Temporary Operations Manager: Mandate and Cost
A temporary operations manager takes charge of production, supply chain, and delivery for a defined period, usually when service levels have slipped, costs have drifted, or a plant is being reorganised.
The situations that call for one
- Service levels have slipped and customers are escalating
- A plant or warehouse reorganisation nobody internally can lead
- An operations director has left mid-transformation
- Post-acquisition consolidation of two production or logistics footprints
- Margin erosion that the commercial function cannot explain
The first ninety days
- Weeks 1 to 2: measure the real delivery and quality performance, not the reported one
- Weeks 3 to 6: stabilise planning and the daily operating meeting
- Weeks 7 to 12: fix the two constraints that cause most of the failure, act on the team
- Report a corrected cost baseline to the board by day ninety
What should remain afterwards
An operations mandate that leaves only better numbers has half-failed. What must remain is the system: a planning discipline people follow, a daily meeting that surfaces problems within twenty-four hours, a maintenance and quality routine, and a named internal successor who has been coached into the role rather than announced into it.
https://niklaslindahl.com/guides/temporary-operations-manager