Strategic Planning & Manufacturing Capacity Lead
Are you motivated by solving complex capacity challenges, shaping strategic decisions, and influencing the future of a growing business?
Do you thrive in environments where no two projects are the same and where your judgement truly matters?
Explore Manufacturing is looking for a Strategic Planning & Manufacturing Capacity Lead - a senior, business‑critical role that sits at the heart of how we plan, commit, and deliver.
This is not a traditional planning position. It is a strategic leadership opportunity to own the enterprise‑wide capacity view, guide decision‑making, and ensure our commercial ambition is always aligned with manufacturing reality.
Why this role exists:
With up to 30 concurrent projects, rapidly evolving information, and high levels of engineering and production complexity, we need a single source of truth that brings clarity, focus, and confidence to the organisation.
You will lead this - protecting the long‑term health of the business by enabling informed choices about what we accept, defer, sequence, or decline. Your work will reduce firefighting, elevate predictability, and strengthen our ability to deliver for clients
What you'll do:
1. Own the enterprise capacity picture:
- Build and maintain a holistic capacity view across manufacturing resources, skills availability, engineering maturity, QA gating, logistics, and site interfaces.
- Identify constraints early and translate them into clear delivery positions and options.
2. Enable better decisions:
- Provide confident, objective challenge when commercial, project, or manufacturing priorities collide.
- Articulate risk, trade‑offs, and consequences with clarity - and stand by tough calls when needed.
3. Integrate and elevate planning across the business:
- Move Explore from project‑by‑project planning to portfolio‑based decision making.
- Connect and align dispersed planning activities into one transparent, repeatable process.
- Create a single version of the truth for senior conversations.
4. Lead and influence:
- Guide and support planners, bringing structure and calm to high‑pressure situations.
- Collaborate deeply with manufacturing, engineering, project, commercial, and logistics teams.
- Communicate insightfully, objectively, and with credibility across all levels.
5. Champion systems and data:
- Own the planning and capacity utilisation of SAP (and any future tools).
- Ensure decisions are based on trusted data, assumptions, and insight — not system perfection.
Your operating environment:
- Up to 30 active factory projects at once, each unique
- High complexity, high ambiguity, and evolving information
- Tension between project demands and manufacturing reality
- An environment requiring resilience, sound judgement, and composure
About you:
Background:
- Likely from manufacturing, engineering, or construction-led environments
- Experience leading capacity planning in complex, project-based production settings
- Exposure to offsite manufacturing or complex engineered systems is an advantage
Experience:
- Comfortable challenging commitments and influencing senior stakeholders
- Has operated under pressure and in constrained environments
- Makes balanced, pragmatic decisions - and stands by them
- Experienced in aligning bespoke project needs with manufacturing reality
Personal attributes:
- Credible communicator across factory, engineering, and project teams
- Resilient, adaptable, and able to cut through complexity
- Strategic thinker with a calm, structured leadership style
- Able to connect dots, see the whole system, and drive clarity
What success looks like:
- Earlier, clearer decisions on project acceptance and sequencing
- Less firefighting, fewer surprises, and more predictable outcomes
- Stronger alignment between commercial ambition and manufacturing capacity
- A single, trusted view of capacity and delivery risk that the whole business relies on
Why join Explore Manufacturing?
You'll play a pivotal role in shaping how our business grows sustainably. This is an opportunity to influence at the highest levels, drive strategic clarity, and help transform how we plan and deliver across a diverse portfolio of solutions.
If you thrive in ambiguity, enjoy connecting multiple moving parts, and want to make a real organisational impact, we'd love to hear from you
About Us:
Laing O'Rourke are an international engineering and construction company delivering state-of-the-art infrastructure and buildings projects for clients in the UK, Middle East and Australia.
Certainty, reliability, quality – this is what our clients want. And at Laing O'Rourke, we have more than 150 years of experience delivering it. Laing O'Rourke's story is one of energy, passion, ambition, people and teamwork. We harness the power of our experience, stretching back over a century and a half to deliver certainty for our clients.
As part of the Disability Confident scheme, we would like to enable access to candidates with long term conditions and disabilities through the ‘Offer an interview scheme'. This supports applicants that meet the essential criteria by offering an interview for the advertised position. Please let us know if you would like to opt in to this scheme and let us know if you require any adjustments for the interview process.
We want to ensure our recruitment process is accessible to all. If you need the application form in an alternative format or you would like to know more about our recruitment process, please email resourcingteam@laingorourke.com
#LI-KW1
