Plant Director

Location: Birmingham Employment Type: Salaried Work Arrangement: Onsite Position Summary: Lead the end-to-end performance of the manufacturing plant and distribution operations. Build an engaged, accountable organization that safely produces compliant, high-quality products at the required service, cost, and volume. Balance daily execution with long-term capability building through reliability, capital planning, continuous improvement, data-driven management, and cross-functional partnership. Major Duties and Responsibilities: Service: Direct production, warehousing, and distribution execution across all shifts. Translate demand into achievable plans and use daily management routines to deliver schedule attainment, case fill, order fill, and customer commitments. Cost: Own the site operating plan, forecasts, and controllable spending. Improve conversion cost, labor productivity, material usage, utilities, destroyed product, overhead, inventory, and working capital while protecting safety, quality, service, and long-term capability. Quality/ Food Safety: Ensure food safety, product quality, sanitation, allergen, traceability, recall, and preventive-control programs meet company, customer, FDA, and applicable regulatory requirements. Maintain audit readiness and promptly escalate material risk. EHS: Lead the site safety, health, and environmental management system. Model visible safety leadership; ensure employee participation, hazard identification and control, training, emergency preparedness, contractor safety, incident investigation, and timely corrective action. Asset Management/ Maintenance Reliability: Establish the asset-care and reliability strategy, including preventive and predictive maintenance, spare-parts discipline, utilities, facilities, and grounds. Improve OEE and downtime performance and maintain safe, reliable plant infrastructure. Capital Management & Execution: Develop and execute the site capital roadmap. Build sound business cases; manage scope, budget, schedule, change control, safe installation, commissioning, and benefits realization for capital and engineering projects. People Leadership: Select, coach, develop, and retain an effective leadership team and frontline workforce. Set clear goals, strengthen technical capability, conduct talent and succession reviews, administer policies consistently, and promote an inclusive, high-accountability culture. Operational Excellence: Build a fact-based continuous-improvement system using Lean problem solving, standard work, visual management, and verified savings. Sponsor loss elimination, automation, digital tools, and data-quality improvements and ensure gains are sustained. Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner with Supply Chain, Procurement, Quality, R&D, Engineering, Sales, Finance, and HR to balance capacity, inventory, service, and cost. Govern plant trials, product transfers, and launches for safe, capable, and profitable scale-up. Other: Maintain business continuity and crisis-response readiness. Manage environmental obligations and relationships with regulators, customers, suppliers, contractors, carriers, emergency responders, and community stakeholders; communicate site performance and risks transparently. Education and Experience: Bachelor’s degree, is required 10+ years of progressive manufacturing experience, including significant leadership of multi-function operations, is required Demonstrated ownership of plant safety, food safety and quality, customer service, budgets, cost improvement, workforce planning, maintenance/reliability, capital projects, and KPI management, is required Travel up to 5% MBA or relevant graduate degree is preferred Food or beverage manufacturing and high-volume or automated operations strongly preferred Lean or Six Sigma; HACCP; PCQI when assigned responsibility requires it; and SQF, BRCGS, or other GFSI-scheme experience, is helpful Knowledge and Skills: Enterprise-minded manufacturing leader with strong busi…

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