NEWS Project Manager - Wrecker Builds

NETC Fleet Services•Exeter, NH

11d•$70,000 - $100,000•Onsite

About The Position

NEWS builds heavy-, medium-, and light-duty wreckers and carriers for the towing and recovery operators who keep New England moving. We are the NRC dealer for the region and build roughly 80 trucks a year across four build bays. We are privately held, PE-backed, and growing both organically and through acquisition across the NETC Fleet Services family of brands (New England Truck Center, Interstate Towing, Matt Brown’s Truck Repair, Ray’s Truck Service, Alan’s Diesel, and NEWS). What the build shop needs now is someone to run the production plan like a project portfolio and bring lean discipline to how material and information move through the shop. That is this seat: the connective tissue between sales, the build floor, parts, vendors, finance, and the customer. Done well, the shop never waits on a part or a piece of information, the salesman always has a price he can quote, and every build has a date everyone can trust.

Requirements

Three or more years in production planning, production control, project management, or operations in a manufacturing, aviation or aerospace maintenance and production, truck-equipment, upfit, or heavy-equipment environment
Demonstrated project management: you have built and maintained multi-project schedules, tracked milestones and dependencies, and reported status to leadership
Demonstrated data management: you have turned vendor data (order confirmations, delivery schedules, spec changes) into a working schedule or database others rely on
Working knowledge of lean manufacturing tools (5S, standard work, kanban, kitting, visual management, root-cause problem solving) applied in a shop setting
Strong Excel skills; comfort maintaining a structured database or scheduling tool and working in an accounting system (QuickBooks today; Microsoft Business Central from December)
Clear written and verbal communication with technicians, vendors, finance, customers, and lenders
Valid driver’s license

Nice To Haves

PMP, CAPM, or equivalent project management certification
Lean Six Sigma Yellow or Green Belt, or documented lean project results
Experience quoting or estimating configured, built-to-order equipment
Supervisory experience, or clear readiness to lead a direct report
Experience with a truck body builder, upfitter, or dealership build program; familiarity with NRC, Miller Industries, or Jerr-Dan product
Working knowledge of Federal Excise Tax on heavy trucks, MSO/title, and equipment-financing paperwork

Responsibilities

Own the NEWS build plan and the flow of every wrecker build from body order through customer delivery.
Turn the data that arrives from NRC, the chassis manufacturers, and parts vendors — order lists, delivery dates, spec changes, confirmations — into one actionable production schedule in Grist that the whole team runs on.
Keep the rolling three-month build plan current, quote builds for the salesman, coordinate payment and delivery with customers and their banks, and lead the NEWS Parts Associate.
Apply lean manufacturing principles — standard work, point-of-need kitting, visual management, and measured continuous improvement — so the build shop increases throughput without adding headcount.
Develop, update weekly, and load a rolling three-month build schedule into Grist, ensuring it is the single source of truth for every active and planned build.
Ensure every build carries a current status, its gate dates (body order, chassis order, sales order, kit checks, build start), and a projected completion date.
Flag any slip of more than three working days to the Build Shop Manager, Sales, and the COO within one business day.
Reconcile NRC order-list updates, chassis manufacturer delivery changes, and parts vendor confirmations into Grist within two business days of receipt, providing a written change summary.
Ensure zero build days are lost to missing material by surfacing shortages before build start and tracking build-days lost to material shortages monthly.
Achieve schedule attainment of 90% or better, with builds starting within three working days of body and chassis arrival and finishing within the published build-day standard.
Publish a six-month build-load forecast monthly.
Price standard carrier and wrecker builds for the salesman from Grist pricing without assistance by day 90, turning quotes within one business day.
Create a standard-build quick-reference (bodies, chassis, common options, install pricing) for consistent and fast quoting.
Coordinate payment with the customer and their lender for every delivery, schedule the handoff, and close the end-of-sale package within five business days.
Complete and document two lean improvement projects in Year 1, co-led with the Build Shop Manager and Parts Associate, with measured before-and-after results.