This position is responsible for managing all production operations in our New Ulm, MN facility. ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES Creates, leads, and owns the safety culture on our production floor. Promote a culture of safety awareness and ensure compliance with all relevant health, safety, and environmental regulations. Responsible for production activities in a manufacturing environment with the goal of optimizing efficiency, resource utilization, increased safety awareness, minimizing costs, and maintaining high quality standards. Oversees supervisors, team leads, and other production staff to ensure daily production, final assembly, and shipping activities are completed safely and according to plan. Lead and coordinate daily production activities to ensure efficient workflow and minimal downtime. Ensure each employee has a clear understanding of performance expectations and is equipped to succeed at their job. Foster a culture of accountability, collaboration, and continuous improvement. Maintains workflow by monitoring processes, observing control points and equipment, flexing capacity or initiating continuous improvement to eliminate bottlenecks, implementing cost reductions, and facilitating corrections to malfunctions within process control points. Implement and maintain rigorous quality control measures to ensure compliance with AS9100 standards and customer requirements. Ensures all work is completed per available work instructions. Investigate and address any quality issues or deviations from established procedures, implementing corrective and preventive actions as necessary. Must be able to effectively drive Key Performance Indicators (KPI s) across the operation, ensuring all safety, quality, delivery, productivity, and cost goals are met. Plans and executes work distribution for multiple cells or a complex cell to meet production schedules. Interacts with other functions such as Project Management, Supply Chain, Quality, Engineering and Human Resources to facilitate a collaborative environment that ensures new products, processes, plans, promotions, and service requirements are fulfilled by the operation. Lead continuous improvement initiatives aimed at streamlining production processes, reducing cycle times, and enhancing overall operational efficiency. Drive the implementation of best practices and standardization to maximize productivity and quality output. Uses Lean principles to drive continuous improvement, elimination of waste, and a 5S production floor. Maintain effective working relationships with company employees. Promote and maintain the professional image and reputation of the company and ensure timely problem resolution and customer satisfaction. Communicate regularly with production employees, both individually and as a group, to ensure consistent operation. Coaches and develop a winning team through recruitment, training, education, and performance management practices. Manages employee performance to establish expectations, monitor, and measure contributions. Provide employee feedback, coaching, and instruction as required