Job Description
Purpose of the Job
The In-Market Quality Manager serves as the regional face of Quality for the region, acting as the primary connection between customers, markets, operational sites and global functions.
The role represents the Voice of the Customer and Voice of the Market within Sonova, ensuring that quality concerns, customer feedback, emerging issues and major incidents are effectively communicated, escalated and translated into coordinated action.
The In-Market Quality Manager drives alignment between Group Companies, operational sites, key accounts, global QARA and HQ functions, ensuring rapid response to quality issues and effective execution of hypercare activities.
The role complements Post Market Surveillance by providing qualitative customer and market perspectives, while ensuring quality activities within the region are effectively coordinated and executed.
Tasks & Responsibilities
Regional Quality Leadership & Voice of Customer
- Act as the primary Quality representative for the region.
- Represent customer and market quality concerns within Sonova.
- Bring qualitative customer and field insights into quality decision-making.
- Provide regional quality visibility and ensure alignment between local and global stakeholders.
- Ensure markets remain informed regarding quality investigations, corrective actions and major quality initiatives.
- Support leadership teams with market quality insights and recommendations.
- Provide local business and sales team with product performance, quality and reliability insights relevant to their markets
Key Account & Customer Quality Management
- Serve as quality business partner for customers and key accounts.
- Support customer escalations related to product and service quality.
- Coordinate quality communication between customers, GCs, operational sites, global QARA team (QA-Ops, Supplier Quality, Quality ME) and HQ.
- Participate in customer visits, quality reviews and business reviews.
- Support recovery activities following major quality events.
- Build and maintain trusted relationships with key customers and commercial stakeholders.
Hypercare & Major Issue Management
- Own the hypercare process for the region, coordinating regional execution of its activities.
- Coordinate regional execution of hypercare activities.
- Coordinate customer-facing quality events.
- Act as the central quality contact for the region in hypercare environments.
- Coordinate communication between impacted markets, operational sites and global functions.
- Monitor issue impact, customer impact and effectiveness of mitigations.
- Support issue escalation and prioritization processes.
- Track action items and ensure timely follow-up and closure.
Market Quality Governance & Coordination
- Drive effective collaboration between GCs, global QARA, operational sites and HQ functions (QACE & Reliability).
- Identify process gaps, bottlenecks and quality risks.
- Support implementation of global quality processes, standards and initiatives.
- Facilitate cross-functional problem solving across Quality, Operations, Commercial, Customer Experience and R&D organizations.
- Ensure alignment of quality activities across the region.
Continuous Improvement & CAPA
- Support identification and prioritization of systemic quality issues.
- Initiate, sponsor or coordinate CAPAs arising from market feedback and quality events where appropriate.
- Ensure customer and market perspectives are incorporated into corrective actions.
- Support effectiveness verification of implemented improvements.
- Partner with DQA and Reliability to ensure field observations, complaint trends, customer feedback and emerging product risks are translated into product improvements, risk assessments and design enhancements
Requirements
- Degree in Engineering, Quality Management, Life Sciences, Business or related field
- Quality management, medical device or customer excellence related certifications
- 5+ years in customer quality, field quality, customer experience or equivalent customer-facing technical roles
- High ownership and accountability
- Customer-focused, pragmatic, resilient
- Outstanding stakeholder mgmt.
- Ability to lead cross-functional initiatives
- Strong facilitation and coordination skills
