Production manager

Job / role

Leads production in a plant or area and is responsible for output, quality, schedule adherence, cost and the people on the shop floor. Corresponds to the German Produktionsleiter.

Description

A production manager runs the production of a plant or of one area of it. The role is responsible for output, quality, schedule adherence, cost and safety, and for the supervisors, team leaders and operators who do the work. It works closely with planning, maintenance, quality and logistics.

On a normal day the production manager checks the plan against what the lines delivered, deals with disruptions such as missing material or machine stops, and decides how to use people and machines. In lean plants the role also owns the daily routines at the shop floor boards and supports improvement work such as setup time reduction and 5S. In Germany the role is called Produktionsleiter.

Related topics in brief

• Shop floor management · Related to · Concept
  A routine for steering production where the work happens: visual boards, short daily meetings, performance indicators and structured follow-up of problems, so teams and managers react to deviations the same day.
• Tier meeting · Related to · Concept
  A short, fixed daily meeting in stacked levels, from team to plant, at a board. Each level reviews safety, quality, delivery and cost, escalates what it cannot solve, and assigns owners and dates.
• Takt time · Related to · Concept
  The pace at which a product must be completed to meet customer demand, calculated as the available production time divided by the customer demand in the same period.
• SMED · Related to · Concept
  A method for shortening changeover and setup times on machines by separating the work that needs the machine to be stopped from the work that can be done while it runs, and then simplifying both.
• Manufacturing · Related to · Industry
  The industry that turns raw materials and components into physical goods, from single parts to series production, in factories and workshops.

Experts and companies for this topic

Experts on related topics

• Mirko Peters · via Tier meeting

Maintained by Mirko Peters (Microsoft MVP) · Last updated: 2026-11-11