Manufacturing Director to commission & build new facility

Lead partner in a three way joint venture to commission and build a new manufacturing facility.

Three major international groups planned to combine their relative IP, manufacturing and routes to market capabilities. Complex legal and commercial negotiations had overrun by the time the project hit its time line to begin commissioning the plant. The project leader who had been identified from permanent staff resources had been seconded to another project.

The interim need was for an immediately available, experienced manufacturing director with a background in a technologically complex industry. The role was to act as a catalyst, independent of any one of the JV partners, to get the project underway against some very tight timelines. Needing to be acceptable to all parties, intellectually capable of getting to grips quickly with the scale and detail of the process, sufficiently broad skilled enough to move easily between meetings with legal, commercial and technical teams from all three JV partners and external advisors the candidate needed to establish rapid credibility with a wide range of contacts.

Whilst team support was available and provided it was critical that the interim executive took the lead role and was perceived by all concerned as an insider not a consultant.

During the course of the assignment a second and technically more sophisticated project was agreed to run consecutively under the interim’s leadership. The interim ‘s involvement on these two projects ran to almost eighteen months.