Director of Manufacturing – Mexico Ops

THE COMPANY

Our client is a privately held, family-owned U.S. manufacturing group headquartered in Texas, with a long and successful history of designing and manufacturing highly engineered products, equipment, and precision components for the oil and gas industry. The organization operates several specialized businesses serving critical applications across well completions, artificial lift, energy production, and oil & gas measurement. The group has developed a significant cross-border U.S.–Mexico manufacturing platform, including three manufacturing operations throughout the state of Chihuahua, Mexico (one plant is one hour from Cd. Juarez and two other plants are 3 hours from Chihuahua City. Together, these facilities provide capabilities encompassing precision CNC machining, metal fabrication, assembly, testing, and the manufacture and remanufacture of sophisticated oilfield equipment and components. Combining the entrepreneurial culture and agility of a privately held organization with sophisticated manufacturing capabilities and specialized energy technologies, the company continues to invest in operational excellence, capacity, technology, and its people. This newly created Director of Manufacturing – Mexico Operations position offers an accomplished manufacturing leader the opportunity to work directly with the President and senior leadership to enhance performance across all three Mexican operations, implement best practices, increase productivity and asset utilization, and help shape the next stage of the organization’s growth.

THE POSITION

Position Summary

The Director of Manufacturing will drive production performance across three maquiladora operations, each manufacturing equipment, tools, and systems for the oil and gas industry. This is an influence-driven leadership role: the Director will work through local plant managers rather than direct authority to raise productivity, efficiency, and asset utilization across all three sites. The role reports directly to the President of the parent company and is expected to operate with a high degree of independence and ownership.
This position is built for a hands-on manufacturing leader who can walk a shop floor, identify constraints, and get improvements implemented without needing a large staff behind them. Success in this role can lead to expanded organizational authority, including direct reports. The position will ideally be based in either Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, the City of Chihuahua or El Paso, Texas. The position requires significant travel but will work remotely. The first year the Director of Manufacturing will spend significant time in the plant which is one hour from Ciudad Juarez.

Key Responsibilities

Cross-plant production performance

• Assess current-state operations at each plant: capacity, throughput, scheduling, changeover, scrap/rework, and equipment utilization.
• Identify and prioritize the highest-impact improvement opportunities across the three sites and drive them to completion with local management.
• Establish common metrics and reporting (OEE, on-time delivery, cost per unit, first-pass yield) so performance is visible and comparable across plants.

Operational improvement

• Lead lean/continuous improvement initiatives: bottleneck elimination, setup reduction, workflow and plant layout optimization, preventive maintenance discipline.
• Improve production planning and scheduling practices to increase utilization and reduce lead times.
• Standardize best practices across the three businesses where it makes sense; respect legitimate differences where it doesn’t.

Collaboration with local management

• Build working relationships with each plant’s general manager and production leadership. Improvements land through their teams, not around them.
• Coach and develop local supervisory and production staff on improvement methods.
• Escalate to the President where alignment or resources are needed.
• Quality, safety, and compliance
• Reinforce quality systems and drive down nonconformance costs across the plants.
• Support a strong safety culture consistent with heavy manufacturing standards.

Capital and capacity planning

• Evaluate equipment condition and utilization; recommend capital investments with clear payback rationale.
• Support make/buy, insourcing, and capacity allocation decisions across the three plants.

THE CANDIDATE

Candidate Qualifications

• 10+ years of progressive manufacturing leadership, including plant management or multi-site Director of Operations responsibility or similar.
• Deep hands-on experience with metal fabrication, CNC Machining (highly preferred) and/or assembly operations for industrial equipment. Oil and gas equipment manufacturing is a plus (not required).
• Demonstrated results improving productivity, efficiency, and utilization in an existing operation (not just greenfield or steady-state management).
• Solid experience and knowledge of lean manufacturing tools and continuous improvement and a record of accomplishment of applying them on the floor. Past experience in a leadership role in operational excellence is a plus.
• Experience operating in Mexico manufacturing environments, preferably experience with world class operations; familiarity with maquiladora/IMMEX operations.
• Fully bilingual: Spanish and English, spoken and written.
• Ability to influence and drive change without direct authority. Enjoys consulting, advising, and seeing projects to completion.
• Self-starter and highly driven.
• Willingness to travel regularly among the three plant locations.
• Technical Bachelor degree or equivalent experience.

What Success Looks Like

• Within 90 days: credible current-state assessment of all three plants with a prioritized improvement roadmap accepted by the President.
• Within 12 months: measurable gains in throughput, utilization, and on-time delivery at each site, with common performance reporting in place.
• Ongoing: local managers view the Director as a resource that makes their plants better, not an inspector.