Vice President of Operations

Lucifer Lighting Company is a privately held San Antonio-based designer and manufacturer of precision-engineered architectural lighting fixtures. You’ll find our products everywhere from SF MOMA to JP Morgan Chase Headquarters in New York City. We’re in the campuses of 4 of the 5 largest tech companies and 5 of the top 10 tallest towers in the U.S. Our customers are the world’s leading architects and designers who look for minimalist industrial design and place a premium on service, quality, and innovation. Our people make magic happen; we are passionate, smart, hard-working, committed, and creative. We like to make work enjoyable and engaging.

We light the world’s most beautiful spaces.

Position Summary

Drive thru-puts and process improvement by using innovation and strategy while leading the Production, Warehouse, Quality Assurance, Lean Process departments, and Fabrication Services shops, ensuring they consistently meet KPI’s and operate within budget. Duties also involve making plans for Company growth and ensuring that manufacturing operations can meet the demands of new customers world-wide.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities

• Work with senior management in the development of short and long-term strategy and goals, developing, implementing, and ensuring accountability around key goals for multiple departments.
• Facilitate strong collaboration across the organization.
• Ultimately responsible for operational outcomes and driving best practices, with strong emphasis on production efficiencies and asset utilization. Must also maintain a high quality and motivated workforce.
• Achieve Company gross profit margin target.
• Advance fulfillment of key performance metrics (KPIs), measurements, and tools to improve manufacturing efficiencies and communications; ensuring the requirements of the customer are met, optimizing product value, reducing cost and ensuring on time delivery.
• Identify and prioritize initiatives to diminish lead times to meet established goals for all finished goods and maintain quick-ship lead times. Provide input to department and Company procedures to correct problems of deficiencies, recommending and implementing change management initiatives.
• Partner with HR leader to ensure Company is recruiting, retaining and nurturing top talent.
• Ensure development of systems and procedures for operating and managing physical facilities, equipment and products sightly and cost effectively.
• Responsible for the development of manufacturing strategy and readiness to support business objectives.
• Collaborate with Managers charged with oversight of Production, Warehouse, Quality Assurance, Planning, Lean Process and Fabrication Services.
• Work with Finance to ensure expenditures of departments under Operations management are in line with agreed budget expenditures.
• Endeavor to learn how to access Syteline and Lumen basic software reporting which does not require extensive computer ERP Syteline knowledge.

Production

• Directly supervise the Production Manager.
• Develop and execute long term manufacturing strategy and direction in collaboration with the VP, Fabrication Services.
• Plan for both growth and decline on monthly basis and ensure that Production and the manufacturing operations respond to current demand.
• Ensure Production is working on the correct order lines to maintain low “built-not-shipped" numbers.
• Work with Engineering and Lean to re-engineer parts/products and reduce unnecessary material and labor movements and assembly times
• Working with Finance, establish and monitor progress between Planning and Production to fulfill shipping goals.
• Drive continuous improvements in Manufacturing to minimize defects and errors, and measure and improve operational efficiencies throughout Production environment, to include Receiving/Shipping and review and optimization of Lumens measures of Production efficiencies.
• Understand and direct others in managing demand reports in Syteline database.

Warehouse

• Directly supervise the Warehouse Manager to ensure warehouse goals are being realized.
• Ensure proper job quantities are pulled from Warehouse to support Production; including balancing the various units within Production.
• Ongoing review of Warehousing parts location, operations, and staging with Production, to drive efficiencies there, to include Production workstation layouts and thru-puts

Quality Assurance

• Directly supervise the Quality Assurance Manager to ensure quality control goals are being realized
• Ensure that QA staff are all adequately trained and full scope of what should be measured, is being evaluated correctly.
• Work to instill a culture of proactive quality assurance in Production and Shops and reduce reactive instances as they occur.
• Ensure that QA staff are all adequately trained and Gemba boards are in place, updated and adverse trends acted upon.

Lean Process

• Directly supervise the Lead Lean Engineer and mentor the Lean staff.
• Identify opportunities to increase efficiency of all manufacturing process and, as a goal, realize significant savings in Production, Fabrication Service shops, and Warehouse (labor and overhead) costs on an annual basis
• Provide Lean training, mentorship, and leadership to engineering, production, and operations teams — fostering a culture of problem-solving, standardization, and continuous improvement at all levels of the organization.

Fabrication Services

• Collaborate with Mike Hodge in oversight of Fabrication Services..
• Define long-term operational goals for manufacturing, aligning production capabilities (machining, powder coating, fabrication) with Company growth objectives, market demand, and profitability targets. Lead capital investment planning for equipment, technology upgrades, and capacity expansions.
• Ensure seamless coordination between Manufacturing, Quality, and Lean process teams to optimize workflow, reduce lead times, and improve product quality and customer satisfaction. Foster a culture of continuous improvement, Lean manufacturing, and data-driven decision-making across all Production areas.
• Manage operational budgets, labor planning, capital expenditures, and cost-control initiatives across all manufacturing departments. Regularly review KPIs and operational metrics to identify trends, risks, and opportunities, adjusting strategy and resources to meet business goals.

Finance

• Collaborate with Finance staff to obtain and review monthly financial statement content approved for release by CEO and financial analysis data sets for all expense categories on Company's income statements up to gross margin and separately categories on Company balance sheet all comprising inventory.

Knowledge, Skills and Abilities

• Ethical leader who inspires trust and confidence throughout the organization.
• Natural leader, coach, manager, and relationship builder who can build great teams and get results by inspiring.
• Organized thinker and clear communicator with the ability to prioritize multiple urgent projects and initiatives.
• Highly resilient and flexible in dealing with change and fast-moving situations. Working knowledge and experience in focus on Quality Control and Lean Process initiatives.

• Smoke free workplace.

Lucifer Lighting Company is an equal opportunity employer