TAPPI Industry Career Center: Tate & Lyle Seeks Applications Development Specialist
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Tate & Lyle is searching for an Applications Development Specialist for its Decatur, Illinois, USA location.
Tate & Lyle is a leading supplier of industrial ingredients to clients in areas such as paper, adhesives, building materials, and many other specialty applications. The Applications Development Specialist is responsible for supporting growth of Tate & Lyle ingredients by driving development and innovative formulation within industrial market segments.
Responsibilities & Duties:
- Drives customer needs assessments with cross-functional team to identify technical needs or opportunities.
- Develops and deliver appropriate data and technical information for sharing with the customer.
- Supports customer interactions through deep category expertise and ingredient performance knowledge.
- Ensures solutions are customer-relevant and clearly communicate value to customers.
- Represents the team during technical customer interactions, establishing and building relationships with customer contacts, gathering key feedback and input in order to respond to customer needs with appropriate timeliness and with the most effective solution.
- Supports new business development opportunities by providing product or technology feasibility, market information, risk assessments, and performance insights.
- Understands established and competitive technologies, ingredients, and solutions to ensure shared commercial success.
- Creates compelling value propositions.
- Leverages T&L capabilities and broad-range of products and expertise to explore and develop solutions.
- Clearly demonstrate and document the value of working with T&L and the solutions provided.
- Recognizes the issues that must be resolved and can be innovative on multiple solutions paths to drive to a mutually beneficial solution.
- Effectively questions and explores concepts, sources and information to better understand customer needs and how to apply solutions.
- Partners with T&L sales colleagues and the customer to explore and identify the most mutually viable solution that meets the customer’s needs.
- Adapts and delivers compelling value propositions to expand sales and drive value.
- Plan, Organize, Conduct, and Support customer trials, lab work, and technical projects to support and fulfill commercial strategies, including technical reports and data analysis; coordinating with customers and field teams as needed.
- Clearly and logically plans projects, designs and performs experiments that are consistent with best practice research methods.
- Develop and perform lab analyses.
- Provide thorough written documentation of projects and methods/training documents.
- Develops and communicates compelling technical insights to secure customer commitment to engage in new solutions.
- Develops a broad industry network, identifies and builds key relationships both internally and externally who are critical to solving customer needs.
- Advocates the sharing of insights and technical knowledge with cross-functional stakeholders to drive continuous improvement and share the voice of the customer.
- Accountable for delivering to the high level of standards and quality set within T&L and expected by our customers and partners.
- Travel required to cover customers across North America in applications from paper (printing and writing, packaging, tissue, etc.), adhesives, building materials, and many specialty applications. Estimate travel at <20%.
Qualifications:
- BS or higher in Chemical Engineering, Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, Polymer Science, Materials Science, or related field
- Experience in technical service, applications development, product development, materials science, solution formulation, manufacturing, or process engineering.
- Knowledge and experience in the Starch Industry preferred
- Carbohydrate chemistry, polymer science, etc.
- Knowledge in application fields where starches are or could be used
- Product or materials formulation and development.
- Strong analytical thought and lab/bench development skills
- Test method development and execution.
- Computational and Engineering Math
- Problem Solving
- Project planning
- Strong verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to comfortably communicate with all levels of internal and external organizations
- Technical and Business writing
- Curiosity, open-mindedness
- Data analysis
- Development and research processes
- Microsoft – Word, Excel, PowerPoint
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