Decatur Plant Manager

Decatur Plant Manager | Primient

Primient is a century old company with an entrepreneurial spirit. We are a leading producer of food and industrial ingredients made from plant-based, renewable sources. We deliver value through deep technical, commercial, and operational excellence that is backed by our long-standing corn wet milling heritage. Wherever we are in the process, from field to customer, our priorities are focused on ensuring we produce the safest, highest quality products through practices that uphold both our responsibility and commitments to the challenge and drive for excellence, our people and our planet.

We're investing in our plants and people to unlock our potential in the industrial and food sectors. Guided by our values of Safety, Excellence, Integrity, and Growth, we're focused on growing our business, our reputation, and the career of every teammate.

The Plant Manager for our Decatur, IL Corn Wet Milling Plant provides the overall strategic leadership and expertise to ensure success in operating the plant safely and efficiently while being a good steward of the environment and generating quality finished goods that exceed customer expectations.

The Plant Manager has overall responsibility for the site to ensure standards for Safety, Environmental, Health, Quality, Food Quality, Security, Cost, and Plant profitability are continually met or exceeded through direct and indirect actions by the local Plant Leadership Staff and the larger Primient network.

The Plant Manager will oversee the entire manufacturing process across the site, from raw materials to shipping finished products to customers. The role is accountable for implementing best practices to improve the plant performance including financial performance and capital implementation.

Safety and Environmental

• Responsible for growing a world class zero harm safety and environmental culture ensuring continuous improvement through dialogue, actions and implementation of successful initiatives.
• Ensure full compliance with internal and external regulations, policies, initiatives and procedures.
• Ensure all environmental permit limits are being met. Report deviations and expedite any repairs needed to return systems to permit limits. Strong collaboration across the operations network environmental counsels.

Team

• Partner with Human Resources to execute workforce and talent strategies that strengthen recruitment, retention, employee engagement, leadership development, and inclusion across the site.
• Direct change management through proper communication, dissemination of critical information and overall education of the team on critical plant information.
• Inspire a culture aligned with our Primient core values: safety, integrity, excellence and growth as well as our guiding principles.
• Serve as the senior site leader in fostering a positive and constructive labor-management relationship while maintaining compliance with the collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Partner with HR and Legal to lead CBA negotiations.

Quality

• Drive delivery of high-quality finished products for the site.
• Ensure compliance with all Food Safety regulatory requirements.
• Reduce waste and off specification product and achieve industry best practice performance.

Productivity

• Deliver production plans aligned to commercial demand.
• Work with continuous improvement team to enhance the Primient Operating Model, and develop a robust pipeline of improvement projects to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
• Manage operating costs and productivity improvement initiatives.
• Partner with Maintenance team to improve reliability and uptime of plant assets and achieve industry best practice performance.
• Partner with Finance on budgeting, forecasting, and cost optimization.
• Lead the execution of the capital expenditure plan to improve plant safety, reliability, operational efficiency, and cost structure.

Cost

• The Plant Director is accountable for cost performance across areas including Cap Ex, Fixed & Variable performance. This leader will have a strong financial acumen, with proven experience managing a plant P&L and a mindset for delivering year on year EBITDA related growth. Key areas within this remit include strategy and KPI ownership centered around:
• Annual Operating Plan (AOP):
  Author the complete plant budget, forecasting labor, material, utility, and maintenance spending for the fiscal year.
• Variance Recovery:
  Conduct weekly and monthly reviews of budget variances (Actual vs. Budgeted cost) and execute immediate recovery plans for overages.
• Long-Range Asset Planning:
  Architect a 3-to-5-year capital lifecycle plan to manage equipment obsolescence, capacity expansion, and technological upgrades.
• Loss Elimination:
  Lead formal Root Cause Failure Analysis for any chronic production or machine issue failures.
• Yield Performance:
  The Plant Manufacturing Director must treat yield optimization as a core financial and technical strategy. A strong…