Plant LAN Strategy & Delivery Leader

Ford Motor Company

Dearborn (MI)

On-site

USD 133,000 - 251,000

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental coverage

Vehicle discount program

Tuition assistance

Paid time off

Paid holidays

Job summary

Ford Motor Company seeks an experienced Manufacturing LAN Planning and Delivery Manager to lead planning, governance, and delivery of wired and wireless LAN services for Ford manufacturing plants. You will translate plant programs and operational needs into executable network plans supporting production milestones while ensuring safety, security, quality, and continuity.

Through collaboration with Manufacturing, Plant IT, Facilities, Network Engineering, Cybersecurity, Network Operations, and

Qualifications

Minimum of 2–3 years of network engineering and deployment experience.
Experience in manufacturing facilities, industrial environments, plants, or production operations.
Experience leading infrastructure planning, network delivery, manufacturing IT, technical program management, or a comparable complex technical portfolio.
Experience coordinating cross-functional initiatives across Manufacturing, Facilities, Plant IT, Cybersecurity, Architecture, Network Operations, engineering teams, and external suppliers.
Strong leadership, organizational, financial, project-management capabilities.
Ability to influence without direct authority and build trusted relationships across business, technology, and operational organizations.

Responsibilities

Own the Manufacturing LAN planning portfolio and establish clear priorities across new programs, plant expansions, modernization, technology refresh, and operational risk-reduction initiatives.
Lead and develop LAN planners while coordinating effectively with network engineering, wireless, cellular, cybersecurity, network operations, regional technology teams, and suppliers.
Create transparent plans, milestones, dependencies, risks, escalation paths, and executive reporting that communicate network readiness and business impact.
Manage supplier performance, resource capacity, statements of work, purchase-order requirements, financial tracking, and quality of planning deliverables.
Facilitate governance and planning forums to ensure initiatives are prioritized, funded, resourced, and aligned with manufacturing and enterprise technology objectives.
Balance competing priorities across business-critical launches, site operations, infrastructure lifecycle requirements, and network-risk remediation.
Establish consistent planning standards, delivery methods, and performance expectations across plants, regions, and supplier teams.
Direct site assessments, requirements discovery, architecture reviews, site documentation, bill-of-material development, implementation planning, change-request preparation, trade coordination, and project handoff.
Ensure plant plans incorporate all required network infrastructure elements, including MDF and IDF readiness, fiber and copper pathways, switching, wireless access points, power, space, environmental requirements, and operational prerequisites.
Coordinate network readiness with construction schedules, production milestones, launch timing, plant access requirements, labor availability, and operational constraints.
Work with site teams to identify risks and dependencies early, ensuring network-delivery plans are executable, sequenced appropriately, and aligned with plant business needs.
Define acceptance criteria for network installations and require completion of installation validation, wireless coverage validation, documentation updates, asset records, and operational turnover before work is closed.
Ensure site network designs and delivery plans consider maintainability, scalability, resiliency, security, monitoring, and long-term support requirements.
Provide leadership and direction during plant launches, major cutovers, technology refreshes, and production-sensitive network changes.
Partner with Manufacturing, Plant IT, Engineering, and Operations stakeholders to understand connectivity requirements for plant-floor applications and connected assets.
Plan network solutions supporting manufacturing test equipment, material movement systems, vehicles, mobile devices, industrial endpoints, automation technologies, and emerging digital capabilities.
Ensure plant network plans address high availability, network segmentation, secure access, IP addressing, VLAN design, DHCP capacity, application dependencies, and wired and wireless coverage requirements.
Coordinate indoor, outdoor, yard, and complex-area wireless needs, including coverage maps, certification surveys, capacity assumptions, roaming requirements, interference analysis, and device-growth forecasts.
Ensure new manufacturing use cases are evaluated through appropriate architecture, wireless-governance, cybersecurity, safety, and change-management processes.
Partner with network engineering and cybersecurity teams to align technical designs with enterprise standards, security policies, and manufacturing operational requirements.
Translate network constraints, dependencies, and technical risks into clear business impacts, decisions, and mitigation plans.
Review planned network changes for manufacturing risk, production impact, rollback readiness, validation requirements, operational support ownership, and recovery planning.
Use incident, change, inventory, monitoring, capacity, and site-readiness data to identify recurring issues and prioritize remediation efforts.
Partner closely with Plant IT and Network Operations teams to support troubleshooting, critical-issue response, production recovery, and lessons learned.
Improve planning standards, reusable templates, automation, documentation quality, and delivery consistency across regions and suppliers.
Drive continuous improvement in network planning, implementation readiness, risk management, supplier performance, and operational handoff processes.
Ensure wired and wireless network capacity, coverage, resiliency, security, and observability are designed into plans before deployment rather than addressed reactively.
Promote Ford+ behaviors through transparency, speed, technical excellence, accountability, collaboration, and customer-focused delivery.