Factory Manager

Company Overview

Our client is a premier, rapidly expanding international convenience store retail giant and modern food manufacturing enterprise celebrated for its vibrant brand presence, iconic Asian Ready-To-Eat (RTE) culinary offerings, fresh delicatessen items, and high-quality packaged food solutions. Operating a state-of-the-art central kitchen facility in Selangor, they supply a fast-growing nationwide retail footprint with daily fresh meals, chilled items, frozen products, and retort sauces. To lead their central processing operations, drive plant efficiency, and support multi-store retail expansion, they are seeking an experienced, results-driven Factory Manager.

Mission

The Factory Manager holds end-to-end operational accountability for the physical execution, throughput, material yield, asset uptime, and regulatory governance of the Central Kitchen. Reporting directly to the Chief Commercial Officer (CCO), this strategic operational leader directs both Production and Plant Maintenance functions to ensure all Ready-To-Eat product lines—including fresh bento meals, Korean-style Dosirak, Samgak Gimbap, fresh salads, fried street-food items, frozen meals, and retort sauces—are produced safely, cost-effectively, and with strict batch consistency to support aggressive daily retail fulfillment schedules.

Key Responsibilities & Activities

1. Production Execution, Line Stability & Throughput

• Output Optimization: Drive daily production output against commercial demand forecasts, maintaining a minimum line fulfillment rate exceeding 95%.
  

• Process Discipline: Enforce strict process repeatability, standard recipe adherence, and line speed stabilization across high-turnover fresh, chilled, and ambient processing lines.
  

• Bottleneck Elimination: Continuously analyze shopfloor workflows, eliminate line bottlenecks, and manage short-shelf-life product assembly cycles.
  

2. Cost Management, Waste Reduction & Kaizen

• Material Yield Ownership: Own material yield tracking, raw ingredient usage variance, and recipe scrap containment across raw preparation, portioning, cooking, and packaging.
  

• Labor & Utility Efficiency: Optimize manpower allocation and utility consumption (water, electricity, steam, industrial refrigeration), driving continuous improvement (Kaizen) to reduce per-unit production costs.
  

• OPEX Control: Formulate and manage the annual Central Kitchen operating budget (OPEX), tracking actual expenditures against budget forecasts.
  

3. Plant Maintenance & Asset Uptime

• Equipment Reliability: Lead the maintenance team to maintain maximum equipment uptime across thermal cookers, automated packaging lines, blast chillers, flash-freezers, and utility infrastructure, keeping unplanned downtime below 5%.
  

• Preventive Care: Formulate and enforce structured Preventive Maintenance (PM) schedules, spare parts inventory controls, and third-party vendor servicing agreements.
  

4. Outbound Dispatch Readiness & Batch Traceability

• Dispatch Alignment: Supervise finished goods staging, labeling, and cold-chain staging to meet tight daily logistics cut-off timelines for nationwide store distribution.
  

• Traceability Governance: Maintain absolute lot-level batch traceability from raw material intake to store-level delivery, eliminating production-related dispatch delays.
  

5. Regulatory Compliance & Facility Safety Governance

• Food Safety Standards: Enforce strict operational alignment with HACCP, GMP, MESTI, Halal, and ISO food safety frameworks, keeping the facility in a permanent audit-ready state.
  

• Statutory Compliance: Serve as the primary operational authority for local government and regulatory bodies, managing compliance and licensing with DOSH, DOE, BOMBA, and local health authorities.
  

6. High-Accountability Team Leadership

• Workforce Direction: Directly coach, direct, and evaluate production line leads, shift supervisors, and maintenance technicians, building a culture centered on safety, hygiene, and accountability.
  

• Cross-Functional Synergy: Partner closely with Commercial, Supply Chain/Procurement, and Quality Assurance teams to execute new product rollouts and capacity expansions.
  

Requirements

Education & Technical Expertise

• Education: Bachelor’s Degree in Food Science, Food Technology, Food Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Operations Management, or a related discipline.
  

• Professional Tenure: Minimum of 8+ years of progressive manufacturing leadership experience in a high-volume food processing plant, commercial central kitchen, or fast-moving packaged food facility.
  

• Category Advantage (Plus Point): Prior experience managing multi-category central kitchens or high-capacity food processing plants specializing in chilled Ready-To-Eat (RTE) meals, fresh bento boxes, short-shelf-life rice products, sandwiches/wraps, or delicatessen products for retail or food service networks is a strong added advantage.
  

• Regulatory Literacy: Strong working knowledge of Malaysian food safety frameworks (Halal, HACCP, GMP, MESTI) and plant statutory laws (DOSH, DOE, BOMBA).
  

Operational & Personal Attributes

• Cold-Chain & Fresh Operations Acumen: Practical understanding of short-shelf-life fresh food processing, blast chilling, retort technology, automated modified atmosphere packaging (MAP), and industrial cold storage setups.
  

• Financial & Analytical Drive: Strong capability in unit cost modeling, OPEX budgeting, labor productivity analytics, and yield math.
  

• Resilient Leadership: Hands-on operational presence on the processing floor with the ability to manage multi-shift operations under tight daily dispatch windows.