Plant VTIS Systems Manager

The Plant VTIS Systems Manager is a critical role to providing daily oversight, and mid-term strategic planning, to the processing and fluid-intake areas of the plant. This position has mentoring, leadership and resource planning responsibility for the supervision and front-line teams for all shifts and is considered a key role in providing the Processing Department with high level support to ensure that projects are completed, problems are resolved, data is obtained and distributed and operations are streamlined, efficient and meet the goals of the plant.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Active involvement and engagement in all Safety programs, audits, and policies.
• Responsible for coordinating daily Processing activities so as to meet business objectives. o Including receiving bay activities, HTST, and VTIS operations. Including ESL and Aseptic.
• Responsible for the successful attainment of production objectives, implementation of policies, and effective utilization of available resources and facilities.
• Work closely with the Technical Training department for SOP creation, sign-off and training. o Lead VTIS training courses at the facility.
• Manages departmental performance measures, KPI's and objectives, and provides regular progress reports to the Processing Director.
• Ensure compliance with all legal requirements concerning diary processing, environmental, safety, and employee working conditions.
• Maintain effective communication and procedural alignment between shifts and departments to ensure continuity and consistency of plant goals, execution of schedule and SOP completion/creation.
• Knowledge and ability to perform production planning and scheduling. Coordinate production with customer service and forecasting replenishment groups to ensure safe, timely production of quality products.
• Coordination with Maintenance and Engineering to ensure required access to equipment for project and Preventive Maintenance purposes and ensuring PM completion rates for PM's assigned to the Processing group.
• Work with the team to identify and resolve product loss issues, downtime causes, and safety concerns.
• All other duties assigned by management.

Education and Experience:

Bachelor's degree preferred or 7 years of related experience, or equivalent combination of education experience. Minimum of 3 years of supervision experience.

Skills and Competencies:

Job Knowledge:

• Must exhibit working knowledge of in-plant and regulatory audits and inspection, sampling and testing programs required, operations of equipment and plant, etc.
• Balances Safety, quality, productivity, cost, and morale to achieve positive results in all areas.
• Experience in dairy, preferably ESL or fresh Grade "A" milk processing and production.
• Must be able to lead in problem resolution and Root Cause Analysis in order to ensure that all products and processes are continuously improving.
• Experience in maintaining food safety and food quality through completing job tasks and maintaining work areas in a sanitary manner; maintaining the cleaning and sanitation programs; ensure biosecurity procedures are followed; report food safety problems to personnel with authority to initiate action; maintain Master List of Documents for Sanitation and Production and be a member of the SQF and Ethical Sourcing Program Management Team and support continuous improvement of the program.

Managing people:

• Experience in employee development and leadership.
• Ability to follow through and stay organized.
• Knowledge of skills gap analysis to identify mentoring opportunities.
• Takes responsibility for direct report's activities and looks for ways to help them improve.
• Strong written and verbal communications abilities required.
• Ability and willingness to be available for all shifts when needed, providing a connection to all supervision and front-line teams.