Director of Plant Turnaround — Interim, Industrial Machinery

The mandate

A twelve-day strike ended without resolving incentive and overtime grievances, while the order backlog reached ₹420 crore. The plant head departed immediately after settlement, leaving supervisors, union representatives and customers sceptical of another recovery promise.

The interim must start within two weeks for a fixed ten-month turnaround. An internal operations leader will assume the plant after completing workforce, customer and shutdown readiness gates during the final month.

Handover requires backlog below ₹160 crore, schedule adherence above ninety per cent, overtime reduced by a third, zero repeat work stoppage, and the successor jointly signing the agreed productivity and grievance-review cadence.

The director may resequence orders, change shifts inside existing agreements and approve maintenance below ₹60 lakh. Redundancies, collective agreement changes and customer settlements above ₹1 crore require executive approval; Engineering owns design concession and Quality owns release.

Product portfolio, sales territory and a planned greenfield plant are excluded. The assignment repairs flow and industrial relations inside the existing Pune operation.

Why this seat is open

Strike settlement restored access but not confidence in plant leadership. Backlog pressure will quickly recreate unsafe overtime unless flow and grievance mechanisms change together. A finite turnaround director must deliver evidence of stability before an internal successor takes the seat.

What you will own

• Reprioritise backlog by customer criticality, material readiness, constraint load and contractual exposure.
• Establish daily flow control across machining, fabrication, paint, assembly, test and dispatch.
• Decide protected maintenance windows for bottleneck assets using failure and backlog risk.
• Negotiate shift and overtime recovery with union representatives inside current agreement boundaries.
• Create a dated grievance ledger with responsible leaders and non-retaliatory escalation.
• Validate schedule adherence and earned output without counting incomplete assemblies.
• Qualify the internal successor through one shutdown, customer review and workforce council.

Candidate qualifications

• Eighteen-plus years leading heavy engineering or industrial machinery plants with unionised workforces.
• Recovered a material backlog after strike, labour disruption or severe operating instability.
• Strong command of high-mix machining, fabrication, assembly, bottleneck planning and maintenance reliability.
• Demonstrated labour productivity improvement through credible work design and dialogue rather than unmanaged overtime.
• Experience maintaining customer trust while reprioritising delayed engineered-to-order equipment.
• Ability to prepare an internal successor for both workforce and operating accountability.

Non-negotiables

• Can be onsite in Pune within two weeks and support all shift patterns.
• No prior role in the strike dispute or current relationship with labour advisers involved.
• Will work within existing agreements unless formally authorised to negotiate change.
• Available for the fixed ten-month turnaround and successor qualification.

1. 49 words maximum. State your earliest site start and ability to work across all plant shifts.
2. 49 words maximum. What backlog did you reduce after labour disruption, and over what period?
3. 49 words maximum. Which workforce grievance did you resolve without trading away required operating discipline?