Two things straight, before anything else. I have not run corrugated, and I have not carried the General Manager title. What I have run is a whole site — production, shipping and receiving, purchasing, inventory, maintenance, safety and compliance, the people, and the cost of all of it — reporting to corporate leadership every month and to a regional manager every week. The corrugating process itself I would learn from the people who already run it. That is how I learned slitting and tin coating, and I took that operation through an ISO audit with zero findings inside a year.
- The point of nearly everything on this site is that the plant keeps running when I am not standing in it. Every count has a named back-up. Every work instruction has a revision and a date. The scanner procedure is on a card at the machine. The meetings happen because they are on the calendar, not because I called them.
- You would get the numbers without having to ask for them. I ran a monthly review with corporate leadership on delivery, inventory and quality, and a standing weekly efficiency check with the regional manager — that reporting rhythm is already a habit.
- Your customers would be protected, including from us. I have written to a customer to tell them their shipments had to change — with the inspection records behind it — and kept the account. On the other side, every load leaves against a standard with a name signed to it.
- Everything here is one plant's worth of work, not one department's: the daily meeting, the counts and purchasing, the queue and late count, receiving, the safety program, the compliance calendar, the training and the building itself.
- Twenty-five years in manufacturing, twenty of them managing production, the largest team over two hundred. Board, ink, starch and knives are a different vocabulary for the same four questions: what do we have, what are we burning, when do we run out, and who owns it.
- Bilingual English and Spanish, on the floor directly, not through somebody else.
- Bristol is a straight shot from Naugatuck, and I am looking for a seat I can hold for years rather than a step to somewhere else.