Plant Manager

Plant Manager

General Description

• The Plant Manager provides full operational leadership for the facility, accountable for safety, quality, delivery, cost, and people development. This role builds a disciplined operating system, develops strong leaders, and ensures the plant meets customer commitments while driving year over year performance improvement.

Responsibilities

• Production performance - Own daily throughput, uptime, cycle times, and delivery performance. Ensure stable, predictable operations.
• Quality management - Lead the plant to meet or exceed quality objectives; ensure QMS compliance and rapid issue resolution.
• Safety culture - Champion a zero incident environment. Ensure safety is embedded in pre shift meetings, behaviors, and accountability.
• Cost control - Build and manage the plant budget; deliver annual cost reduction targets through process improvement and waste elimination.
• Talent development - Strengthen supervisory and operator capability; build succession plans and upgrade talent to meet future business needs.
• Performance management - Set clear KPIs for safety, quality, cost, delivery, and employee relations. Hold leaders accountable for results.
• Employee relations - Maintain open communication, fair treatment, and a positive work environment aligned with company values.
• Daily management system - Ensure robust tiered accountability, problem solving, and communication routines.
• QMS oversight - Maintain compliance with all quality, regulatory, and customer requirements.
• Lean deployment - Drive Lean Manufacturing, visual controls, standard work, and continuous improvement across all departments.
• Cross functional alignment - Partner with engineering, maintenance, quality, and program management to ensure coordinated execution and planned downtime.
• Budgeting & forecasting - Prepare and manage departmental budgets; forecast labor, materials, and capital needs.
• Staffing & scheduling - Set manpower plans and schedules to meet customer demand efficiently.
• Operational problem solving - Resolve production, processing, and facility issues quickly to prevent delays and minimize cost.

Job Requirements

Work Experience

• 10+ years manufacturing leadership with increasing responsibility
• 5+ years direct plant or operations management in automotive, industrial, or high volume production
• Proven success leading supervisors and managers
• Demonstrated results in safety, quality, cost reduction, throughput, and delivery
• Experience with Lean systems (policy deployment, standard work, visual management, CI)
• Budget ownership for multi million dollar operations
• Cross functional leadership with engineering, maintenance, quality, HR, and supply chain

Education

• Bachelor's degree in engineering, Operations Management, Industrial Technology, or related field
• Advanced degree (MBA or technical master's) preferred
• Lean / Six Sigma certification strongly preferred
• Safety & compliance knowledge (OSHA, EPA, ISO, IATF depending on industry)

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Strong understanding of manufacturing processes (assembly, plastic injection, painting, molding, etc.)
• Production planning & scheduling
• Maintenance coordination and reliability fundamentals
• Quality systems expertise (ISO/IATF, audits, corrective actions)
• Data driven decision making using KPIs, OEE, downtime analysis, scrap trends
• Continuous improvement tools (Kaizen, 5S, SMED, root cause analysis)
• Strategic thinking - ability to build long range plans and align the plant to business goals
• Strong communication - clear, direct, consistent with all levels of the organization
• Talent development - coaching, succession planning, upgrading capability
• Accountability culture - sets expectations, measures performance, drives results
• Problem solving - structured, fast, and fact based
• Customer focus - ensures delivery, quality, and responsiveness
• Change leadership - leads transformation, not just daily operations

PI6ed2bd090b58-3625