OT Manager – Manufacturing IT & Digital Operations

Role overview

Strategy, delivery, and processes

• Define OT strategy, architecture, and multi-year roadmap for production growth, new lines, and automation; align systems to ISA-95 and the Purdue model.
• Lead OT projects through scope, design, budget, testing, cutover, and hypercare; own go-live readiness and production change governance.
• Govern production-order, advanced manufacturing, WIP, warehouse, dispatch, and design-to-machine processes with partner departments.
• Own integration inventory across ERP, MES, CAD/CAM, nesting, machine, warehouse, labeling, transport, maintenance, and analytics systems.
• Maintain production KPI definitions and a source of truth for OEE, downtime, cycle time, throughput, yield, scrap, WIP aging, and OTIF.

Operations, security, and team

• Define service levels, multi-shift support, and on-call; manage incidents and major incidents through permanent fixes.
• Own OT continuity and disaster recovery, including tested restore and documented manual fallback.
• Lead OT cybersecurity with Corporate InfoSec: asset inventory, segmentation, firewall governance, secure vendor access, privileged access, hardening, and industrial patching.
• Maintain OT risk register and audit readiness for ISO 9001, ISO 14001, and ISO 45001.
• Build and develop the OT team; manage machine, MES, CAD/CAM, and ERP vendors, RFPs, statements of work, acceptance criteria, service levels, and OT budgets.

Mandatory qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, IT, Industrial Engineering, or Automation Engineering.
• 10+ years in manufacturing IT, OT, or digital manufacturing, including 3+ years leading a team and owning production-critical system delivery.
• Owned at least one MES or shopfloor digitalization implementation from design through go-live and steady state in discrete or engineer-to-order manufacturing.
• Strong ERP-context knowledge of production orders, advanced manufacturing, WIP, advanced warehouse management, and outbound/dispatch.
• Experience with multi-vendor machine connectivity, shopfloor data acquisition, industrial protocols, and edge/gateway architectures.
• Integration architecture experience across ERP, MES, CAD/CAM, and warehouse systems, including error handling and reconciliation.
• Practical OT network and security knowledge, OT backup and disaster recovery, vendor management, budget ownership, and senior stakeholder management.
• Excellent English communication with shopfloor supervisors and leadership.

Preferred qualifications

• MSD 365 F&O is strongly preferred; postgraduate qualification or MBA is an advantage.
• Preferred backgrounds include woodworking, furniture, panel processing, engineer-to-order interiors, and high-mix project-driven manufacturing.
• Preferred experience includes greenfield or factory expansion, PLM, APS, CMMS/EAM, quality systems, transport platforms, Azure integration and data services, or Power BI at scale.
• Preferred certifications include PMP, PRINCE2, ITIL, Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, IEC 62443, GICSP, Lean Six Sigma, or TOGAF; GCC or UAE manufacturing experience is also preferred.

Role approach and performance measures