The Judge Group is seeking a Plant Operations Manager for a large manufacturing company in Chicago, IL area! The qualified candidate will control and supervise all coordination, planning and direction of production activities, ensuring product quality and ensuring maximum operating efficiency. The candidate will ensure all jobs are performed efficiently, accurately, and safely to improve and maintain the performance of the entire plant. The qualified individual will develop superintendents to improve and maintain plant performance.

Responsibilities:

• Communicate and maintain new industry trends including customer needs, developments in equipment, and ingredients
• Participate and support the plant safety process
• Use familiarity of plant operations and process to maintain and develop department organization
• Create areas of responsibility and group production functions to meet production objectives and needs
• Advance recommendations in all fields related to effective department and plant operations
• Must be highly organized and systematic in approach
• Ensure all things happen on schedule
• Prepare production portion of operating budgets
• Implement and control approved budgets
• Communicate effectively with all plant workers to ensure timely and efficient policy implementation
• Maintain close contact with sales and marketing staying up to date of all marketing and sales activities that may affect production distribution
• Implement and improve methods for assisting employees to achieve plant production goals
• Develop department associates and managers to the fullest extent of their ability, while maintaining positive engagement
• Provide feedback to leads, associates and department managers on performance against department and plant goals and objectives
• Follow policies, practices and programs to produce safe quality foods that meet company and regulatory requirements
• Support the maintenance, development, implementation and ongoing improvement of the SQF 2000 Systems
• Supervise direct reports in the performance of their duties
• Complete performance reviews and provide feedback to direct reports

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master’s Degree in Engineering, Operations or Business Management
• Minimum of 7-10 years of experience in operations, maintenance, engineering and/or process Improvement roles including managing teams of people
• Previous experience working in a Lean environment.
• Six Sigma Green or Black Belt Certification a plus
• Bilingual English/Spanish a plus, but not required