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PLANT MANAGER / DIRECTOR OF OPERATIONS – METAL FABRICATION | P&L EXECUTION, OPERATIONS & MARGIN

Our client is seeking an experienced Plant Manager / Director of Operations – Metal Fabrication to lead the operational organization at its Anaheim facility. This is an AS9100-certified, technology-enabled metal manufacturing operation serving demanding customers across industrial, infrastructure, data center, aerospace & defense, space, and OEM markets. This is not simply a Production Manager position.

The Plant Manager is the senior operational leader at the site, overseeing Production, Supply Chain/Purchasing, Quality, Engineering, and Facilities & Maintenance and leading experienced managers across each function. The Site Leader owns revenue, customers, pricing, commercial strategy, and overall P&L. The Plant Manager owns operational execution—ensuring the organization engineers, purchases, manufactures, inspects, and delivers work at the labor, material, time, quality, and margin performance expected.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

Gross Margin & Job Performance

• Own the weekly job-reconciliation process.
• Review estimated versus actual labor hours and material costs.
• Identify jobs that outperform or miss expected gross margin.
• Determine the root causes of margin misses.
• Drive corrective actions across Engineering, Purchasing, Production, Quality, and Scheduling.
• Ensure lessons learned from completed jobs improve future estimating, planning, and execution.
• Give the Site Leader clear visibility into where margin is being won or lost.

Production & Manufacturing Operations

• Lead Production and hold leadership accountable for schedule attainment, labor allocation, utilization, capacity, throughput, WIP, and on-time delivery.
• Identify bottlenecks and develop solutions before they impact customers.
• Manage overtime and labor efficiency.
• Coordinate execution across departments and work centers.
• Maintain a clear understanding of what is late, what is at risk, why, and what is being done about it.

Supply Chain & Purchasing

• Oversee material availability and purchasing performance.
• Monitor supplier performance, material cost, purchase-price variance, and lead times.
• Maintain inventory discipline and expedite materials when necessary.
• Develop stronger suppliers and alternatives.
• Ensure purchasing decisions support quoted job economics.

Engineering

• Lead the Engineering function and ensure effective handoff from estimating and sales into production.
• Maintain accountability for engineering throughput, manufacturability, drawings, routings, BOMs, and production information.
• Ensure engineering changes are controlled and technical bottlenecks are resolved quickly.
• Use lessons learned from completed jobs to improve future execution.

You will not be expected to personally engineer every job. You will be expected to have enough technical and manufacturing judgment to challenge the organization, ask the right questions, and hold senior technical leaders accountable.

Quality

• Lead Quality in an AS9100-certified environment.
• Reduce scrap and rework and improve first-pass yield.
• Drive root-cause analysis and corrective action.
• Maintain traceability and documentation discipline.
• Ensure Quality and Production work together without compromising standards.
• Improve the overall cost of quality.

Facilities & Maintenance

• Oversee equipment uptime, preventive maintenance, repairs, and facility reliability.
• Identify capital-equipment requirements and facility improvements.
• Address equipment and facility constraints that affect capacity and profitability.
• Maintain strong safety and housekeeping standards.

DATA, TECHNOLOGY & ACCOUNTABILITY

The employer is a technology-enabled manufacturing business, and we expect the Plant Manager to manage using data—not intuition alone.

You will use ERP, job-costing, scheduling, and production data to understand:

• Job profitability
• Labor efficiency
• Material variance
• Capacity and utilization
• WIP
• Schedule attainment
• On-time delivery
• Scrap and rework
• Quality performance
• Gross-margin performance

LEADERSHIP & ACCOUNTABILITY

This role manages managers—not just individual contributors. You will lead senior functional leaders across Production, Supply Chain, Quality, Engineering, and Facilities. You will:

• Establish clear KPIs for each function.
• Run effective daily and weekly operating reviews.
• Hold functional leaders accountable for measurable results.
• Develop and upgrade leadership talent where necessary.
• Break down silos between departments.
• Create clear ownership for problems.
• Drive cross-functional corrective action.
• Build a culture of urgency, ownership, quality, and continuous improvement.

Your job is not to personally solve every problem.

Your job is to build and manage an operating organization that solves problems systematically.

WHO WE'RE LOOKING FOR

The ideal candidate has:

• 7+ years of manufacturing leadership experience.
• Experience as a Plant Manager, Director of Operations, Operations Manager, Manufacturing Manager, or similar leader.
• Experience managing managers across multiple manufacturing functions.
• Experience overseeing Production plus functions such as Engineering, Supply Chain, Quality, or Facilities.
• Strong understanding of job costing and gross-margin drivers.
• Experience reviewing estimated versus actual job performance.
• Strong understanding of labor efficiency, utilization, capacity, throughput, WIP, and scheduling.
• A demonstrated record of improving on-time delivery.
• Experience reducing scrap, rework, and operational waste.
• Strong ERP and manufacturing-data competency.
• Strong root-cause-analysis and continuous-improvement skills.
• Ability to hold experienced managers accountable without micromanaging them.

PARTICULARLY RELEVANT EXPERIENCE

Metal fabrication | Sheet metal | Precision machining | Welding | CNC manufacturing | Contract manufacturing | Engineered-to-order | Build-to-print | Aerospace & defense | AS9100 | High-mix / low-volume manufacturing

Experience with Lean Manufacturing, Six Sigma, continuous improvement, or similar operating systems is highly valuable.

We are not looking for someone who is simply a strong Production Manager with a bigger title.

This role requires someone capable of managing multiple senior functional leaders while understanding the economics of the entire operation. You combine shop-floor credibility, financial discipline, data, operational rigor, and leadership of experienced managers.

SUCCESS WILL BE MEASURED THROUGH:

• Gross-margin execution
• Estimated versus actual job performance
• Labor efficiency
• Schedule attainment
• On-time delivery
• Throughput
• Capacity utilization
• WIP management
• Material performance
• Overtime
• Scrap and rework
• Quality performance
• Equipment uptime
• Job-reconciliation discipline
• Performance of the functional leadership team

The objective is to create an operation that is predictable, data-driven, accountable, and consistently converts quoted margins into realized margins. This is a hands-on manufacturing leadership role requiring regular presence with the team and on the production floor.

 

JOB ID: 181144

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Aimee Krisfalusi

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