Plant Manager/Director of Operations - Metal Fabrication

The Opportunity

Pen Manufacturing, part of Metal Solutions Holdings ("MSH"), is seeking an experienced Plant Manager/Director of Operations - Metal Fabrication to lead the operational organization at our Anaheim facility. MetalSolutionsHoldings.com

About Pen Manufacturing:

Pen is an AS9100-certified, technology-enabled metal manufacturing operation serving demanding customers across industrial, infrastructure, data center, aerospace & defense, space, and OEM markets.

The Plant Manager is the senior operational leader at the site and will have direct responsibility for:

• Production
• Supply Chain / Purchasing
• Quality Control
• Engineering
• Facilities & Maintenance

You will lead experienced managers across these functions and be accountable for getting the entire operational organization working together.

This is not simply a Production Manager position.

The Site Leader owns the overall P&L, customers, pricing, and commercial strategy. The Plant Manager owns operational execution — ensuring we engineer, purchase, manufacture, inspect, and deliver jobs for the labor, material, time, quality, and margin we expected.

What You Will Own

Gross Margin Execution & Job Reconciliation

This is a critical part of the role.

Every job has an estimate. We need to know whether we actually performed against it — and why.

You will:

• Own the weekly job-reconciliation process.
• Review estimated vs. actual labor hours by job.
• Review estimated vs. actual material usage and costs.
• Identify jobs that beat or missed expected gross margin.
• Determine the root cause of margin misses.
• Identify recurring problems across Engineering, Purchasing, Production, Quality, or scheduling.
• Assign and drive corrective actions with the appropriate functional managers.
• Ensure lessons from completed jobs flow back into Engineering, Estimating, Purchasing, Production, and future bids.
• Provide the Site Leader with clear visibility into where gross margin is being won or lost.

We do not want to discover margin problems at the end of the month.

We want someone who can identify problems at the job level while there is still time to fix them.

Production

You will lead the Production organization and hold its leadership accountable for:

• Production scheduling and schedule attainment.
• Labor allocation.
• Machine and work-center utilization.
• Capacity planning.
• Throughput.
• Work-in-process management.
• Bottleneck identification and resolution.
• Overtime management.
• Labor efficiency.
• Coordination across departments.
• On-time delivery.

You should always know:

What is late? What is at risk? Where is the bottleneck? Why? And what are we doing about it?

Supply Chain & Purchasing

You will oversee Supply Chain and ensure material supports both customer delivery and job profitability.

You will be accountable for:

• Material availability.
• Purchasing performance.
• Supplier performance.
• Material cost and purchase-price variance.
• Lead times.
• Inventory discipline.
• Expediting when necessary.
• Developing stronger suppliers and alternatives.
• Ensuring purchasing decisions support quoted job economics.

Supply Chain should not operate independently from Production, Engineering, or job profitability.

Engineering

Engineering will report into the Plant Manager.

You will not be expected to personally engineer jobs. You will lead experienced technical managers and ensure Engineering supports successful execution.

You will be accountable for:

• Engineering throughput and responsiveness.
• Effective handoff from estimating/sales into production.
• Manufacturability.
• Accurate and timely drawings, routings, BOMs, and production information.
• Engineering-change discipline.
• Resolving technical bottlenecks affecting production.
• Ensuring lessons from completed jobs improve future execution.

The Plant Manager needs enough technical and manufacturing judgment to challenge the organization, ask the right questions, and hold senior technical leaders accountable.

Quality Control

Pen operates in an AS9100-certified environment, and Quality will report to the Plant Manager.

You will work with experienced Quality leadership to:

• Maintain strong AS9100 operating discipline.
• Reduce scrap and rework.
• Improve first-pass yield.
• Address recurring quality problems.
• Drive root-cause analysis and corrective action.
• Maintain traceability and documentation requirements.
• Ensure Quality and Production work together without compromising standards.
• Improve the cost of quality.

Quality is not something that gets inspected into a part at the end.

It needs to be built into how the plant operates.

Facilities & Maintenance

You will oversee Facilities and Maintenance and ensure the physical plant supports reliable production.

Responsibilities include:

• Equipment uptime.
• Preventive maintenance.
• Facility reliability.
• Equipment repairs.
• Safety and housekeeping.
• Capital-equipment needs.
• Facility improvements.
• Identifying equipment or facility bottlenecks that constrain capacity or profitability.

Labor Efficiency

Labor is one of the most important drivers of profitability.

You will:

• Track estimated vs. actual labor hours.
• Monitor utilization and efficiency.
• Improve staffing and work-center allocation.
• Reduce unnecessary overtime.
• Identify training and performance gaps.
• Hold managers and supervisors accountable for labor performance.
• Improve setup times and production flow.
• Ensure labor data is entered accurately and on time.

The goal is not simply keeping people busy.

The goal is producing quality work efficiently and profitably.

Data & Technology

Pen is a technology-enabled manufacturing business.

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
• WIP
• Schedule attainment
• On-time delivery
• Scrap and rework
• Quality
• Gross-margin performance

You should be comfortable digging into the numbers yourself and using data to hold your functional leaders accountable.

If a job lost money, "we had a bad week" is not an acceptable answer. We expect you to determine why.

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 managers 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.

Partnership With the Site Leader

The Plant Manager reports directly to the Site Leader / General Manager.

The roles are intentionally different.

The Site Leader owns:

• Revenue and growth
• Pricing
• Major bids
• Customers
• Commercial strategy
• Overall P&L
• EBITDA and cash flow

The Plant Manager owns:

• Production
• Supply Chain
• Quality
• Engineering
• Facilities
• Factory execution
• Job-level operational performance
• Labor efficiency
• Capacity and throughput
• Scrap and rework
• On-time delivery
• Operational gross-margin drivers
• Job reconciliations and corrective actions

The Site Leader determines which work we want, what we charge, and where the business is going.

The Plant Manager ensures we execute that work at the cost, quality, and delivery performance we committed to.

Who We Are 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 role.
• 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 vs. actual job performance.
• Strong understanding of labor efficiency, utilization, capacity, throughput, WIP, and scheduling.
• Experience 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.

Strongly Preferred Experience

Experience in one or more of the following is highly valuable:

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

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

The Person We Do NOT Want

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 and the economics of the entire operation.

We also do not want someone who:

• Walks the floor and simply expedites late jobs.
• Measures success based on whether machines look busy.
• Waits until month-end financials to discover jobs lost money.
• Allows Engineering, Purchasing, Quality, and Production to operate in silos.
• Blames another department instead of determining root cause.
• Manages primarily through intuition when operating data is available.
• Needs to personally make every production decision.

We need someone who can combine shop-floor credibility, financial discipline, data, and leadership of experienced managers.

You should be able to answer:

Did we build the job the way we estimated it? If not, why not? Who owns the corrective action? And what are we changing so it doesn't happen again?

What Success Looks Like

You will be measured primarily on:

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

The goal is to create an operation that is predictable, data-driven, accountable, and consistently converts quoted margins into realized margins.

Location

This position is on-site in Anaheim, California.

This is a hands-on manufacturing leadership role and requires regular presence with the team and on the production floor.

This is not a remote position.