Research and Development Project Manager

Overview

Sheboygan Paint Company is a privately owned, general industrial paint manufacturer, with national paint distribution capabilities and a diverse compliant product portfolio. Established in 1921, Sheboygan Paint Company is ranked 18th of North American Paint Companies and excels at manufacturing innovative coating solutions. We are implicitly trusted and rewarded for adding premium value to each targeted customer’s industrial coatings process and aim to be the most recognized family-owned industrial paint company in America.

The R&D Project Manager is responsible for planning, coordinating, and executing research and development projects from concept to completion. This role ensures that all R&D initiatives are delivered on time, within scope, and aligned with organizational objectives. The Project Manager works closely with cross-functional teams—including engineering, product design, quality, and manufacturing—to drive innovation, manage resources, and mitigate risks throughout the development cycle.

• Lead and manage multiple R&D projects simultaneously, ensuring alignment with strategic goals.
• Develop and maintain comprehensive project plans, schedules, and resource allocations.
• Coordinate cross-functional teams (scientists, engineers, designers, quality assurance, regulatory, etc.) to ensure seamless collaboration.
• Track project progress and performance, providing regular updates and reports to senior management.
• Foster a culture of innovation, continuous improvement, and knowledge sharing within the R&D team.
• Ensure compliance with relevant regulations, standards, and documentation requirements.
• Lead technology transfer and commercialization processes for successful R&D outcomes.

Active Listening: Listening accurately and confirming the concern or goal state is essential to solving the correct problem:

• Be comfortable leading as an active listener
• Ask questions to confirm you understood the concern, goal state, current state, and timeline and align on a plan
• Demonstrate active listening, by recording accurate situation appraisal notes, with clearly annotated follow up plans.
• Willingness to accept constructive criticism and demonstrate an ability to reflect and recalibrate an approach.

Good communication: Communicating with others effectively, and in a timely manner is crucial. Ability to communicate respectfully and concisely via diverse modes:

• Verbally - in person and virtually
• Written - by note taking, email, report and specification writing, teams instant messaging, and Power Point
• Visually - through graphs, flow charts
• Technically - through spreadsheets, and other analytical tools

Collaboration and Continuous Learning:Inspire confidence and trust by being dependable and honest, having high standards for quality and punctuality of work. Have and intrinsic and enthusiastic drive to support team goals, with a positive attitude and passion for innovation, continuous learning and application of new skills and  open to learning new chemistries, analysis techniques and software, and project management disciplines.

Critical thinking and problem-solving
:
Identifying problems, root causes, and possible solutions is a focus of this role. Before choosing a solution, objectively evaluate each option and present the most effective solution for review. Logical approach to judgement and decision making based on original thinking, direct experience, and high quality, independently verifiable evidence.

Time management: This team has many different accountabilities. There are many different types of projects, many deadlines, so being able to manage and record time well to punctually meet those deadlines and summarize time by project is a key skill.

Analytical: This team is highly data driven.

At times we will work with very compact data sets and use math to extrapolate new, larger solutions, quickly.

At other times, we will use analytics to look through large datasets and interpolate opportunities, thus, having an flexible and analytical mind is essential to our success.

Organizational skills: This role is very process and results oriented.

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