Manager - Operation Center at Danish Crown in Kraków, PL, 31-155

26/10/2026

POL-Kraków

Manager - Operation Center

We are a food company owned by Danish farmers supplying high-quality food to customers and consumers all over the world. From butchers to business developers, we’re more than 23,000 colleagues.

Danish Crown Global Business Services (GBS) in Krakow is a key part of Danish Crown’s transformation journey. We strive to be a trusted partner to the business by providing scale and standardized, efficient and effective services, thereby achieving the strategic goals of the business.

GBS and its three Centers of Excellence act as the Group Digital Transformation engine for Finance, Procurement, and Master data. Our Operational teams provide global services for Finance, Procurement, Master data, HR, and IT with the ambition to further move up the value chain and expand its service portfolio.

Passion is our protein, and by supporting each other every step of the way - from high potential programs and sustainability certifications to embracing diversity - we’re moving towards the same goal.

Better food. Brighter future

About Danish Crown and Global IT

Danish Crown is an international food company headquartered in Randers, Denmark. Global IT supports corporate, retail, distribution and production-critical environments across countries, and Technology & Operational Services is where services are run, supported and improved every day.

The Operations Center sits in Service & Operations, one of the areas that make up Technology & Operational Services, alongside Service Management, End User Support and Workplace Delivery.

Manager - Operations Center

About the role

Danish Crown runs 24/7 business-critical operations across plants, distribution centres, shops and corporate functions, where IT downtime quickly affects production, logistics, sales and support. The Operations Center is being established to give Global IT one operational capability for early detection, coordinated response, operational visibility and service restoration across critical services.

This is a build-and-lead role where you will turn a strategic ambition into an operational reality. The direction is clear: Danish Crown needs an Operations Center that can create visibility, coordinate response and protect business continuity across critical services. Your task is to define the practical operating model, build the team, establish the routines and interfaces, and make the capability work in day-to-day operations.

You will directly lead the Operations Center and the Situation Management capability within it. Situation Management will coordinate the response to major incidents and significant operational situations, while the Operations Center will develop the monitoring, event handling, escalation and operational routines needed to support stable services. Within the first 12 months, the expectation is visible and measurable progress: a working operating model, clear handovers and escalation paths, defined coverage principles, documented runbooks and an initial capability that can be scaled towards 24/7 operations. Success is measured on time to detect and restore business-critical services, the share of major incidents picked up by monitoring before users report them, and closure of post-incident actions.

Your initial priorities

• A realistic roadmap and staffing model: what to build in what order, what it costs, and what can credibly be committed to.
• A single operational picture: what is monitored, what an event means, who acts on it, what requires immediate human intervention outside normal working hours, and what can wait until the next working day.
• Monitoring that reflects operational reality. The platforms come from platform teams and the Operations Center consumes them — where they do not surface what operations needs to see, you make the case for extending them.
• Situation Management and Service Stability: lead major incident response and coordination across Global IT while establishing the operational disciplines that protect service stability. This includes strong operational execution and input to change and problem management, operational reviews and continuous improvement to minimise disruption and strengthen resilience.
• A coverage model. Today there are no shifts. You will design the coverage actually needed as opening hours extend, cost it, and make the case for it, rather than inherit a roster.
• Runbooks and escalation paths that are written down and followed, so response does not depend on knowing who to call.
• A working interface with End User Support, which remains the single point of contact for users. The Operations Center is not a second front door: it acts on monitoring, events and the shared operational picture, while Situation Management coordinates the cross-team response when a significant situation occurs.

Where the role goes from there

Your ongoing responsibilities

• Lead and develop the Operations Center and Situation Management teams — people leadership, capability building, performance and recruitment.
• Lead the operational execution of monitoring, event handling, major incident coordination and escalation for business-critical services across production, distribution, retail and corporate environments.
• Deliver the operational input to change and problem management — operational assessment of changes, problem follow-up and operational reviews — so that improvements agreed with Service Management and the delivery teams build on operational evidence, recurring issues and business impact.
• Design clear operational triage and escalation practices that separate actionable signals from operational noise, assign responsibilities and enable issues to be resolved at the lowest effective level, with timely escalation when broader coordination or decision-making is required.
• Work closely with Service Management, End User Support, Workplace Delivery, delivery teams across Global IT including Business Solutions, platform teams, country services and suppliers who carry part of the operational load.

How the role fits with the rest of the area

Service Management governs the incident, change and problem processes, and process ownership remains with the designated owners. Your teams execute the operational activities, coordinate situations and provide the evidence-based feedback needed to improve them. Situation Management sits within the Operations Center and coordinates major incident response and significant operational situations. The Operations Center also plays an active operational role in problem and change management: turning recurring incidents, monitoring insights and operational patterns into problem input and improvement actions, and helping assess, plan and execute changes with a clear view of operational risk and business impact.

What the role requires

This is a leadership role for an experienced manager who has built, matured or restructured an operational IT function before. You bring sufficient technical understanding to challenge assumptions, assess operational risk, understand dependencies and make sound decisions across incidents, events, changes, problem patterns and service stability topics.

• Several years of leadership experience running an IT operations centre, NOC, command centre or equivalent operational team, including standing one up or restructuring one.
• Hands-on experience with major incident management at scale, including personally leading major incident bridges and coordinating restoration across multiple teams.
• Practical understanding of monitoring and event management, and an opinion about what good looks like.
• Strong practical ITIL knowledge and the ability to apply it as a working framework for operations and service management.
• A track record of building teams — recruiting, onboarding and developing people who are new to the discipline, and leading experienced specialists.
• The composure to be the calm point in a situation where production is down and the pressure is real.
• Fluent English, written and spoken, in a working environment that spans several countries. You also speak Polish — the Operations Center is built in Kraków with a primarily Polish-speaking team.
• Comfortable with ambiguity: much of this role is deciding things that do not have an answer yet.

Nice to have

• Experience from manufacturing, food production, logistics or another environment that runs around the clock.
• Experience designing or running shift coverage, including on-call.
• Experience working across an internal organisation and external suppliers in the same operational chain.

What the role offers

• A build mandate, not a maintenance job — you will shape an operational capability that does not exist yet.
• Direct influence on how Global IT operates services for a business that cannot afford downtime.
• A leadership team that is honest about what is decided and what is still open.
• International exposure with approximately 30 days of business travel per year.
• A highly collaborative, office-based environment with 100% on-site work.

What we offer

• Private medical care together with dental care
• Edenred lunch card
• Life insurance
• MyBenefit and multisport program
• 2 additional holiday days benefits
• Events, integrations for employees

Practical information

• Location: Kraków, Poland. This role is onsite — building a new team and an operational function requires close, day-to-day presence.
• English is the working language in Global IT.
• Applications are reviewed continuously.
• Questions about the role: you are welcome to contact Manager, Nicolai Bæklund +45 21648546