The Chair must understand what happens between the gate and the accounts
This is a process-manufacturing mandate in which yield, grade, energy, water, effluent, maintenance, working capital and export execution all have financial consequences. The Board seeks a director capable of walking a plant, questioning the control design at source and later recognising the same issue in margin, provisions, cash flow and risk disclosure.
The dual chairship matters. Audit can identify recurring inventory, quality, safety or compliance issues; NRC must then ask whether accountabilities, capability, incentives and succession are helping or preventing durable correction. The director should resist the habit of treating people questions as separate from control quality.
A plant-to-board agenda
The first operating review should begin with material flow. The Chair will test purchase specifications, receipt controls, consumption norms, yield variance, rework, scrap, by-product accounting and finished-goods valuation. Variances should be understood by cause and recurrence, not merely absorbed into standard cost. Slow-moving and customer-specific inventory needs evidence-based provisioning.
The second lens is resource and process integrity. Water withdrawal, effluent treatment, emissions, chemical handling, energy intensity and waste are not solely ESG disclosures; they affect licence to operate, capital needs, contingent liability and customer acceptance. The committee should receive exceptions, near misses, consent conditions, monitoring reliability and closure evidence in a form that permits independent challenge.
Export and customer economics form the third lens. Foreign-exchange exposure, quality claims, shipment cut-off, rebates, customer concentration, logistics disruption and receivable recoverability should be reconciled to contract terms and cash. The Board needs to know when commercial accommodation becomes an accounting estimate or a conduct concern.
Maintenance and capex are the fourth. Deferred maintenance can flatter cash while increasing downtime, safety and quality risk. Each material capital project should have a baseline covering output, yield, resource intensity, safety and return; post-completion reviews should separate installation from realised benefit.
NRC work that follows the evidence
The appointee will lead succession planning for plant, commercial, finance and control leadership; review whether site-level managers can escalate bad news without penalty; and examine reward measures that may encourage volume at the expense of quality, resource compliance or working capital. A skills and dependency review should identify roles for which retirement, attrition or local knowledge loss would interrupt safe operation.
The candidate
Applicants may be manufacturing CFOs, plant or business heads, audit professionals, risk leaders or former chief executives with direct process-industry responsibility. They must show personal engagement with plant economics and control—not only corporate reporting. Experience of environmental compliance, export operations, labour-intensive sites or turnaround assurance is valuable. Previous Audit Committee chairship is preferred for the dual-chair role.
The appointment is conditional on independence checks, DIN and Independent Directors' Databank requirements. The Chair should expect site visits in addition to regular Board and committee meetings, with extra engagement around annual accounts, a material incident or leadership transition.
Application note
Applications should present committee-relevant evidence rather than a general biography: two or three decisions personally governed, the information used, the challenge made, and the resulting change in risk, capital, control, succession or stakeholder outcome. Shortlisted candidates will undergo independence, conflict, capacity, DIN and databank verification before any confidential market approach.