Assistant Plant Superintendent - Decatur, IL

Job description

Assistant Plant Superintendent - Decatur, IL

This is a full-time, exempt position.

Position Summary

The Plant Superintendent is responsible for leading the daily operations of ADM Spiral, ensuring the facility achieves world-class performance in safety, environmental stewardship, quality, reliability, production, and employee engagement. This position provides leadership and direction to operations, maintenance, quality, and support personnel while driving continuous improvement initiatives to meet business objectives.

The Plant Superintendent serves as the primary operational leader for the facility and is accountable for achieving plant performance metrics, developing employees, ensuring regulatory compliance, and driving operational excellence.

Job Responsibilities

Safety, Health, Environmental & Quality (SHEQ)

• Provide visible leadership and accountability for all plant safety, health, environmental, and quality programs.
• Ensure compliance with all ADM policies, procedures, regulatory requirements, and industry standards.
• Promote a culture where safety is the first priority and all employees are actively engaged in hazard identification and mitigation.
• Lead incident investigations, root cause analyses, and corrective action implementation.
• Ensure environmental permits, reporting requirements, and compliance obligations are met.
• Champion Behavioral Safety Excellence (BSE) and Operational Excellence initiatives throughout the facility.
• Ensure all quality standards, customer requirements, and product specifications are consistently met.
• Lead emergency response preparedness efforts and serve as Incident Commander during plant emergencies when required.

Operations & Production

• Direct all aspects of plant operations to safely maximize production, efficiency, reliability, and profitability.
• Develop and maintain a detailed understanding of all manufacturing processes, equipment, and production constraints.
• Establish daily, weekly, and monthly operating priorities to meet business objectives.
• Monitor and drive performance against key metrics including safety, quality, throughput, yield, downtime, energy usage, and cost.
• Ensure effective communication and coordination between operations, maintenance, quality, engineering, and logistics teams.
• Provide leadership during operational disruptions and make timely decisions to protect employees, assets, customers, and production commitments.
• Lead plant operational reviews and continuous improvement activities to increase performance and reduce losses.

Maintenance & Reliability

• Partner with maintenance leadership to develop and execute preventive and predictive maintenance programs.
• Ensure maintenance activities are aligned with operational priorities and production schedules.
• Drive equipment reliability improvements and help identify capital and maintenance projects needed to improve performance.
• Participate in plant shutdown planning, execution, and post-outage evaluations.
• Monitor maintenance spending and resource utilization to ensure effective asset management.

People Leadership

• Lead, coach, mentor, and develop supervisors, operators, and hourly team members.
• Foster a culture of accountability, teamwork, ownership, and continuous learning.
• Support recruiting, onboarding, training, succession planning, and employee development activities.
• Conduct performance evaluations and provide timely coaching and feedback.
• Ensure consistent application of company policies, procedures, and performance expectations.
• Partner with Human Resources on employee relations, disciplinary matters, and workforce planning.
• Promote employee engagement and encourage participation in improvement initiatives.

Continuous Improvement & Business Performance

• Lead efforts to improve plant productivity, reliability, efficiency, and cost performance.
• Utilize Operational Excellence, Lean Manufacturing, and continuous improvement methodologies to eliminate waste and improve processes.
• Identify opportunities for process optimization, capital improvements, and cost reduction initiatives.
• Support annual business planning, budgeting, and forecasting activities.
• Track and communicate plant performance metrics and improvement opportunities.

Additional Responsibilities

• Serve as primary point of contact for plant operations during off-hours and emergency situations.
• Coordinate with corporate, regional, and facility leadership on strategic initiatives and performance objectives.
• Lead special projects as assigned.
• Perform other duties as required.

Reporting Relationship

Reports directly to the Plant Manager.

Job Requirements

Education & Experience

• Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Operations Management, Industrial Technology, Business, or related field preferred.
• Minimum of 5-10 years of manufacturing, processing, or industrial operations experience.
• Minimum of 3-5 years of leadership or supervisory experience in a manufacturing environment.
• Experience leading operations in a continuous process or industrial manufacturing environment preferred.

Knowledge, Skills & Abilities

• Proven commitment to safety and environmental compliance.
• Strong leadership, team-building, and employee development skills.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple priorities and meet deadlines.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving capabilities.
• Ability to make sound decisions under pressure and during operational upsets.
• Understanding of manufacturing processes, process improvement, reliability, and asset management principles.
• Experience with root cause analysis and corrective action processes.
• Working knowledge of budgeting, cost management, and business performance metrics.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office applications including Outlook, Teams, Excel, Word, and PowerPoint.
• Ability and willingness to work flexible hours and respond to plant emergencies when needed.
• Ability to travel occasionally for meetings and training.

Critical Success Factors

Safety Leadership

• Achieves world-class safety performance through visible leadership and employee engagement.
• Ensures a safe work environment and compliance with all regulatory and company requirements.

Operational Excellence

• Delivers production targets while optimizing quality, reliability, and cost performance.
• Maintains focus on continuous improvement and operational efficiency.

Employee Development

• Builds strong teams through coaching, accountability, training, and succession planning.
• Creates an environment where employees are empowered to contribute and improve.

Business Results

Drives measurable improvements in plant performance metrics including

• Safety
• Quality
• Throughput
• Yield
• Reliability
• Downtime
• Cost Control
• Employee Engagement

Excited about this role but don’t think you meet every requirement listed?

We encourage you to apply anyway. You may be just the right candidate for this role or another one of our openings.

ADM requires the successful completion of a background check.

REF:114119BR