• The Vice President of Manufacturing is a senior leader responsible for leading and scaling the company’s global manufacturing strategy. This role has been created to keep up with continued growth and provide succession planning options for the company moving forward. This role provides vision, leadership, and operational oversight for all production facilities globally, ensuring the company delivers best-in-class quality, efficiency, safety, and innovation in the manufacture of its industrial automation products. This person will be responsible for driving operational excellence while aligning manufacturing capabilities with the company’s strategic growth initiatives, customer commitments, and innovation pipeline. Key Responsibilities: Leadership & Strategy
• Develop and lead the global manufacturing strategy, aligned with corporate objectives and growth targets.
• Serve as a strategic advisor to the SVP of Operations and executive leadership team on operations, capacity, and long-term investments.
• Build a world-class culture of safety, quality, accountability, and continuous improvement across all sites. Global Manufacturing Operations
• Oversee multi-site, international manufacturing operations, including electronics assembly, testing, and packaging.
• Standardize processes and systems across facilities to ensure scalability, efficiency, and operational consistency.
• Lead the transition toward digital manufacturing and Industry 4.0 adoption. Innovation & Transformation
• Champion the integration of automation, robotics, AI, and advanced analytics into production operations.
• Partner with R&D and Engineering to drive design-for-manufacturability (DFM) and seamless new product introductions (NPI).
• Lead major transformation initiatives that improve cost efficiency, responsiveness, and sustainability. Cross-Functional Collaboration
• Partner with Supply Chain to optimize material flow, supplier performance, and global sourcing strategies.
• Collaborate with Product Management and Engineering to align capacity and capabilities with future product launches.
• Collaborate with Operations Engineering to support design for manufacturability and test.
• Work with HR to build leadership pipelines, strengthen workforce capabilities, and drive succession planning. Budget and Global Resource Management
• Own the manufacturing P&L, ensuring profitability, ROI, and operational efficiency.
• Lead long-term planning for capital investments, facility expansions, and global capacity growth.
• Ensure compliance with ISO standards, regulatory requirements, and environmental policies across all facilities.

The company is looking initially for someone who currently lives in the Twin Cities. They aren't interested in people who are willing/wanting to commute or work hybrid. Due to the importance and visibility of this position, when the person is not traveling, they will be on site 5 days/week. The company is looking for a person who has at least 15+ years of total experience of which 3+ has been in a current role leading multiple plants of scale (750+ people) for a company that has global reach. They want to find a person who has runway in front of them, so they are capable of taking on future roles of greater responsibility. They would like to find a candidate whose training started in engineering and led to plant operations roles working for a large industrial manufacturing company as this training will have allowed the person to have seen and understand what good looks like. It would be beneficial if the hire had prior experience rolling out Lean & CI programs and is process oriented. The person needs to be respectful of the culture and the history, seeks to understand and over time can make the changes that are necessary. They aren’t looking for a huge change agent that wants to come in and implement new programs right away.