Manager, Production Controls

About the role

Vulcan Elements is manufacturing American rare-earth permanent magnets for a secure, resilient future. With a focus on national security and economic resiliency, we serve critical industries such as defense, aerospace, and automotive powering a high-technology future. Vulcan Elements is building a team of ambitious professionals committed to Mission Focus, Technical Excellence and Integrity. This role establishes material flow, WIP locations, storage and staging design, the ERP and warehouse management configuration, and the inbound, WIP and outbound organizations do not yet exist. The Manager designs them during construction and then leads the organization that runs them.

Responsibilities

• Material Flow and Plant Layout Design: end-to-end material flow — inbound receiving through finished goods shipment — including bulk chemical and rare earth feedstock handling, inter-area WIP movement, and finished magnet packaging and dispatch.
• Define WIP locations, buffer sizing and staging areas between Metallization, Magnet Production and Machining, and physically confirm them on the floor with Construction and the Operations areas before turnover.
• Establish the storage strategy: racking, bulk storage, hazardous and controlled material segregation, environmental and humidity requirements, and floor marking and location addressing.
• Specify material handling equipment — forklifts, tuggers, lifts and containers — and the traffic patterns, aisle widths and pedestrian separation that make movement safe at rate.
• ERP and WMS Configuration and Deployment: Own functional configuration of the ERP and warehouse management environment: item masters, units of measure, storage locations and bins, put-away and picking logic, and transaction types.
• Build and govern item, location and BOM-linked material data, including the master data controls that keep it accurate as volume scales.
• Establish lot genealogy from incoming rare earth feedstock through finished magnet, supporting customer, defense and rare earth sourcing documentation requirements.
• Deploy barcode or RFID labeling, license plating and mobile scanning so transactions are captured at the point of movement rather than reconstructed later.
• Partner with Automation & Digital Manufacturing on ERP–MES integration for production consumption, WIP moves and finished goods receipt, and with Finance on inventory valuation and cost flow.
• Own testing, training, go-live and stabilization.
• Transaction discipline on the floor determines whether inventory records are trustworthy.
• Warehouse and Material Movement Operations: Own inbound receiving: carrier scheduling, dock management, receipt and inspection coordination with Quality, bulk chemical transfer, and hazardous material handling and storage compliance.
• Own WIP material movement between process areas — kitting, lot staging, container management and delivery to point of use — to a defined service standard.
• Own outbound operations: finished goods packaging, labeling, load planning, carrier management and export documentation, including the handling and shipping requirements specific to magnetized product.