What does a Production Manager do?
The main role of a Production Manager is to oversee the manufacturing process within a company and to ensure that production lines run without any problems and minimum downtime. Working together with supervisors and top management, they also ensure that products are manufactured to a certain quality standard and adheres to other safety/industry-related regulations.
Production Manager Duties
The exact day-to-day duties will differ from the company or industry. Here are some of the more general duties you can expect to do in this role:
- Manage and support SHEQ initiatives and objectives.
- Define, propose and implement the annual production.
- Cost management of products and assist with new product costings models.
- Analyse budgets and continuously control production costs and identify/rectify waste measures.
- Manage all activities within the production process, including maintenance and the workforce.
- Handle logistics, warehousing and stock of raw materials used in production.
- Manage all teams within your production department (contracts/leave/pay).
- Create and implement organisational/production changes on an operative level.
- Focus on growing business and revenue by implementing necessary changes to product/production line to enter new markets or grow existing territories.
Production Manager Skills
Production Managers need to have a wide set of skills to liaise with various department within a company. Some of the top skilled you will need include:
- Excellent communication, numeracy and computer literacy skills.
- Good people management skills and management of staff.
- Identifying problems and implement preventative strategies to minimise risk.
- Being able to develop good working relationships and trust with various teams.
- Strong problem-solving skills, analytic ability and be very detail-oriented.
- Working well with many different departments and external suppliers.
- Always keeping the end-user/customer in mind.
- Being results and deadline-driven.
Production Manager CV Must-Haves
Your CV should focus on these main areas:
- Your career objective and achievements in production.
- Showcase how you have improved processes and achieve targets.
- Give a high-level view of your key skills, strengths and responsibilities.
- Highlight key responsibilities in leading teams.
- Show examples of your ability to successfully implement production strategies.
- Your ability to build and maintain trust with clients and other employees.
Production Manager Interview Questions
A selection of popular questions being asked to Production Managers are:
- How would you go about identifying and entering a new market?
- Give an example of how you successfully reduced cost and wastage?
- Taking a look at our business, can you see any changes you suggest we implement to improve our production/cut costs?
- Give us an example of a mistake you have made in a previous job and what you learned from it.
Production Manager Qualifications
The qualifications you will need will depend on the industry you will be working in. Many Production Manager skills are transferable though so keep upskilling as you move in your career to stay on top of new technologies and methodologies. You might need a:
- Degree/Diploma in Production.
- Degree/Diploma in Operations Management.
- Qualification in Food/Operations/Production/Operations.
- Technical Qualification.
Production Manager Salaries (IT)
Your salary as a Production Manager will vary from company to company. Below are current salary levels based on actual salary offerings on the CareerJunction website:
- Intermediate: R23,427 – R29,311
- Senior: R30,744 – R39,756
Production Manager Resources
Written by CareerJunction
