Any supervisor should excel at:

• Monitoring and reviewing information from materials, events, or the environment.
• Detecting or assessing problems whether real or potential.
• Monitoring and controlling resources and overseeing the spending of money.

Innovators will usually have four main goals:

• Developing or creating new applications, relationships, systems, or products.
• Providing creative ideas or artistic contributions.
• Keeping up-to-date technically and applying new knowledge to your job.
• Benchmarking, experimenting and testing novel approaches to solving problems.

• Preparing layouts, drawings, or sketches of machinery or equipment, such as shop tooling, scale layouts, or new equipment design, using drafting equipment or computer aided design (CAD) software.
• Overseeing equipment startup, characterization, qualification, or release.
• Creating computer applications for manufacturing processes or operations, using computer aided design (CAD) or computer assisted manufacturing (CAM) tools.
• Coordinating equipment purchases, installations, or transfers.
• Developing manufacturing infrastructure to integrating or deploy new manufacturing processes.
• Designing plants layouts or production facilities.
• Developing or maintaining programs associated with automated production equipment.
• Developing production, inventory, or quality assurance programs.
• Estimating manufacturing costs.
• Identifying opportunities for improvements in quality, cost, or efficiency of automation equipment.