Director of Plant Operations

About UTEX Industries:

UTEX Industries is a leading manufacturer of engineered sealing solutions serving the oil and gas, industrial, and petrochemical markets. With a legacy of innovation and operational excellence, we take pride in our people, our products, and our purpose. Join a team that values safety, integrity, and continuous improvement.

UTEX Industries is a leading manufacturer of engineered sealing solutions serving the oil and gas, industrial, and petrochemical markets. With a legacy of innovation and operational excellence, we take pride in our people, our products, and our purpose. Join a team that values safety, integrity, and continuous improvement.

UTEX is seeking a hands-on Director of Plant Operations to lead its largest and most strategically important manufacturing site. The plant produces precision seals and engineered components for demanding industrial applications across oil & gas, mining, water distribution, chemicals, and general industrial markets. The role reports to the SVP Operations and carries full accountability for safety, quality, delivery, cost, workforce capability, equipment reliability, capital execution, and sustained operational performance.

Success requires a leader who is comfortable on the shop floor, understands manufacturing, can improve flow in a complex environment, and can build scalable operating discipline without losing the practical urgency required to run the plant day-to-day. Furthermore, this role requires a visible, hands-on leader who ensures stable day-to-day execution while building the systems, standards, and accountability needed for long-term operational excellence.

The site has a strong technical foundation, differentiated material and process capabilities, and significant opportunity to improve performance through stronger operating systems, clearer standards, better production flow, and improved reliability. The Director will build on the plant’s existing strengths while driving measurable progress in safety, first-pass quality, on-time delivery, capacity utilization, labor productivity, scrap reduction, maintenance execution, and capital effectiveness.

• Lead all site operations, including production, quality, planning, maintenance, EHS, shipping, engineering, tooling, and support functions.
• Own plant performance results across safety, quality, delivery, cost, asset reliability, labor productivity, and customer service.
• Improve production flow, throughput, schedule attainment, and on-time delivery in a high-SKU, short-run manufacturing environment.
• Establish disciplined daily management, visual controls, standard work, problem-solving routines, and clear accountability across the plant.
• Strengthen quality performance through first-pass yield improvement, scrap/rework reduction, process control, root cause analysis, and operator ownership at the source.
• Build workforce capability by assessing skills, closing technical gaps, formalizing critical process knowledge, and developing front-line leadership.
• Develop a multi-year capital plan tied to safety, quality, capacity, reliability, automation, productivity, tooling, equipment upgrades, and facility improvements.
• Partner with Corporate Engineering to ensure capital projects are well executed from concept through closeout, including scope definition, technical justification, business case development, implementation and benefits realization.
• Improve maintenance work management, preventive maintenance compliance, equipment uptime, root cause failure analysis, OEE, MTBF, and reliability-driven productivity.
• Partner with the plant controller and FPA to organize, present and explain how the plant is performing operationally and financially.
• Partner with the HR function to cultivate, train and retain people.

• At least 10 years of proven plant leadership experience in a technically complex manufacturing environment, with measurable improvement in safety, quality, delivery, cost, people, and equipment performance.
• Ability to transform culture, develop people/leadership and deliver results are critical attributes that will make the candidate and site successful.
• Molding experience is preferred, including compression, injection, transfer, rubber, plastic, elastomer, polymer, and/or engineered-material molding processes.
• Experience with high-mix, low-volume manufacturing, short production runs, complex routing, fast…