Production Supervisor - Press and Weld Cells

Overview The Production Supervisor is responsible for leading daily manufacturing operations within robotic and manual welding cells and the press shop. This position ensures that production targets are achieved safely, with the required quality, efficiency, labor utilization, and delivery performance. The supervisor provides direct shop-floor leadership, assigns employees, monitors hourly performance, addresses production interruptions, enforces standardized work, and coordinates support from Maintenance, Quality, Engineering, Tooling, Materials, and Safety.

The primary focus of this role is to maintain a safe workplace, prevent defects, reduce downtime and scrap, improve productivity, and ensure customer requirements are consistently achieved.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities Reasonable accommodation may be made to enable individuals with disabilities to perform the essential functions.

Safety Maintain a strong safety presence on the production floor.

Ensure all employees follow plant safety rules, personal protective equipment requirements, lockout/tagout procedures, machine-guarding requirements, and safe work practices.

Conduct daily pre-shift safety meetings and communicate applicable safety alerts.

Complete safety observations, layered process audits, housekeeping inspections, and corrective-action follow-up.

Stop production immediately when unsafe conditions or behaviors are identified.

Ensure operators are properly trained and authorized before operating welding equipment, presses, cranes, forklifts, robots, or other machinery.

Investigate incidents, near misses, first-aid cases, and unsafe conditions using structured root-cause analysis.

Maintain clean and organized work areas through 5S standards.

Ensure emergency stops, light curtains, guards, interlocks, and other safety devices are functional and never bypassed.

Coordinate with EHS and Maintenance to close safety concerns promptly.

Quality Ensure all products are manufactured according to customer specifications, work instructions, control plans, quality alerts, and standardized work.

Verify that first-piece, last-piece, changeover, and in-process inspections are completed and documented.

Monitor weld quality, dimensional requirements, press-part conditions, visual standards, and critical product characteristics.

Ensure operators properly use gauges, fixtures, boundary samples, master samples, and error-proofing devices.

Stop production and contain suspect material when defects or process abnormalities are identified.

Coordinate containment, sorting, rework, and corrective actions with the Quality team.

Support root-cause analysis using 5 Why, Fishbone, 8D, Pareto, and other problem-solving methods.

Reduce scrap, rework, weld defects, missing components, dimensional issues, and customer complaints.

Ensure nonconforming material is properly identified, segregated, documented, and controlled.

Participate in layered process audits, process verification audits, PFMEA reviews, control-plan reviews, and customer-specific quality activities.

Reinforce a quality-at-the-source culture and employee accountability for defect prevention.

Productivity and Delivery Achieve hourly and daily production targets according to the approved production schedule.

Monitor hourly production, cycle time, downtime, scrap, labor efficiency, changeover performance, and schedule attainment.

Review production results against established rates and immediately address performance gaps.

Assign employees according to production requirements, skills, qualifications, and staffing levels.

Ensure production boards and KPI tracking systems are updated accurately and on time.

Identify bottlenecks and coordinate recovery plans with Maintenance, Engineering, Quality, Tooling, and Materials.

Minimize unplanned downtime through rapid escalation and structured response.

Manage break coverage, absenteeism, overtime, job rotation, and manpower utilization.

Support continuous-improvement activities focused on throughput, OEE, cycle-time reduction, labor efficiency, scrap reduction, and changeover improvement.

Ensure materials, containers, racks, labels, components, and finished-product handling are available to support uninterrupted production.

Maintain effective communication during shift handoffs and document unresolved issues.

Welding Cell Responsibilities Supervise robotic and manual MIG welding operations.

Monitor weld quality, including porosity, burn-through, undercut, cold welds, missed welds, excessive spatter, wire-feed issues, and weld-location concerns.

Ensure weld parameters, programs, fixtures, clamps, tips, nozzles, liners, wire, gas flow, and consumables are controlled.

Confirm that operators complete required tip changes, nozzle cleaning, fixture cleaning, and basic autonomous-maintenance tasks.

Ensure robotic programs and weld parameters are not changed without proper authorization.

Escalate robot faults, fixture issues, clamp failures, sensor problems, and repeated weld defects.

Coordinate with Welding…