How to write it
Lead with span of control and budget
Two numbers establish an operations manager's level faster than any description: how many people report to you, and how much money you're responsible for. Both belong in the summary and in the first bullet of your current role.
Include the structure where it's meaningful — "190 people, 4 shift managers reporting in" tells a reader you manage managers, which is a different job from managing associates directly.
Two metrics moving in opposite directions is the strongest bullet
Anyone can cut cost by degrading service, and anyone can improve service by spending more. The bullet that proves real operational skill shows both improving, or one improving while the other holds under growth.
"Raised on-time dispatch from 91% to 99.2% while volume grew 34%" is that shape. So is cost per unit down 21% with service maintained. This is the pattern to look for in your own history, because it's the one that survives scrutiny from someone who runs operations themselves.
- Cost per unit, order or case, before and after
- Throughput, and how it changed against headcount
- Service level: on-time, fill rate, SLA attainment
- Quality: defect, error or return rate
- Safety: recordable incidents, days without injury
- Turnover and absenteeism, which are operational outcomes
Safety is not optional content
In manufacturing, logistics, healthcare and construction, a hiring manager will look for safety before they look at cost. Omitting it reads as either inexperience or a record you'd rather not discuss.
State it plainly with the baseline: "zero recordable injuries over 14 months, from 7 in the preceding year". The improvement is the achievement, and having a baseline makes the claim credible rather than lucky.
Turnover is an operations metric
Most operations managers treat retention as an HR matter and leave it off. That's a missed opportunity, because in high-turnover environments labour churn is often the single largest controllable cost, and reducing it is hard, unglamorous management work.
"Reduced voluntary turnover from 48% to 19% by rebuilding onboarding, shift patterns and the progression ladder" says you can lead people rather than only schedule them — which is the concern about anyone whose resume is otherwise all throughput.
Show the method doing work
Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen and 5S appear on nearly every operations resume as a skills entry, which makes them worthless as signal. They regain their value the moment they're attached to a specific result.
"Ran the Kaizen programme that cut packing errors 63%" uses the same words to make a much stronger claim than a Green Belt listed in a skills section. Keep the certification, but let the improvement carry the argument.