The same thing I said in the interview, in writing so it is on the record: I have not run blow molding and I have no plastics processing experience. What I have run is a whole site — production, shipping and receiving, purchasing, inventory, maintenance, safety and compliance, the people, and the cost of all of it — reporting to corporate leadership every month and to a regional manager every week. The process itself I would learn from the people who already run it. That is exactly how I learned slitting and tin coating at Wieland, and I took that operation through an ISO audit with zero findings inside a year. Before that, six and a half years at Resonetics in Bethel making surgical components under ISO 13485 and 9001.
- Nearly everything on this site exists so the plant keeps running when I am not standing in it. Every count has a named back-up, every work instruction carries a revision and a date, and the procedure is on a card at the machine instead of in somebody's head.
- You would get the numbers without having to ask for them. A one-page daily board, a monthly review with corporate leadership on delivery, inventory and quality, and a standing weekly efficiency check with a regional manager. That reporting rhythm is already a habit, not something I would have to be reminded about.
- Packaging is not an afterthought on this site, it is a tab of its own — shrink wrap, sealing, pallet construction, the labeling a customer actually requires, and a sign-off with a name on it. For a plant whose product is the container, that discipline is the product.
- I live in Naugatuck. Great Hill Road is a ten-minute drive, which matters on the mornings it actually matters: a call-out at 5am, a line down on a Saturday, a customer issue that needs somebody on the floor rather than on the phone. I ran company-wide cleanups on Saturdays at my last plant for exactly that reason — so production never lost an hour to them.