Plant Controller (Manufacturing)

About the role

You don’t sit in the office waiting for numbers to tell a story. You walk the plant, talk to operators, challenge assumptions, and connect what’s happening on the floor to what’s showing up in the P&L.

Responsibilities

• Be the financial leader on the plant floor
• Act as a trusted advisor to Operations, not just a reporter of results
• Translate financial data into clear, actionable insights for plant leadership
• Connect production activity, labor, materials, and variances to real business outcomes
• Drive accurate, disciplined manufacturing accounting
• Lead all plant accounting activities in compliance with U.S. GAAP
• Own monthly close, financial statements, budgeting, forecasting, and audit coordination
• Ensure costing integrity across all systems, transactions, and SKUs
• Investigate and explain actual vs. standard variances with precision
• Own inventory, costing, and controls
• Lead cycle counting and physical inventories with operational alignment
• Ensure work orders are fully burdened and aligned to the corporate cost model
• Strengthen and continuously improve internal controls across inventory and manufacturing
• Conduct ongoing audits of transactions and master data for accuracy and impact
• Turn data into operational improvement
• Analyze cost of goods, run costing studies, and identify margin opportunities
• Lead process improvements using Lean tools (as-is / to-be flow mapping)
• Pull and analyze data from SQL and ERP systems to improve visibility and decision-making
• Partner cross-functionally to drive efficiency, cost reduction, and performance
• Lead systems and continuous improvement
• Recommend and implement system enhancements
• Develop and deliver ERP and process training to close gaps and elevate team capability
• Build and develop your team
• Lead and coach the Cycle Counter / Inventory Analyst
• Set clear goals, develop capability, and raise the bar on performance
• Establish best practices across accounting, warehousing, and operations support

Requirements

• Bachelor’s (or Master’s) in Accounting, Finance, or related field
• Proven experience as a Plant Controller or senior manufacturing finance leader
• Deep expertise in cost accounting within a process manufacturing environment
• Strong working knowledge of U.S. GAAP in manufacturing
• Experience working inside an ERP environment (Visual, SAP, Oracle, Epicor, D365, etc.)
• Advanced analytical skills, comfortable pulling data from SQL and building models in Excel
• Ability to operate at both the strategic level and the transactional level
• Strong presence on the plant floor. You build relationships, ask questions, and influence outcomes

Qualifications

• Nice To Have: CPA
• Experience with BI tools (QlikView, Power Query)
• ERP implementation or migration experience