Role & responsibilities -

- Lead, guide and develop the plant production team of 50+ people.

- Ensure safety comes first on the shop floor. Enforce safety practices, PPE use and safe work procedures, and drive near-miss reporting and zero-accident targets.

- Align the production plan with customer orders and forecasts. Work with Purchasing and Customer Success on material and capacity.

- Track daily production progress with line supervisors, find bottlenecks and take corrective action quickly.

- Ensure 100% on-time delivery to customers, and escalate risks early.

- Ensure the shop floor follows the defined systems and processes, such as work instructions, quality checks, IATF 16949/ISO requirements and customer-specific requirements.

- Work with Quality to reduce rejections and rework, and support root cause analysis and corrective actions for customer complaints.

- Work with the Maintenance team to maximise machine uptime.

- Improve productivity and OEE using lean tools (5S, Kaizen, SMED, visual management).

- Lead the shop floor digital transformation with the leadership team, including digital production tracking, real-time dashboards,



paperless records and wider ERP adoption.

- Manage manpower planning, shifts, skill matrix, training, and contract labour where applicable.

- Track and report plant KPIs, such as OTD, OEE, output, scrap/rework, safety incidents and productivity.

- Support new part introductions and PPAP runs with the Customer Success team.

Preferred candidate profile -

- Bachelor's degree in Mechanical, Production or Industrial Engineering.

- 10+ years of production experience, ideally in sheet metal fabrication (laser cutting, CNC punching, press brake bending, MIG/TIG and robotic welding, powder coating, assembly).

- Experience supplying export or global OEM customers is a strong plus.

- Working knowledge of lean manufacturing, IATF 16949/ISO 9001 and ERP systems (training on our customised ERP will be provided).

- Interest and experience in shop floor digitisation is preferred.

- Good communication in English, Marathi and Hindi.

- Solid people leadership, problem solving and decision making.

📌 Production Manager (Pune)
🏢 Kelkar Auto Parts
📍 Pune