Book: Plant Manager
This book is about Charlie Hall, a new Plant Manager who finds himself unprepared for the challenges of managing a manufacturing plant. Through the course of the book, Charlie learns that operational success is built upon three key principles. By applying and combining these principles, Charlie develops his team, engages his people, and uses the tools of continuous improvement to generate great results in his plant.
There are over 500,000 manufacturing plants in the U.S. and they all want to create excellent performance results. All plants have great people who work very hard, but most struggle to achieve excellence. The purpose of this book is to describe the path to become an excellent Plant Manager. The author builds on his vast experience and expertise to illustrate a simple fictional story of Charlie Hall and his journey to become an excellent Plant Manager. Like most Plant Managers, Charlie finds himself in a very challenging situation.
The author guides Charlie through the steps of combining the principles of Operational Excellence, Leadership Excellence, and Culture Excellence to create a new and exciting model of Organizational Excellence. The intersection of these three forms of excellence is where extraordinary results exist. At this intersection, short and long-term organizational performance continuously improves.
Experience
Bob Charleston has a long and extensive background in operations, supply chain, sales, and general management responsibilities over the past 3 decades. He has a BS in Engineering Management from the United States Military Academy at West Point and an MBA from Kent State University. Bob served in the U.S. Army for 7 years as an Armor and Cavalry officer. Bob was awarded the Bronze Star Medal while serving as a Cavalry Troop Commander in combat operations during Operation Desert Storm in Iraq.
Since leaving active military duty, Bob has had many operations assignments, of increasing responsibility, across the consumer products and food manufacturing industries. Bob has been a Plant Manager 5 times in 4 different companies, in plants up to 1,000 employees. Bob twice has led groups of 12+ plants in the food industry. Bob’s career has also extended beyond operations and includes a recent assignment as the President and CEO of a food company based in upstate New York.
Bob has led 2 green field plant startups as well as 4 implementations of a high-involvement, team-based culture of performance excellence. In all of these roles, Bob has brought his passion to build a culture of Organizational Excellence to achieve outstanding results.
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