Director of Maintenance Excellence and Reliability in Fredericksburg, Pennsylvania at Farmers Pride Inc

Director of Maintenance Excellence and Reliability

Enterprise Asset Reliability, Maintenance Strategy, and Continuous Improvement

Position Summary

The Director of Maintenance Excellence and Reliability provides enterprise leadership for maintenance strategy, asset reliability, workforce planning, systems, and continuous improvement across all plants. The position establishes the standards, processes, capabilities, and governance required to achieve best-in-class maintenance performance while supporting safe, reliable, efficient, and cost-effective plant operations.

Reporting Relationships

• Direct reports: Enterprise Maintenance Planner and Scheduler

• Matrix relationships: Plant maintenance leaders and teams report directly to Operations and maintain a dotted-line relationship to this position for functional standards, capability development, performance management, and enterprise alignment.

• Key partners: Operations, Engineering, Safety, Quality, Procurement, Finance, Information Technology, plant leadership, contractors, and equipment suppliers.

Key Responsibilities

Maintenance Strategy and Standards

• Develop and lead the enterprise maintenance and reliability strategy across all plants.

• Establish, document, and continuously improve common maintenance standards, work processes, governance, and performance expectations.

• Define the appropriate balance of preventive, predictive, condition-based, and corrective maintenance based on asset criticality and business risk.

• Partner with plant and operations leaders to improve equipment reliability, uptime, throughput, safety, quality, and total cost of ownership.

• Identify and scale best practices across facilities while allowing appropriate flexibility for plant-specific needs.

Organization, Staffing, and Capability

• Determine the maintenance organization structure, roles, competencies, staffing levels, shift coverage, and skill mix needed across all plants.

• Develop workforce-capacity models using asset base, workload, operating schedules, reliability targets, and service requirements.

• Clarify decision rights and accountabilities among Operations, plant maintenance, the enterprise maintenance function, Engineering, and external service providers.

• Establish competency models, training priorities, career paths, and succession plans for maintenance personnel.

• Provide functional coaching and direction to plant maintenance leaders through the dotted-line reporting relationship.

Planning, Scheduling, and Work Management

• Lead the design and consistent execution of maintenance planning, scheduling, prioritization, backlog management, shutdown, and outage processes.

• Direct and develop the Enterprise Maintenance Planner and Scheduler.

• Ensure planned work is properly scoped and supported with labor, parts, tools, safety requirements, procedures, and contractor resources before scheduling.

• Define scheduling cadences and coordination routines that align maintenance work with production requirements and minimize operational disruption.

Systems, Data, and Performance Management

• Own the functional requirements, governance, adoption, and continuous improvement of the computerized maintenance management system and related reliability tools.

• Ensure accurate asset hierarchies, criticality rankings, preventive maintenance plans, bills of material, work histories, failure codes, and parts data.

• Establish enterprise key performance indicators, dashboards, targets, and review routines that drive accountability and fact-based decisions.

• Use performance and cost data to identify systemic issues, prioritize resources, support capital decisions, and verify that improvements are sustained.

Continuous Improvement and Reliability

• Build a continuous improvement mindset within maintenance and operations, emphasizing disciplined problem solving, standard work, ownership, and learning.

• Lead reliability improvement methods such as root-cause analysis, defect elimination, criticality analysis, and recurring-failure review.

• Facilitate cross-plant forums to share lessons learned, standardize effective practices, and accelerate improvements.

• Assess maintenance maturity by location and maintain a prioritized multiyear roadmap for advancing capabilities.

Contractor and Parts Optimization

• Develop the enterprise strategy for using internal labor and external contractors, ensuring the right work is performed by the right resources at the appropriate cost and risk level.

• Establish contractor qualification, safety, performance, scope, and cost-management expectations in partnership with Procurement and plant leadership.

• Optimize maintenance, repair, and operations inventory by setting standards for critical spares, stocking levels, storeroom controls, obsolescence, repairable assets, and supplier performance.

• Reduce avoidable spending and downtime without compromising safety, compliance, quality, or asset reliability.

Decision Authority and Accountability

• Sets enterprise maintenance and reliability standards, methods, systems requirements, and performance measures.

• Recommends plant maintenance structures, staffing levels, capability investments, technology, contractor strategies, and parts policies.

• Challenges local practices that create unacceptable reliability, safety, compliance, quality, or cost risk and escalates unresolved issues through the appropriate operations leadership.

• Works through influence and matrix leadership while respecting Operations’ direct accountability for plant maintenance execution and results.

Measures of Success

• Improved asset availability, reliability, and production uptime

• Reduced unplanned downtime and repeat equipment failures

• Higher preventive and predictive maintenance effectiveness

• Improved schedule compliance, planned-work percentage, and backlog health

• Appropriate staffing, skill coverage, and contractor utilization across plants

• Optimized maintenance cost, parts inventory, and contractor spend

• Strong adoption and data quality within maintenance systems

• Demonstrable improvement in maintenance maturity and cross-plant standardization

• Maintenance work completed safely and in support of food safety, quality, and regulatory requirements

Qualifications and Leadership Capabilities

• Bachelor’s degree in engineering, operations, business, or a related field; equivalent relevant experience may be considered.

• Significant progressive leadership experience in multi-site maintenance, reliability, engineering, or plant operations within a manufacturing environment.

• Demonstrated success implementing maintenance excellence, reliability, work-management, and continuous improvement programs.

• Strong knowledge of maintenance planning and scheduling, computerized maintenance management systems, workforce planning, contractor management, and maintenance-parts optimization.

• Ability to lead through influence in a matrix organization and build alignment among plant, operations, and functional leaders.

• Strong analytical, financial, change-management, communication, and problem-solving capabilities.

• Visible commitment to safety, food safety, quality, operational discipline, and continuous improvement.

• Ability to travel regularly among company facilities.