Plant Director

About the Role

The Plant Director leads all aspects of operations for a multi-campus or complex facility, including safety, production, quality, engineering, supply chain, and customer service. This role has full P&L accountability and drives continuous improvement initiatives to ensure operational excellence, customer satisfaction, and profitability while maintaining compliance and meeting business objectives.

Responsibilities

• Foster a culture where safety, quality, schedule, and cost are prioritized with a continuous improvement mindset.
• Drive rapid, significant, and sustainable improvements in Safety, Quality, Delivery, and Cost metrics.
• Oversee daily operations of the plant, ensuring optimal safety, quality, delivery, cost, and inventory performance.
• Develop and execute strategic plans aligned with company goals, including compliance with ISO, FDA, EPA, OSHA, and other regulatory requirements.
• Lead and manage New Product Introduction (NPI) execution, ensuring on-time, on-quality, and on-cost results.
• Ensure effective allocation of resources to meet customer-driven priorities and optimize operational efficiency.
• Oversee financial performance, including budgeting, forecasting, revenue planning, cost control, and profitability improvement.
• Identify opportunities to reduce costs in direct and indirect labor, manufacturing overhead, and inventory levels while enhancing operational efficiency.
• Manage capital expenditure planning to align with company technology needs, capacity, and cash flow requirements.
• Establish and review key operational metrics and performance indicators to ensure alignment with business objectives.
• Drive a Lean Operating System culture (5S, SMED, TPM, etc.) and lead the roadmap for achieving breakthrough performance.
• Conduct regular KPI reviews with the plant team to ensure goal attainment and prioritize implementation strategies.
• Continually benchmark and implement best practices to enhance efficiency and performance.
• Build, coach, and mentor a high-performance team, fostering morale and professional growth across multiple functions.
• Develop leadership and management capabilities within the team to sustain long-term success.
• Establish and maintain strong relationships with internal and external stakeholders, including customers, suppliers, regulators, and corporate teams.
• Collaborate with sales, marketing, engineering, and other functional teams to deliver exceptional products and customer satisfaction.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in business, engineering, or related field. MBA preferred.
• 8+ years of manufacturing operations leadership experience.
• Demonstrated track record of significant performance improvement through the successful development of a lean culture and implementation of lean tools.
• Strong developer of people and teams, believing it is a critical component in driving organizational change and effectiveness.

Skills

• Highly customer-responsive and entrepreneurial.
• Resourceful, combining strong manufacturing and technical abilities with good overall management acumen.
• Strong financial acumen.
• Effectively deploys resources to key priorities.
• Sets high expectations for self and the organization; driven by metrics and countermeasures.
• Ability and passion for lean operating system culture.
• Selects great people and makes changes quickly when required.
• Ability to create followership and lead an organization through significant change and improvement.
• Tough-minded but a welcome team member.
• Strong communication skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to communicate effectively at all levels of the organization.
• Possesses a high sense of urgency.
• Low-ego/high-confidence.
• Thinks expansively/innovatively and targets breakthrough performance, not simply incremental gain.
• Highly autonomous and self-directed.
• High degree of credibility to be convincing and persuasive.
• Medical device industry experience is a plus.

Work Environment

The work environment involves typical manufacturing and office settings. Reasonable accommodations may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform essential functions.

Physical Requirements

• May be required to stand, walk, use hands to finger, handle, or feel, reach with hands and arms, talk, or hear.
• May be required to sit, climb or balance, stoop, kneel, crouch, or crawl.
• May occasionally lift and/or move up to 50 pounds.
• Specific vision abilities required include close vision, distance vision, peripheral vision, and ability to adjust focus.

Travel Requirements

Up to 10% travel may be required.