Manufacturing Manager

Job Title: Manufacturing Manager

Job Function: Supply Chain

Location: PAN India

Req ID: R

About This Opportunity

Are you passionate about driving operational excellence and leading high-performing teams? Join us as a Manufacturing Manager where you'll take ownership of a dynamic manufacturing unit and play a pivotal role in our factory's success story. This is your chance to make a real impact while advancing your career in a fast-paced FMCG environment.

What You'll Do

Lead with Purpose

As our Manufacturing Manager, you'll be the driving force behind a complete manufacturing unit, directly reporting to the Factory Manager as a key member of our leadership team. You'll take on end-to-end responsibility of delivering exceptional results across pillars of safety, quality, productivity, and cost.

Driving Excellence Across Key Areas

Safety, Health, & Environment

• Champion a safety-first culture by leading SHE initiatives
• Ensure 100% compliance with established safety systems
• Identify and act on leading indicators that prevent incidents before they happen

Quality Leadership

• Spearhead quality improvement projects (QIPs) with a consumer-first mindset to deliver brand superiority
• Build a culture of quality assurance over quality control
• Implement hygiene improvements that exceed industry standards

Operational Performance

• Achieve OEE targets through continuous improvement initiatives
• Implement manpower productivity initiatives that deliver measurable results
• Demonstrate agility through meticulous production planning as per market demand

Cost Management & Innovation

• Operate with an owner's mindset to optimise manufacturing costs
• Drive operational excellence to minimise wastages
• Optimise run strategy to bring down utility cost

People Leadership

• Inspire and motivate your shopfloor workforce to achieve their best
• Foster a collaborative environment for brainstorming
• Coach and build high-performing teams that drive actions and deliver results
• Engage with the workers' union to provide a conducive workplace for exceptional performance

Strategic Partnership

• Collaborate with the Factory Manager on long-term strategy for the site
• Influence key operational decisions that shape the factory's future
• Execute the factory master plan and pave way to creating a future-fit factory

What Success Looks Like

You'll thrive in this role if you embody our key leadership principles:

• Bias for Action: You make things happen and drive results.
• Building Talent & Teams: You develop people and create winning teams.
• Accountability & Ownership: You take responsibility and deliver on commitments.

What You Bring -

Education & Technical Background

• Bachelor's degree in engineering (B.E./B.Tech)  
• Strong technical foundation with practical application experience

Preferred Professional Experience

• Preferred experience of managing shopfloor operations in the FMCG sector with multiple supervisors and blue-collar workforce.
• Driving operational improvements and managing change.

Location-Based Role: This will be a site-based position with minimal travel requirements.

Your Network & Partnerships

You'll collaborate with a diverse range of internal and external partners like Finance, R&D, Quality, HR, IT, Planning, and Procurement, unions, Factory leadership, Suppliers and equipment vendors etc.

A day in the life of a Manufacturing manager

The day starts with a daily team huddle where you review the Safety and Quality performance of the previous day and check-in on people. You also understand the production performance and come up with the run strategy for the day, plan changeovers, and schedule repair/maintenance activities. In a digitally advanced factory, you leverage the automated tools and dashboards put in place to track line performance, quality performance, and the process parameter compliance. Following this, you take a walk around the shopfloor to ensure compliance to our SHE norms, quality practices, and engage with the shopfloor team to understand operational challenges from them first-hand.

Once through with the review of previous day's performance, you regroup with the larger team in a daily morning meeting to priorities work for the day and align those priorities with extended stakeholders. Usually, by the end of this meeting you are done with your day-to-day operations, and you move on to kaizens to unlock OEE, reduce wastage, improve the quality performance of production lines, or enhance the safety of our operations.

In the second half, you spend time with the Factory Leadership Team for an update on the progress of key long-term strategy actions in line with the factory's master plan. Further, the second half of the day is also spent in engaging with other manufacturing units for cross-learning across all the pillars of operations. You also engage with stakeholders from other departments to plan production runs in the upcoming week, trials in collaboration with R&D and innovation & technology planning teams, and with the manufacturing excellence teams to review progress on OEEs, wastages, and digital transformation initiatives at the factory.

Finally, you close your day with a shopfloor-round to follow up on the activities that were planned for the day, engage with the second shift team, and ensure all safety & quality control systems are in place. You also huddle up with your second shift team to address any issues—ranging from material unavailability to machine breakdown—and take decisions accordingly on corrective actions. You fill in the factory leadership team on things that need immediate attention, plan for scheduled maintenance activities along with the engineering lead, and communicate production plans to the material planning team for RM/PM connectivity.

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