Plant Manager · Operations Leadership
From the plant floor to full P&L ownership in five years. I lead manufacturing operations by building high-performing teams and the operating discipline—real-time visibility, clear priorities, accountable execution—that makes performance repeatable.
The Journey
Five years, four companies, steadily bigger problems. Every chapter added a discipline—and every discipline still shows up in how I run a plant today.
I started where operations actually happens—on an automated diesel-catalyst line, fresh out of chemical engineering at West Virginia University. As a process control engineer I learned to read a production line the way a clinician reads vitals: cycle times, defect rates, downtime patterns. Then came my first team—six technicians and a process control engineer—and the harder lesson that results come from people. Together we lifted OEE more than 5% and ran every shift without a single recordable injury.
One plant became a region. Covering air-separation and specialty-gas facilities across the Northeast, I owned improvement projects, project budgets, and reliability at sites I couldn't walk every day. That forced real discipline: standardized processes, honest metrics, and influence without direct authority. Six Sigma work on Krypton/Xenon production added over $1M in annual revenue, and 15+ reliability projects with the site teams clawed back 25 days of annual downtime.
I joined a battery-storage scale-up as a quality engineer and left running manufacturing operations—11 supervisors, 6 team leads, and 240 technicians across two buildings. Together we built the company's first production dashboards, converted subassembly from batch to one-piece flow for a 41% throughput gain, grew BESS output 340%, cut rework 66%, and stood up a brand-new third shift that became the plant's best within a month. Scale-ups don't hand you playbooks—we wrote ours as a team.
Today I run a high-volume mining-infrastructure plant in West Virginia—accountable for safety, quality, delivery, cost, and a team of about 100 people. Everything the first five years taught me gets applied daily: a management cadence built on real-time data, planned maintenance instead of reactive repair, quality governance with full material traceability, and supervisors coached into leaders. In our first year, the team grew output 36.7%—and we're already working the next constraint.
The pattern has held at every stop: walk the floor, find the constraint, build the system, develop the people—repeat.
Impact
How I Operate
The Toolkit
Operational excellence isn't one methodology. I've invested in three disciplines—and I reach for whichever one removes the constraint fastest.
The discipline
The visibility
The force multiplier
A note on AI: it's a tool in the arsenal—not the arsenal. It earns its place when it removes manual work, sharpens a decision, or scales a proven process. The fundamentals—safety, quality, flow, and people—are never outsourced to a model.
Proof of Work
Dashboards, monitoring systems, forecasting tools, and improvement projects—this is what operational discipline looks like in practice.
Every visual is a faithful recreation of a system I built, shown with representative data—the production versions run on live plant data, which stays inside the plant.
Interactive daily operations email with real-time KPIs, downtime analysis, quality metrics, and action tracking—sent automatically each morning to plant leadership. Features in-email navigation buttons for mobile-first consumption.
The annual capital plan, balancing automation investment against care of the asset base—each project scoped, sequenced across the year, and tied to a payback case before submission.
An illustrative automation business case: two manual steps become one integrated cell—five operators to three per shift, WIP staging and forklift moves between them eliminated, one-piece flow with repeatable cycle times.
The financial case behind the same illustrative project—savings built bottom-up from labor and benefits, then tracked against a 36-month payback target.
A throughput project told the way it should be—on a control chart. Baseline the process, make the change, then hold a control period to prove the gain is real: average daily output up 15%, day-to-day variation down 10%, and the new level holding inside recalculated control limits.
Value on hand with a Pareto inside each class—finished goods, raw material, and WIP—so the conversation starts where the cash actually sits. Illustrative snapshot: $7.8M held near a healthy mix—roughly half finished goods for service level, a third raw material sized to supplier lead times, and minimal WIP.
Plant efficiency against prior year, with the current year split by shift—trending up year over year, with the two crews running nearly even.
Volume tells the other half of the efficiency story. In this illustrative year, tons step down through Q2 as volume is rebalanced to a sister plant—while efficiency climbs—so demand is met without overtime or weekend hours. The biweekly hours picture shows what that means for the crew: overtime disappears and schedules return to straight time.
Career
Leading end-to-end operations for a high-volume manufacturing site—a team of about 100—and building the data systems and operating cadence that make performance predictable and scalable.
Together with 17 front-line leaders, turned fragmented operations into data-driven, flow-oriented manufacturing—scaling output while cutting losses.
Built the quality backbone that enabled next-generation products—faster testing, fewer defects, and ISO-anchored compliance.
Drove operational excellence across multiple facilities by scaling visibility, reliability, and process discipline.
Drove shift-level performance and safety excellence by empowering teams with lean discipline and data clarity.
Where the fundamentals took root—optimizing automated processes, cutting losses, and learning from the technicians who ran the line.
Credentials
B.S. Chemical Engineering · West Virginia University, 2020
Connect
Open to conversations about operations leadership, manufacturing performance, and what it takes to build teams and systems that deliver.