Textile Operations Manager

**Textile Operations Manager (Melbourne, Australia).**

**The Company - **Plant Protector Group (PPG) is an exciting têxtile manufacturing scale-up with world-leading insulated packaging solutions made from 100% natural waste wool material. We are passionately committed to creating sustainable, recyclable, biodegradable, compostable packaging solutions for today's fast-moving world. We are looking for a dynamic Manufacturing Specialist to lead a world-best-practice greenfield manufacturing site in Australia

**The Role (summary) - **You will report directly to the CEO and COO. You will have a Production Manager reporting directly to you. You will maintain direct control across all facets of Operations (People / Safety / Quality / Product / Processes / New Product Development). You will have direct operational control of a newly commissioned Melbourne (Australia) manufacturing facility inclusive of shopfloor staff, plant/equipment up-time, quality management, continuous improvement, safety compliance, daily performance reporting, supplier engagement and sourcing, and turning new products into reality on the shopfloor (via material-selection, prototyping, line-testing, and full-scale production).

**Your role will look as follows-**

**Maintain operational safety, product quality, with the right cost accuracy**:

- Ensure all working areas and assets comply and operate and are maintained in working order, in accordance with Best-Practice Manufacturing (BPM) principles.
- Ensure Safety and Quality conditions (and culture) for a safe / compliant working environment.
- Ensure finished products are consistently manufactured according to standards of quality, on time, optimal cost and customer expectation. This will involve the use of in-process BPM tools to understand failure / loss causality.
- As a new green-field site, rapidly build shopfloor process-maturity (ie. Line SOPs, Line changeovers, Start-up/Shut-down, Operator/Machine maintenance systems) across end-to-end operational workflow.
- Ensure implementation of software tools designed to assist shopfloor process optimisation (ie. BOM / Cost-to-Make systems, inventory systems, maintenance systems).
- Develop new processes / procedures / practices as part of _continuous improvement_ initiatives. This means the Operations Team will be hands-on, on-the-shopfloor (for 6-12months) to learn & realise the operational capabilities of new plant.

**People**:

- Foster a healthy management / employee culture.
- Build capability of the operations team and manage individual development plans.
- Coach operations / production staff effectively through performance reviews. Use SOPs and Training/Coaching (one on one / one to many) to ensure sustainable and repeatable results.
- Monitor compliance to manufacturing SOPs, including safety and housekeeping.
- Roll out HR tools - Skill/Training matrix, Shopfloor position descriptions, Shopfloor inductions, Shopfloor timesheets, SOP templates, Toolbox meetings.

**Manage and improve manufacturing cost (to drive profitability)**:

- Implement software tools to establish cost-to-make BOMs and manage inventory movement.
- Lead and sponsor cost improvement projects to improve Plant P&L.
- Manage and improve the operational budget.
- Ensure the right cascading of priorities and measures from Management to Factory.
- Understand factory loss analysis. Develop & implement Lean/Cost improvement action plans.
- Oversight of data-entry practices across software platforms (and manual data-entry processes) to help maintain good decision quality.
- Deployment of SPC (control) charts onto shopfloor, at all in-process checkpoints along end-to-end production line, to test conformance to required specification tolerances.
- Managing production schedules to meet sales contract requirements along with inventory, WIP and SKU optimisation.

**Turn new product development goals into reality on the shopfloor**:

- Provide technical / manufacturing support to in-house design team (during discovery meetings).
- Realise new-to-market têxtile solutions using advanced fibre-manufacturing capabilities.
- Control new product cycle on shopfloor (via material selection, BOM development, prototyping, product/line testing to specification, and full-scale production).
- Ensure timely and reliable launch of new products into the market as per agreement with internal stakeholders (and external contract manufacturing customers).

**Target attainment**:

- Measure weekly targets -Safety, Operations, People, Quality, Product, In-Process controls.
- Machine (capacity) utilisation - Machine up-time & changeovers, Machine efficiency, Line/Cost optimisation, Product manufacturing tolerances, Day-to-Day troubleshooting.
- Create operational KPI metrics (for presentation to organisational stakeholders) - Zero Harm, SPC output charts, Efficiency charts, Machine (OEE) uptime, Product quality (vs. specification), Internal safety audit findings, Internal risk/hazard registe