work your way, together

We’re a hybrid business, which means you’ll have flexibility alongside time together with your team. In this role, you can expect 3 days a week in the office or on-site, helping you stay connected, collaborate and do your best work for our customers.

What you'll be doing

• Responsible for identifying, prioritising and building outcome focused value cases for process improvements that deliver measurable, sustainable business and customer value across the enterprise.
• Working with cross functional stakeholders to translate complex processes and challenges into practical improvement opportunities.
• Apply end-to-end thinking through analysis of existing processes to identify and address inefficiencies, optimise value streams and enhance overall system performance.
• Remove complexity, duplication and non value adding activities, improving activity flow, ownership clarity and handoffs between teams and drive standardisation to improve consistency, scalability and control
• Drive and champion process simplification, standardisation and efficiency improvements across teams to help build a culture of continuous improvement through introduction to practical tools and approaches (e.g Lean, value stream mapping).
• Take ownership from idea through to implementation, leading practical delivery of cross functional process transformation initiatives to embed sustainable change.
• Support with the definition of clear metrics that reflect end‑to‑end performance track performance improvements and ensure benefits are delivered, tracked and sustained over time.

Scope and Key Interfaces

• Partnering cross functionally as appropriate, providing constructive challenge and influence to functional stakeholders in identifying areas of opportunity for process improvement
• Facilitation of cross functional workshops to drive / influence alignment and decisions, translating complex problems into clear, actionable improvements
• Work with Finance and Risk teams to maintain a strong control environment
• Supporting cross functional stakeholders with embedding changes

What we'll look for in you

Capabilities and qualifications

Essential

• Demonstrated application of system thinking in a business context (interdependencies, flow optimisation, root cause analysis)
• Experience working across functions in a fast‑paced environment
• Strong stakeholder skills, with the ability to both support and challenge
• Practical use of continuous improvement methodologies (Lean, Six Sigma, value stream mapping)

Desirable

• Experience of cost out programmes at other enterprises
• Practical use of blending human and AI capabilities with consideration for the future of the workforce
• Commercial mindset focused on total value, not isolated gains