Waynesboro Plant Manager

About the Role

Lead end-to-end operations for Ingevity's Waynesboro, Georgia Plant in a 24/7 manufacturing environment. Ensure safe, reliable, and cost-effective production in a high-volume manufacturing environment serving demanding customer requirements. Set the vision, clear expectations, build strong frontline leadership, strengthen employee engagement, and drive continuous improvement across safety, quality, delivery, cost, and sustainability. This role reports to the Vice President, Global Manufacturing, and is a key site and community leader.

How You Will Impact Ingevity

• Lead with safety: Champion a proactive safety culture on the shop floor; ensure OSHA/EPA compliance; drive near-miss reporting, root-cause analysis, and effective corrective actions.
• Run the plant: Own production planning, operational performance, inventory, and logistics to meet service, quality, and cost targets in a 24/7 operation.
• Drive Customer Focus: Coordinate with S&OP to ensure that operational schedules are executed and optimized to meet customer needs.
• Maintain assets: Direct preventive/predictive maintenance, turnaround planning, reliability engineering, and critical spares to maximize uptime.
• Assure quality: Maintain and improve management systems and certifications rigor, and customer complaint resolution; partner closely with QA and Technical teams.
• Elevate performance: Deploy Lean/TPM/Six Sigma to reduce waste, improve OEE, stabilize processes, and sustain standard work.
• Lead a continuous improvement culture: Build a culture of continuous improvement focused on improving and automating equipment operation, standardizing work, and reducing unnecessary manual labor.
• Develop people and teams: Coach and mentor leaders; foster an inclusive, high-trust environment across hourly and salaried teams and with non-union stakeholders.
• Plan and budget: Build and manage site operating and capital budgets; evaluate and execute CapEx with clear ROI, risk controls, and timely delivery.
• Represent the site: Serve as the face of the plant with employees, community partners, auditors, and regulators.
• Employee relations: Maintain a positive non-union site culture: Build and sustain strong employee relations through visible leadership, clear communication, fair and consistent practices, and proactive engagement with frontline teams.
• Decision authority: Exercise authority to make decisions necessary to operate the facility safely, reliably, and in an environmentally sound manner.

What You Need To Succeed

• Education: Bachelor's degree in engineering, operations, or a related field. Advanced degrees or certifications (e.g., Six Sigma, CMRP) are a plus.
• Experience: 15 years of experience in Manufacturing or production environments, including working in high-volume operations with large frontline teams and standardized work processes, with a focused five years of progressive leadership in the operations management of a 24/7 manufacturing operation.
• Operations toolkit: Demonstrated results using Lean/TPM/Six Sigma, reliability-centered maintenance, and sound financial acumen (P&L, cost drivers, ROI).
• Safety and compliance: Proven record improving TRIR/near-miss engagement and managing OSHA/EPA requirements and audits. Experience managing within a Process Safety Management (PSM) environment.
• People leadership: Ability to set clear expectations, provide actionable feedback, and build inclusive, high-performance teams.
• Communication: Clear, direct communicator who simplifies complexity and aligns teams around priorities.
• Employee relations: Experience maintaining positive employee relations and maintaining a direct, constructive relationship with employees in a manufacturing environment.