The Chief Operating Officer Role

843 Words2 Pages

THE POSITION

The Chief Operating Officer (COO) Role

The departments to be assembled under the new COO position essentially give the new role control of all aspects of operations planning, inbound materials and logistics, pre-production engineering, production, quality, outbound logistics and customer service. In addition, the role will have a continuous improvement (CI) manager/function reporting to it, in order to internalise/embed CI processes in this part of the business.

The new Chief Operating Officer role, reports to the CEO. Points of interface between this organisational structure and the rest of the organisation are as follows:

Sales: in regard to the S&OP process, the specification of customer requirements for product and also order for formant/customer service.
Advanced Product Engineering: in regard to the introduction of new products, or substantial changes to existing products as they affect manufacturing operations
Finance: in regard to all aspects of Volgren’s planning/budgeting and reporting of daily operational performance (to enable weekly and monthly operation actual versus budget analysis to be undertaken by finance.)

The Position Requirements

The nature of the role therefore requires the incumbent to have a following attributes or capabilities:

 Must be a people manager. The role requires the achievement of it objectives through people, because of its breadth of functional scope as well as managing multiple sites in interstate locations (rather than being hands-on and “managing by walking around”, for example).

 Must understand the full scope of a manufacturing supply chain – not just be an “Operations” person with a focus on the Plant, or for that matter, a “Logistics” person who does not ...

... middle of paper ...

...blem solve, etc.
 They must show strong people management ability, in recruitment and performance management, change leadership etc.
 Finally this person should be able to demonstrate business management capability; this is essentially a commercial perspective or nous, indicating that they will have the skill to provide commercial leadership to a total business. Ideally, they should demonstrate the capability to qualify in the short to medium time frame, to be a contender for the CEO role at Volgren (as it will stand at that time).
Industry Experience

Candidates must have come from manufacturing industry. They should have worked in a fairly large scale businesses – so that they have sophisticated personal management skills and business system understanding. However they should not be bureaucratic in their style or dependant on extensive support networks.

Open Document