Company

Join a highly successful and profitable division of a leading Australian manufacturing group, operating across a national network of 10+ sites. The business is performing strongly and has recently appointed a new COO who is driving a clear focus on operational excellence, capability and continuous improvement. As part of this next phase, a newly created National Reliability Manager position has been established to bring greater consistency, visibility and strategic direction to reliability across the network.

With sites ranging from highly automated operations through to more manually intensive environments, this is a genuinely varied national portfolio with significant opportunity to improve reliability practices and create greater synergies across the network.

The Role

Reporting to the COO, you’ll work with Site and Maintenance Leaders to assess capability, identify gaps and establish a consistent national reliability strategy. Your initial focus will be on asset registers, critical spares, asset criticality and maintenance visibility, before progressing the network towards a more proactive, preventative and data-led reliability model.

Key responsibilities will include

- Develop and implement a national reliability strategy across 10+ sites.
- Assess current asset, maintenance and reliability maturity across the network and establish clear improvement priorities.
- Develop consistent asset registers, asset criticality frameworks and critical spare parts strategies.
- Identify opportunities to standardise processes, equipment knowledge and reliability practices across sites.
- Build greater focus on preventative and predictive maintenance, moving the network away from reactive maintenance.




- Partner with Site and Maintenance Leaders to develop practical reliability improvement plans and drive accountability for delivery.
- Establish appropriate reliability KPIs, reporting and governance to improve visibility of asset performance.
- Build capability within site-based maintenance teams and embed a stronger reliability mindset across the business.

Your Background

You’ll be a proven reliability leader with multi-site or large-scale manufacturing experience, ideally within food, FMCG, dairy or another asset intensive setting. Importantly, you’ll have experience building or maturing reliability strategies, moving businesses from reactive maintenance towards more structured, preventative and data-led approaches.

You will bring

- Demonstrated multi-site or large-scale reliability leadership experience.
- Experience developing reliability strategies, frameworks or improvement programs.
- Strong understanding of asset management, criticality, preventative maintenance and reliability engineering.
- Experience establishing asset registers, spare parts strategies and maintenance standards.
- A practical understanding of RCA, FMEA, CMMS and maintenance data.
- Strong stakeholder engagement skills and the ability to influence site-based teams without relying solely on direct authority.
- Commercial awareness and the ability to connect reliability improvements to cost, productivity, safety and operational performance.
- A pragmatic, hands-on approach - someone who can establish the strategy while remaining close enough to the sites to make it work.

What's On Offer

This is a rare opportunity to take ownership of a newly created national reliability function and influence how reliability operates across a successful and profitable business. For a confidential discussion, contact Chade Cupit-Love on [0436 286 633](tel:0436 286 633) or [email protected]

📌 National Reliability Manager (Melbourne)
🏢 Sonder Executive
📍 Melbourne