Plant Manager - Food Production

Directs a plant or production facility's overall operations. Sets and implements policies and procedures that guide plant operations' productivity, quality, and cost efficiency. Utilizes operational metrics to analyze productivity and set performance targets to achieve production goals. Develops and deploys manufacturing practices focused on quality and continuous improvement. Develops and implements plant safety and security inspections, auditing, and training procedures to meet OSHA and other required regulations. Collaborates with multi-functional plant teams, including finance, engineering, materials, quality assurance, and human resources. Manages a departmental sub-function within a broader departmental function. Creates functional strategies and specific objectives for the sub-function and develops budgets/policies/procedures to support the functional infrastructure. Deep knowledge of the managed sub-function and solid knowledge of the overall departmental function.

Essential Job Functions and Responsibilities:

• Lead the factory production and support teams (direct line and dotted line staff, including direct labour, indirect labour, and temporary employees) for daily execution of the production plan.

• Ensure that the factory plays an integral role in maintaining stocks (working with the supply chain team) to supply timely inventory and meet customer/sales needs.

• Provide robust people leadership across the factory, including both those with direct line factory responsibilities, as well as dotted line support functions of HR, Finance, QA, and IT.

• Provide quality stewardship of our products and their quality attributes with efficient delivery to ensure customer satisfaction. Collaborate with Commercial and Technical/R&D functions to ensure product quality and service.

• Ensure effective Supply management evaluation and business inputs on cost, capacity, assets, and the supply chain plans to ensure a feasibility “Voice of Supply” is reflected. Influence others in central functions and partner departments on both current and new product initiatives in support of growth and earnings strategies. This includes mfg. evaluation of the factory product portfolio, impact on complexity costs & SKU discontinuations.

• Lead the Operations employees by coaching, mentoring, and training to ensure the deliverables of manufacturing are met. Ensure communications to team members about the business and site performance, capital additions, capacity expansions and business processes as needed.

• Provide direct support for the factory operating system, safety, discreet production scheduling, materials ordering and expediting, local raw and FGS inventory management, shipping/receiving, and application/usage of business systems. Provide indirect support for QA/QC audits/inspections, finance cost controls, HR, business planning process inputs and local IT.

• Be a member of the Operations Leadership Team / staff member.

• Identify and evaluate financial labour and efficiency opportunities and recommend solutions that will drive overall cost reductions and labour management to continuously improve the factory P&L

• Drive timelines for efficiency improvement, establish priority projects and other initiatives for the plant and share/establish best practices across factories for CI.

• Develop factory cost/financial targets, standards and tracking for produced goods (waste/NQC, inventory and cash delivery, operational costs/tonne, etc.)

• Develop and maintain factory KPI’s and cost roadmaps, including routine, periodic metric dashboards. Through Site IE’s, set standards for the factory performance, capacity, and cost CI.

• Provide local factory technical support as part of the leadership team in support of projects and asset maintenance for both current business and integration of new capital/capacity investments. Being a steward for all site assets (infrastructure and equipment).

• Own site safety controls and traffic systems to ensure both people and product safety, including site security and overall capability of the site.

• Collaborate with production and supporting departments to ensure the food safety and quality of our products.

• Perform other duties as assigned.

Education: Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Supply Chain, or Business Management. Master’s in Supply Chain Management, Business, Industrial or other Engineering discipline preferred. MBA or advanced Supply Chain or International Business also preferred.

Experience: 7-10 years of experience in Operations Management. 2-5 years of experience in Engineering or Technical Manager. 2-5 years of experience in Supply Chain, Industrial Engineering or Activity Management.