Maintenance Supervisor

Ford Ford · Auto · Sterling Heights, MI +2 · Manufacturing

Supervises skilled trades professionals (electrical, mechanical, tooling) to ensure equipment reliability and uptime in a manufacturing environment. Focuses on safety, preventive and crisis maintenance, team leadership, data-driven decision making (MTTR, MTBF), root-cause problem-solving (4D/8D), and cross-functional collaboration to optimize OEE.

What you'd actually do

  1. Act as a champion of workplace safety, proactively enforcing regulations, ensuring strict adherence to Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) and electrical safety protocols, and fostering a culture of vigilance among your skilled trades team.
  2. Lead and direct a team of skilled trades employees to deliver World-Class Maintenance. You will take ownership of equipment reliability, drive high-performance maintenance standards, and address technical gaps proactively while celebrating team successes.
  3. Effectively allocate skilled trades resources to balance scheduled Preventive Maintenance (PM) with urgent crisis maintenance activities. You will apply a "Bias for Action," prioritizing critical line-stoppage issues to minimize downtime while maintaining a strategic focus on spare parts availability to prevent long-term recovery delays.
  4. Embrace a servant leadership style, focusing on building a high-performing, winning team of skilled trades and investing in their technical growth. You will foster a positive, collaborative, and psychologically safe work environment, motivating your team to achieve shared reliability and safety goals.
  5. Utilize maintenance data and insights to dramatically reduce downtime. You will collaborate with the production team to identify opportunities to optimize key metrics, specifically reducing Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and increasing Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). You will meticulously track skilled trades labor, time, and attendance, transforming raw equipment data into actionable intelligence for strategic maintenance planning.

Skills

Required

  • Supervisory experience
  • Manufacturing experience
  • Electrical knowledge
  • Mechanical knowledge
  • Tooling knowledge
  • PLC logic and controls
  • Lockout/Tagout (LOTO) protocols
  • Electrical safety protocols
  • Preventive Maintenance (PM)
  • Root-cause problem-solving
  • Data analysis (MTTR, MTBF)
  • Team leadership
  • Conflict resolution
  • Union relations

Nice to have

  • Lean / Six Sigma methodology
  • Military Decision-Making Process (MDMP)

What the JD emphasized

  • skilled trades professionals
  • World-Class Maintenance
  • equipment reliability
  • Preventive Maintenance
  • crisis maintenance
  • Bias for Action
  • line-stoppage issues
  • downtime
  • Mean Time to Repair (MTTR)
  • Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF)
  • root-cause problem-solving
  • 4D and 8D quality/reliability investigations
  • Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)