About The Role
The Site Production Manager is responsible for leading the day-to-day production operation and delivering performance across safety, food safety, quality, service, labour efficiency, waste, output, cost, and people standards.
The role requires a visible, hands-on production leader who can create structure, consistency, pace, and accountability across all shifts.
The successful candidate will be expected to manage daily production performance while also supporting improvement activity through lean manufacturing principles, daily management, root cause problem solving, standard work, training, and change management.
This is not simply a shift coordination role. The purpose of the role is to improve production discipline, support customer service, reduce recurring issues, and build stronger capability across the production team.
Responsibilities & Requirements
Safety, Food Safety and Quality
- Lead production in line with company health and safety, food safety, quality, legality, customer, hygiene, and compliance standards.
- Ensure safe systems of work, PPE, machine guarding, housekeeping, GMP, allergen controls, and hygiene standards are followed across all shifts.
- Work closely with Technical, Engineering, HR/H&S, and Site Leadership to close actions, reduce risk, and maintain audit readiness.
- Ensure non-conforming product is identified, contained, escalated, investigated, and prevented from recurring.
Production Performance
- Own daily production performance across all shifts.
- Ensure the production plan is understood, resourced, and delivered as effectively as possible.
- Drive improvement across key KPIs including plan attainment, customer service, shortages, output, labour efficiency, waste, giveaway, downtime, OEE, and shift performance.
- Ensure missed plans, shortages, service risks, labour issues, and downtime losses are escalated early with clear recovery plans.
- Use data to identify trends, recurring problems, and improvement priorities.
- Lead daily production reviews and ensure shift handovers are factual, structured, and action focused.
Shift Manager Leadership
- Lead, coach, and hold accountable the Shift Management team.
- Set clear expectations for shift discipline, communication, standards, escalation, labour control, problem solving, and performance delivery.
- Create consistency across all shifts so that standards do not vary depending on who is on duty.
- Ensure absence, conduct, capability, holidays, performance reviews, and training plans are managed properly.
- Develop a culture of ownership, pace, teamwork, and accountability.
Labour, Skills and Training
- Own labour deployment against the production plan and agreed labour standards.
- Work with Shift Managers and the Training Coordinator to maintain a live skills matrix.
- Identify skills gaps and build training plans that improve flexibility, resilience, and performance.
- Ensure training is treated as an ongoing capability-building process, not a one-off compliance exercise.
- Challenge inefficient labour usage and drive better deployment across lines, shifts, and departments.
Lean, Continuous Improvement and Change Management