Interim Plant Operations Director — Cast Film Delivery Recovery

The mandate

A cast-film facility is carrying a growing backlog of committed orders and material awaiting disposition and needs an executive plant owner. Managers are keeping individual shifts running, but frequent grade changes, maintenance interruptions and uncertain release dates are undermining the promised delivery sequence. The interim director will become the executive owner of a recoverable production plan, not merely accelerate output into an already congested quality and dispatch queue.

The assignment starts on 26 October 2026 and provides five-day weekly coverage for nine months. Recruitment of the permanent director proceeds alongside recovery. An extension is possible only through written COO and board approval, with a maximum combined engagement of 24 months. The handover will include eight consecutive weeks of tested delivery planning, stable shift accountability and an explicitly owned residual backlog that the successor can manage without undocumented priority instructions.

Authority includes resequencing approved orders, assigning plant managers and authorising routine operating expenditure within the existing plant budget. Customer promise changes require commercial agreement; safety-critical modifications, substantial overtime increases and new capital commitments require their prescribed approvals. Quality retains independent release authority. The director must never resolve a delivery shortfall by overriding product disposition or declaring material saleable before the required evidence is complete.

The plant perimeter contains 190 employees working through six managers. The first practical task is to identify how many orders can genuinely be recovered, which require renegotiation and what maintenance access the recovery plan must protect. A new production line, renegotiation of annual customer prices and redesign of product specifications are excluded. At exit, the permanent appointee should be able to run a complete weekly planning cycle, explain the basis of each delivery promise and distinguish unresolved equipment risks from failures of ordinary scheduling discipline.

What you will own

• Establish a physically executable order-recovery sequence using available resin, approved recipes, equipment condition and release capacity, separating deliverable commitments from orders that need commercial renegotiation before another unsupported date is promised.
• Decide campaign grouping and grade-transition priorities within customer constraints, recording the yield and delivery trade-offs so shift supervisors do not repeatedly sacrifice the agreed plan to the loudest urgent request.
• Restore daily accountability for blocked material by joining production, quality and dispatch evidence, making each disposition owner and expected decision date visible without interfering with independent quality release.
• Protect essential maintenance windows inside the recovery schedule, assessing the consequence of deferral and escalating conditions that would make continued production unsafe or leave the following week's promises unachievable.
• Lead a short weekly operations decision forum that closes disagreements on staffing, changeovers and dispatch readiness, distinguishing new facts that justify replanning from avoidable changes that merely destroy schedule discipline.
• Verify recovery through customer-facing delivery evidence, usable output and backlog age, rejecting an apparent improvement achieved by producing easy grades while difficult committed orders remain unresolved in the queue.
• Prepare the permanent director's control file and operating induction, demonstrating a complete planning cycle with manager-led decisions, documented constraints and named owners for every material issue remaining after the interim exit.

Candidate qualifications

• Have 12–18 years in flexible-film manufacturing or similarly continuous polymer processing, including responsibility for production and supporting plant functions. Personal experience with CPP or another cast-film process is essential. Show a recovery where you improved dependable customer delivery, explaining the constraints you preserved rather than reporting only a temporary rise in tonnes produced or a reduction in one shift's downtime.
• Demonstrate operational judgement in grade sequencing, transition loss, material disposition and maintenance access. You must be able to examine a proposed schedule and identify why nominal capacity differs from physically deliverable output. Relevant technical education and practical process knowledge should support your decisions, including recognition of quality and engineering matters that require independent qualified authority.
• Bring experience leading managers through conflicting plant priorities without replacing their accountability with continuous personal intervention. Describe a decision where you refused to defer necessary maintenance, or changed a promised recovery date because the underlying operating evidence was inadequate. Improvement training is useful when it helps investigate variation and sustain routine decisions under pressure, not when it substitutes terminology for execution.
• Be available for the stated start and onsite executive commitment, including planned presence across shift interfaces. Your previous handovers should show that operating managers could continue the routine without private instructions or dependence on your relationships. An interim exit must disclose remaining equipment, staffing and delivery risks candidly; a clean dashboard is not sufficient if unresolved obligations have simply been transferred to the successor's first week.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 15 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-INT-2026-IND-216.