Manager, Advanced Manufacturing

Overview

We are a technology company that aims to help people return home safely from their worksites by building smart safety systems. We have a hyper focused safety culture that puts our customers and our employee safety first. As a company, we aim for stable and sustained business growth and this strategy has supported our growth. We hire carefully to ensure our growth strategy as well as culture fit and value each hire tremendously. We hugely value learning and continuous improvement and believe strongly in furthering the careers of all our employees. We recognize that our careers can take us in different directions, and we value retention by recognizing and even encouraging this diverse career growth. Being a global organization, we are well positioned to have varied opportunities within the organization to support growth in different directions. Our compensation and benefits packages are competitive.

MSA is an organization that respects boundaries, encourages people to unplug and recharge, and prioritizes the well-being of everyone on the team, all while sustaining reasonable growth and remaining committed to our meaningful mission.

Responsibilities

The Manager of Advanced Manufacturing will contribute to the vision for MSA’s Factory of the Future, supporting the global business in the efforts to transform our operational technology.  This role will lead the creation of our strategy to deploy advanced manufacturing methods and physical automation across our 20 global factory footprint.  The goal is to align our people, processes, and technology across our enterprise to deliver new modern capabilities in an agile and iterative way with cross functional team members.  This team will lay the foundation for operational efficiencies and how we will deliver exceptional products and integrated solutions to our customers.  This leader will be a pioneer at heart who enjoys continuous process improvement and intertwines creativity to evaluate advanced manufacturing & automation technologies and their readiness.

Specifically, this position will focus on understanding current manufacturing processes and actively participate, promote, and support their improvement while preparing processes for automation by developing documentation and improving the process flow, to reach targeted operational goals. The incumbent will provide Manufacturing Engineering expertise to the 3D new product development process to build manufacturability and automation feasibility into new product designs. They will champion an organized approach to conduct industry research and provide thought leadership in the field of advanced manufacturing to introduce new technologies that contribute to breakthrough innovations. To do this they must create positive relationships with internal & external (supplier) stakeholders, develop talent, and execute the strategy through regional Operations and local Manufacturing Engineering leadership.

Qualifications

Experience & education required:

• Bachelor’s degree in appropriate discipline required, preferably from an ABET accredited program.
• Continuing education in management studies expected.

Engineering Manager I:

• 8 years relevant work experience
• Deep understanding of manufacturing operations, lean manufacturing, process metrics, digital transformation, Industry 4.0 and IIoT.
• Experience with IIoT platforms and robotic cell automation
• Critical thinking, processing, and organizing facts, data, and other information to define a problem and develop effective solutions.
• Excellent decision making and problem-solving skills.
• Experience collaborating with and influencing cross-functional teams and key stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to build & deliver structured & compelling communications (both written and verbal) to sell a vision.
• Successful use of cost / benefit analysis and key financial drivers to justify significant capital programs, as well as monitoring their return.
• Passionate about designing, implementing, and maintaining efficient manufacturing processes, ensuring quality control of outputs, specifying equipment, crafting, and deploying monitoring protocols, and working in a high-performance and fast-paced environment. 

Engineering Manager II:

• 10 years relevant work experience, including a minimum of 2 years’ experience in direct staff management.
• Experience in architecture and system design.
• Experience in technology evaluations and road mapping.
• Experience in annual portfolio planning processes and execution.
• Detailed people resource forecasting, planning, & justification.

Experience and education preferred:

• Advanced degree
• PMP or PE certification

• Experience with advanced manufacturing applications such as: robotic cells, collaborative robotics, autonomous guided vehicles, additive manufacturing, vision, scientific molding, logo & printing customization.
• Direct management experience in any of the following manufacturing environments: molding, electronics, textiles, pneumatics, machining, assembly and secondary operations.
• New Product Industrialization (NPI),
• Design-for-Assembly / Manufacturing (DFM/A),
• Value Analysis/Value Engineering (VA/VE)