Production Analyst

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Job Title: Production Analyst
Location: Souderton, PA, Mid-Atlantic United States, USA

Company: The Wenger Group
Industry Sector: Agribusiness
Industry Type: Input Retail, Cooperative and Related Crop Services
Job Type: Full Time

Job Description: Who are we: We're a leading Northeast family-owned food, agricultural products, and agricultural services organization headquartered in Pennsylvania. We provide animal nutrition and feeds; specialty protein production, processing, and marketing; on-farm protein production services; and grain, fertilizer, and ingredient procurement. Leidy's is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Wenger Group since 2022. Leidy's is a 130-year-old pork company located on the family farm in Pennsylvania, where Jacob Leidy was deeded the original land grant by William Penn in 1753.

We're a stable company with strong core values, great benefits, competitive wage structure, and a safe and healthy work environment. With over 1000 team members, we're a growing company in an essential sector - agriculture! Learn more here: https://www.thewengergroup.com / https://www.leidys.com

What your day looks like:

We are seeking a data-driven, detail-oriented Production Analyst to analyze plant performance and support continuous improvement across our meat processing operations. This role partners closely with production, QA/food safety, maintenance, supply chain, finance, and IT to turn operational data into actionable insights. The ideal candidate understands manufacturing and meat-industry dynamics-yields, giveaway, throughput, downtime, labor efficiency-and can build reports and models that help leaders make fast, informed decisions.

Track and analyze daily/weekly/monthly KPIs (e.g., throughput, OEE, yields, giveaway, rework, scrap, downtime, changeover time, labor efficiency, and schedule adherence).
Build dashboards and automated reports that highlight trends, anomalies, and root causes.
Translate complex data into concise, actionable insights for supervisors and plant leadership.
Monitor raw-to-finished yields by species, line, and SKU; quantify impacts of trim recovery and rework.
Identify sources of giveaway and implement controls with operations and QA.
Partner with R&D/operations to validate formulation adherence and spec compliance on processed items.
Analyze capacity constraints and line rates; recommend line balancing, crew size, or shift adjustments.
Work with finance to reconcile production variances (material usage, labor, overhead) and COGS impacts.
Evaluate run-time standards, BOM accuracy, and routing times; recommend updates.
Provide SKU- and customer-level profitability insights to guide rationalization or improvement projects.
Collaborate with QA/HACCP teams to correlate process controls (SPC, CCP monitoring) with yield and quality outcomes.
Track hold/release, customer complaints, and corrective actions; quantify financial and operational impact.
Maintain audit-ready data for USDA, GMPs, and traceability requirements in coordination with QA and Compliance.
Reconcile raw, WIP, and finished goods movements between floor counts and ERP/MES transactions.
Analyze shrink/waste and implement controls to reduce loss while maintaining food safety.
Support traceability investigations with timely, accurate data pulls.
Develop self-service reports (e.g., Power BI/Tableau) and SOPs for data entry and reporting standards.
Train supervisors on data capture best practices and interpretation of operational reports.
Participate in Kaizen events and CI projects focused on yield, labor productivity, and throughput.
Standardize measurement methods and implement visual management for line-level KPIs.
Quantify project benefits (hard/soft savings) and report progress to leadership.

Who you are:

Bachelor's degree in Industrial Engineering, Operations/Manufacturing, Data Analytics, Business, or related field (or equivalent experience).
2-4 years of experience in a manufacturing/production analytics role (preferably in food/meat processing).
Proficiency with Excel (advanced functions, pivot tables, lookups) and data visualization (Power BI, Tableau, or similar).
Familiarity with ERP/MES data structures and manufacturing KPIs.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, and communication skills; ability to explain data to non-technical audiences.
Detail-orientation with a bias for action in fast-paced, multi-shift environments.

Preferred

Experience with meat industry metrics (raw-to-finished yield, giveaway, trim recovery, SPC for process control).
Hands-on experience with ERP systems (SAP, JD Edwards, Dynamics, NetSuite) and/or MES/LIMS.
Working knowledge of Lean/Six Sigma tools (5S, SMED, value stream mapping, root cause analysis).
Basic SQL or Python for data extraction/automation.

In addition to our more traditional benefits, we also offer great perks and numerous resources for professional development and team building: