Director, Film Conversion Operations

The mandate

Vacuum metallising, offline coating and finishing lines in a polymer film platform now serve more demanding customer applications, but operating reviews still concentrate on tonnes and downtime. Those measures cannot explain why material that passes a local check performs inconsistently after conversion or customer use. The Director takes permanent leadership of conversion operations, connecting process decisions to dependable product performance and economic yield.

The open-ended appointment begins with an eighteen-month agenda spanning process windows, changeover reliability and technical leadership. Vadodara is the onsite base: daily plant engagement includes metallising and coating reviews, changeover observation and direct work with line leaders. Planned Ahmedabad customer-performance reviews complement that operating presence. The perimeter includes approximately 180 employees and several conversion lines. Quality specialists retain independent release authority where required; this leader ensures the operating conditions and evidence support their decisions and that recurring defects are not normalised through repeated concessions.

The technical problem involves interactions between incoming film condition, surface preparation, vacuum performance, coating settings and subsequent finishing. A line can appear stable while an upstream variation changes adhesion, barrier behaviour or winding performance. The Director will develop an operating evidence model that traces those interactions, requiring teams to distinguish a verified process cause from a convenient explanation selected after the latest customer complaint.

The role controls conversion schedules, operating standards and improvement resources within the approved delegation. Major equipment investment, customer specification changes and structural workforce decisions require platform approval; safety and independent quality authorities retain their mandated responsibilities. The leader may stop unsafe or uncontrolled operation but cannot waive a critical release requirement or redefine a customer's qualification standard to make an output target easier to achieve.

During the first year, each major product family should have a justified process window, reliable changeover evidence and a traceable route from defect to corrective decision. The following six months establish repeatable yield improvements and technical succession in line management. Continuing operations leadership then supports new applications and investment choices while preserving process control, rather than treating a successful short trial as proof that production capability will remain stable indefinitely.

What you will own

• Establish product-family process windows for metallising and coating, linking approved settings to incoming film characteristics and downstream performance so line teams understand the evidence supporting each operating boundary.
• Decide conversion improvement priorities through defect origin and economic yield, distinguishing avoidable process losses from customer mix effects before approving experiments or additional operating expenditure.
• Build a cross-process defect trace linking surface preparation, vacuum conditions, coating and winding evidence, preventing repeated corrective actions based only on the machine where the defect was first noticed.
• Govern changeover qualification with line and quality leaders, requiring stable operating evidence before a new setting or product sequence is adopted across normal production rather than retained as an informal successful trial.
• Develop investment cases for conversion capacity or reliability improvements, documenting bottleneck evidence, customer qualification requirements and expected yield effects so equipment proposals are not justified through nominal speed alone.
• Lead technical capability reviews for line managers and shift leaders, using real process cases to develop judgement and make escalation of unstable conditions consistent across the operating perimeter.
• Present customer-performance and conversion-yield reviews that connect complaints, concessions and operating decisions, ensuring management can judge whether an improvement is sustained rather than merely moves loss to another stage.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate substantial operations leadership in polymer films, flexible packaging or closely related conversion manufacturing, with hands-on understanding of vacuum metallising and offline coating. Explain a product-performance issue whose cause crossed process boundaries, identify the records and trials used and show the operating decision you personally led rather than attributing improvement to a general quality initiative.
• Technical judgement must include the interaction of film condition, surface treatment, coating or metallising settings and finishing behaviour. Provide evidence of defining or restoring a process window, including what could not be concluded from a short trial. Applicants should know how to coordinate independent quality review and customer qualification without assuming operations authority can waive those requirements.
• Leadership at plant or multi-line level is required, including production planning, loss analysis and practical improvement execution. Describe a yield claim you challenged because the loss had moved to another process or customer outcome, and explain the measure adopted. Lean or Six Sigma methods should support verifiable causal work, not become a vocabulary applied after the result is already assumed.
• Candidates must have developed line and shift leaders, sustained safe operating discipline and communicated technical trade-offs to senior management. Evidence should include a decision to stop or revise unstable production, the consequences accepted and the control that remained afterward. The role needs accountable operations leadership grounded in film technology and realistic capacity economics, with appropriate technical or engineering education.

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 12 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-213.