Customer Success Lead – Manufacturing Systems

Role Purpose

Snic Solutions is looking for a Customer Success / Engagement Lead – Manufacturing Systems to lead customer engagements from problem definition through implementation, adoption, and measurable business outcomes.

This is not a traditional project manager role.

The Engagement Lead is expected to understand manufacturing operations well enough to earn credibility with plant, operations, engineering, scheduling, quality, and IT stakeholders. The person will work with customers to understand the operational problem being solved, establish clear success criteria, guide the solution team, drive adoption, and ensure that the customer realizes value from the technology.

The Engagement Lead acts as the business and customer-facing owner of the engagement, while application engineers, solution engineers, configurators, and developers remain responsible for detailed technical execution.

The successful candidate will have experience implementing enterprise software in manufacturing environments, preferably across systems such as MES, APS, ERP, QMS, MOM, production planning, scheduling, manufacturing analytics, or industrial data platforms.

What You Will Own

1. Customer Outcomes

Own the overall success of assigned customer engagements.

You will work with the customer to establish:

• the manufacturing or operational problem being solved;
• desired business outcomes;
• first time-to-value;
• measurable KPIs and success criteria;
• adoption expectations;
• stakeholder responsibilities;
• subsequent improvement priorities after the initial solution is adopted.

Success is measured not simply by completing project activities, but by whether the customer is using the solution and achieving measurable operational value.

2. Manufacturing Process Discovery

Lead workshops with customer stakeholders to understand how manufacturing operations work today and how they should work in the future.

Typical areas may include:

• production planning and scheduling;
• shop-floor execution;
• work order management;
• production reporting;
• quality and non-conformance;
• material movement;
• labor and machine utilization;
• production visibility;
• traceability;
• manufacturing data integration;
• ERP/MES/APS interactions;
• operational KPIs and analytics.

You should be able to ask the right questions, identify underlying problems, and translate operational needs into clear solution requirements.

3. Engagement Leadership

Act as the primary customer-facing leader for the engagement.

Responsibilities include:

• establishing engagement objectives;
• aligning customer stakeholders;
• maintaining priorities;
• managing expectations;
• coordinating Snic resources;
• identifying dependencies and risks;
• facilitating key decisions;
• resolving functional issues;
• escalating technical or commercial issues when necessary.

You should be comfortable leading conversations with plant managers, operations leaders, manufacturing engineers, schedulers, quality teams, IT teams, and executive sponsors.

4. Solution Leadership

You are not expected to personally perform every technical configuration or development task.

However, you must understand the solution sufficiently to:

• explain how the proposed solution addresses the customer's problem;
• evaluate whether the configuration aligns with the business process;
• challenge unnecessary customization;
• identify gaps between requirements and product capabilities;
• coordinate application engineers, developers, integration engineers, and product specialists;
• ensure that technical implementation remains aligned with business outcomes.

You should be able to distinguish between:

• a process problem;
• a product limitation;
• a configuration issue;
• a data/integration issue;
• a user adoption issue.

5. Adoption and Change Management

Drive adoption of the implemented solution.

Responsibilities include:

• defining user groups and use cases;
• identifying required process changes;
• supporting training and enablement;
• establishing UAT and acceptance criteria;
• monitoring actual usage;
• identifying adoption barriers;
• working with customer champions;
• establishing post-go-live improvement plans.

The engagement is not considered successful simply because software has been deployed.

6. Value Realization

Establish measurable customer success criteria at the beginning of the engagement and track progress toward those outcomes.

Examples may include:

• schedule adherence;
• production throughput;
• reduction in planning effort;
• improved production visibility;
• reduced manual transactions;
• improved plan-versus-actual performance;
• reduced downtime;
• improved quality performance;
• increased data accuracy;
• reduced cycle time;
• faster decision-making.

You should be comfortable connecting software functionality to operational KPIs.

7. Customer Expansion

Customer Success at Snic is also expected to help identify additional areas where the customer can obtain value.

You will:

• understand the customer's broader manufacturing transformation priorities;
• identify adjacent operational problems;
• recognize opportunities where additional Snic, Factory Thread, Siemens, or partner capabilities may help;
• qualify opportunities before involving sales;
• support customer business cases and solution discussions.

This is not a quota-carrying sales role, but successful Engagement Leads naturally create expansion opportunities by understanding the customer's business.

8. Cross-Functional Coordination

Work closely with:

• Customer Success;
• Sales;
• Presales / Solution Architecture;
• Application Engineering;
• Software Engineering;
• Product Management;
• Siemens and other technology partners.

You will ensure that customers experience Snic as one coordinated team rather than separate sales, engineering, and delivery organizations.

Ideal Candidate

Required Experience

We are looking for someone with approximately 5–8 years of relevant experience, including meaningful customer-facing responsibility.

Candidates should ideally have experience in one or more of the following:

• manufacturing software implementation;
• MES / MOM;
• Advanced Planning & Scheduling;
• ERP manufacturing modules;
• production planning;
• quality management systems;
• industrial data platforms;
• manufacturing analytics;
• digital manufacturing transformation.

Experience working inside manufacturing organizations is also valuable.

Manufacturing Knowledge

The candidate should understand manufacturing concepts such as:

• production orders;
• routings and operations;
• work centers;
• capacity;
• scheduling;
• constraints;
• BOMs;
• WIP;
• production reporting;
• quality;
• inventory;
• traceability;
• machine and labor utilization;
• production KPIs.

Deep expertise in every area is not required, but the candidate must be able to understand manufacturing conversations quickly and credibly.

Business Analysis Capability

Strong business analysis skills are important.

You should be able to:

• conduct discovery workshops;
• ask structured questions;
• map processes;
• document requirements;
• define future-state workflows;
• identify business rules;
• define acceptance criteria;
• prioritize requirements;
• distinguish needs from requested features.

Customer Leadership

The strongest candidates will demonstrate the ability to:

• lead customer meetings independently;
• communicate confidently with senior stakeholders;
• facilitate difficult conversations;
• challenge customers respectfully;
• simplify complex problems;
• create alignment among different stakeholders;
• make recommendations rather than simply documenting requests.

Technical Orientation

You do not need to be a software developer.

However, you should be comfortable discussing:

• enterprise software architecture;
• APIs and integrations;
• ERP/MES interfaces;
• databases;
• master data;
• transactional data;
• cloud and on-premise deployments;
• reporting and analytics.

You should be able to work effectively with technical teams without personally performing all of the technical work.

Preferred Background

Strong candidates may have previously worked as:

• Manufacturing Business Analyst;
• MES Business Analyst;
• APS Consultant;
• Manufacturing Systems Consultant;
• Functional Consultant;
• Solution Consultant;
• Digital Manufacturing Consultant;
• Manufacturing Transformation Consultant;
• Customer Success Manager for industrial software.

Experience with platforms such as Siemens Opcenter, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft Dynamics, Rockwell, Dassault, PTC, or similar manufacturing systems is useful but not mandatory.

What This Role Is Not

This role is not primarily a project coordinator or PMO position.

You should not apply if your primary experience has been limited to:

• tracking schedules;
• maintaining project plans;
• managing meeting minutes;
• following up on action items;
• coordinating resources without understanding the business problem.

Project management discipline is valuable, but manufacturing understanding, customer leadership, business analysis, and value realization are more important.

How Success Will Be Measured

Success in this role will include:

• customers reaching first time-to-value quickly;
• clearly defined and achieved success criteria;
• strong customer adoption;
• high customer satisfaction;
• reduced executive escalation;
• predictable engagement delivery;
• effective coordination of technical teams;
• identification of additional customer problems;
• expansion and renewal opportunities;
• development of referenceable customers.

What Good Looks Like

A successful Engagement Lead should be able to walk into a manufacturing customer meeting and comfortably move the discussion from:

“Here is what we want the software to do.”

to:

“What manufacturing problem are we actually trying to solve, how will the process change, what should the technology enable, and how will we know that the customer has achieved value?”

That is the core purpose of this role.