I’m writing to express my interest in the Production Manager position. I am an experienced manger seeking a new challenge with a stable and growing company.

I am very skilled in continuous improvement and achieved a six-sigma green belt certification from Purdue. In addition, I have further training in lean manufacturing implementation based on the Toyota production system and would bring that experience to the company.

I have developed an outstanding track record of delivering significant results for my previous employers. I am regarded and respected as a valued team leader with a career that exhibits self-motivation, creativity, exceptional attention to detail, and initiative to exceed goals. I am confident I will bring these qualities and more the to your Company. Please review the previous accomplishments below.

Sincerely,

John M. Linson

1. Aisin Light Metals: Reduced finished good inventory by 60% through TPS implementation of customer pickups in 2013-2014.

Space was limited in our facility and were growing rapidly. We did not want to add a new building due to the cost and timing of completion. Also, we had a new production line we needed to install.

I developed an internal team to begin investigating ways to save space in the plant. Each member had action items and deadlines to complete which we tracked on a spreadsheet in our weekly meetings. We were able to saved enough space to add the new production line however, we still needed more space for the increased storage of finished goods and WIP. I contacted Toyota logistics with the idea of increasing the pickup frequency. At that point Toyota, our largest customer, picked up 2X per day. The logistics group pushed back on picking up more often at first. But I contacted Toyota in Japan with the help from our Japanese president and asked for assistance. Toyota Logistics came to our plant 2 weeks later. We developed a number of ideas and later agreed that they would pick up every 2 hours. We rearranged our plant to run on Kanban only with no schedule. The new pickup schedule along with the Kanban implementation allowed us to reduce our safety stock and produced only what was needed. This kaizen followed the TPS just-in time philosophy and 1-piece flow.

2. Kaiser aluminum: Installed new building and new extrusion press-line with handling system in 2016.

I joined Kaiser in 07/2014 with the primary task of developing a product launch system for 2 new products for the Ford F-150 as the company was beginning to change to an overall automotive parts production facility. My experience with launching automotive parts with Aisin light metals provided the experience Kaiser needed. I developed the systems and chaired weekly meetings with all the functional groups as we worked through the cadence and execution of product launch. The press equipment to produce the parts was both older and in poor condition and was not reliable enough to consistently produce the quality level for automotive parts and we need to produce on a 24/7 schedule to make enough parts. Our overall downtime was 12.4% which was not going to be good enough to produce the parts we needed.

I tasked the extrusion and engineering sections with developing a TPM program with visible check-sheets and routine audits. I hired a reliability manager to help engineering with the planning an implementation of TPM. I developed an overall capital project to add a new building and press line based on the age of the equipment and back-up for the current press-line to produce automotive parts. The target was to have the new press line in place by 02/2016. By the end of 201, the older press downtime reduced to 8.1% and we continued the reliability activities. The new press line was installed at the end February 2016. The maintenance downtime of the old press reduced to 5.8 by the end of 2015. We were consistently producing good parts and had the ability to qualify the new press-line to back-up the older line to run if needed. Eventually we shifted production form the old-line to the new line which was much more efficient.

3. Nanshan-America: EBITDA increased from (5M) 2016, 800K 2017, 7.5M 2018. Nanshan was a Chinese owned company with many challenges. The company began operation in mid-2013 in a very large facility containing a casting and extrusion operation. The company was deep in debt and sales were too low to sustain the operation. Operationally, the plant had superior equipment with a very high level of automation. I began the journey by setting the policies, company goals, and developed KPI’s for each section and established the targets. The KPI’s were used in our daily management meetings and visualized on the plant floor in each functional area. I implemented a 3x per week walkthrough based on an area schedule. I held a daily management meeting each day and each section displayed their result each morning. I assigned actions items to each section, dates and followed up each morning. Casting was operating at 50% of production and extrusion only 60%. I hired a new Director of sales an industry veteran and developed a plan to begin our journey to increase our volume and margin for both Extrusion and casting. We captured some automotive sales from Tesla before the end of 2016. I developed an automotive vision/strategy for the plant to be totally automotive by 2022. We began running a 24 x 7 operation in the summer of 2017. Casting and extrusion were at 90% production and our daily management system increased on-time delivery, significantly reduced defects and ultimately increased production and allowed us to increase our margin. The financial numbers at the top of this paragraph are actual results.