Animal Nutrition Sr Manager, Manufacturing - St. Joseph, MO

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Wilbur-Ellis invests heavily in our employees by offering skill development and training, competitive compensation and benefits, and a tradition of promoting from within for a broad range of career opportunities. And we foster a supportive, people-first work environment.

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General Purpose and Scope of Position:

As a Sr. Manufacturing Manager for the Pet division, you will be responsible for the manufacturing aspects of multiple facilities in separate locations, focused on optimizing and elevating manufacturing practices, including Facilities/Equipment Management, Maintenance and Inventory Control. Working in close collaboration with the respective groups and functions, this position is responsible to ensure the efficient and safe operation while also ensuring compliance with all regulatory, quality, safety, operations, and financial/accounting and inventory standards and policies. In this role, you will be responsible for oversight of each location’s budget, assisting location management in making the best use of the budget allocated. This individual will have overarching responsibility for all staff operations to ensure the efficient and safe handling and receipt of all ingredients into the facility, the processing activities within the facility, and the shipment of all finished products from the facility. Your success will rely on understanding when & where to elevate the interactions between manufacturing and other areas of the overall business. The individual will need to have a hands-on, can-do attitude that will lead by example through coaching, be able to help direct reports in the day-to-day challenges and be able to manage conflict. In parallel, you must be able to translate long term vision into the daily activities and communicate upwards on strategic needs for the location and its components. As needed, you may from time to time be asked to participate in some outside interaction with customers or suppliers.  

Key Skills and Abilities Include:

• 15+ years’ experience in management at a feed mill/manufacturing setting; 5+ years with multiple plants

• Bachelor’s degree in a relevant industry related field (can be supplemented with significant experience)

• Strong technical knowledge of feed manufacturing and feed production practices; and/or pet manufacturing experience will be a strong differentiator. Experience in plant design is a plus.

• Strong and polished communicator who can bring together people with different opinions and functional experiences.

• Ability to collaborate with cross functional departments using strong communication skills to drive buy in and performance objectives

• Ability to efficiently manage multiple plants remotely.

• Demonstrated capacity to solve problems in a decentralized work environment and efficiently lead the team to find solutions, assess the impact of change, and manage it.

• Experience in successfully implementing cost savings activities and programs.

• Ability to prioritize in a fast paced and changing work environment

• Available for domestic travel with ability to accommodate global travel if needed

Key Personal Attributes Include:

• An individual with a high level of integrity, transparency, work ethic and safety commitment

• A “working” leader, able to lead a team of professionals but also able to directly take over specific areas of work when needed.

• Learning agility, ability to learn more than taught and to deliver more than asked

• Resourceful, ability to “do more with less” but also able to recognize when “more leads to more”

• Strong customer centric approach: An enabler for the commercial teams to fully server our customers

• Able to work with simplicity, sense of urgency and mutual accountability

• A critical thinker who can analyze complex situations, look at them from different angles and can seamlessly change gears into a “can do” attitude to drive practical action leading to desired results. Capable of generating new ideas and solutions oriented with ability of providing options as appropriate that conform to all guidelines and regulations

• Ability to work in a team environment by collaboration and horizontal influence

• Strong communication skills, both oral and written, with the ability to interact with employees at all levels of the organization. Ability to listen to others’ ideas, synthetize them and convert them i