Cost Accountant

Dubai Cable Company - Ducab; Dubai; On-site; AED 223,000 - 357,000; Full time

Job summary

Dubai Cable Company - Ducab invites applications for a Factory Controller who will safeguard product costing and BOM accuracy across plants, leading variance analysis and partnering with operations on consumption control, maintenance costs and shop-floor reporting.

This role requires strong knowledge of standard/product costing, SAP/ERP experience, and capability to drive cost transparency and capital expenditure evaluation across cable manufacturing processes.

Qualifications

• CMA (US) / ICWA (India) / CIMA qualified, or an equivalent professional cost & management accounting qualification.
• Approximately 4–7 years cost accounting experience, preferably in cable, wire or metals manufacturing, or another process / discrete manufacturing environment.
• Strong working knowledge of standard costing, product costing and variance analysis in a manufacturing environment.

Responsibilities

• Maintain and validate BOMs across the full process flow and ensure accurate reflection of metal content, materials, and costings.
• Evaluate and monitor routings and work-centre data, including standard and actual times, and quantify cost impact of variances.
• Reconcile actual material issued/consumed against standard BOM consumption; monitor yield and scrap.
• Ensure timely SAP/ERP shop-floor reporting, production confirmations, and period close activities.
• Analyze maintenance orders by work centre and equipment; distinguish capex from repair costs and drive cost control.
• Support month-end close, inventory valuation, and COGS analysis; safeguard inventory accuracy.
• Act as finance business partner to plant management, develop capex business cases and benefits tracking.
• Conduct time-and-motion studies to validate standard routing times and drive productivity improvements.
• Evaluate capacity planning and overall equipment effectiveness to optimise plant performance.

Skills

Cost accounting

Variance analysis

Finance partnering

Education

CMA/ICWA/CIMA qualified

Tools

SAP CO

Excel

Power BI

Job description

Job Purpose

Serve as the embedded Factory Controller for the cable manufacturing operation — safeguarding the accuracy and integrity of product costing across all plants (BOM and routing), leading variance analysis between standard and actual performance, and partnering with operations on consumption control, maintenance cost, shop-floor reporting and capital expenditure evaluation.

The role is the critical link between Finance and the shop floor: converting physical production activity into financial insight that protects margin, improves yield and underpins sound capital allocation.

Key Responsibilities

A. Standard Costing & Bill of Materials (BOM)

• Maintain and validate multi-level BOMs across the full process flow — rod and wire drawing, stranding and bunching, insulation/extrusion, laying-up, armoring and sheathing — ensuring metal content (copper / aluminium), compounds (PVC / XLPE / PE), armor wire and tape, fillers and packaging are accurately reflected at every level.
• Partner with the Technical and Manufacturing teams to improve BOM accuracy, minimizing variances and strengthening the reliability of product costing.
• Ensure costing master data consistently reflects current manufacturing processes and cost structures.
• Embed standard scrap, wastage and process-loss factors at each BOM level and review them periodically against actual performance.
• Drive the periodic and annual standard cost roll (cost estimate run), ensuring metal standards align with the agreed LME / costing-price basis and conversion costs reflect prevailing rates.
• Validate new-product (NPD) costings and assess the cost impact of engineering change notes (ECNs) and BOM revisions.

B. Routing & Routing-Time vs Actual-Time Variance

• Evaluate and monitor routings and work-center master data — drawing lines, stranding machines, extruders, armoring and sheathing lines — including standard machine times, setup times, labour times and machine-hour rates.
• Monitor and quantify the variance between standard routing time and actual production time at work-order and work-center level, translating it into a clear cost impact.
• Ensure routing activities are correctly categorized across the following elements:
  • Machine run time
  • Setup time
  • Idle time
  • Rework time
  • Maintenance time
  • Downtime
• Identify the root causes of time variance (line speed, downtime, changeover/setup, rework, manning) and partner with Production Engineering to keep standard times realistic and to challenge persistent unfavourable variances.

C. Material Consumption Monitoring

• Reconcile actual material issued and consumed against standard (BOM) consumption at work-order and product level, reporting usage and yield variances with particular focus on high-value metal.
• Monitor copper and aluminium yield, process scrap and reclaim/recovery, ensuring scrap is captured, weighed and valued correctly.
• Investigate abnormal consumption, over-issues, unconfirmed issues and negative inventories, driving corrective action with Stores and Production.

D. Shop-Floor Reporting & Production Confirmation

• Ensure timely and accurate shop-floor reporting in SAP / ERP - production confirmations, order completions, WIP movements and yield reporting.
• Strengthen the discipline and accuracy of confirmations, reconciling reported production to physical output and to financial postings.
• Monitor WIP ageing and open / unsettled work orders, ensuring clean and timely order settlement at period close.
• Monitor compliance with production-order closing procedures across all plants, ensuring the shop-floor teams follow the defined process for timely confirmation, goods receipt, material-consumption posting and technical closure of production orders.

E. Maintenance Order Analysis

• Analyse maintenance orders (planned/preventive and breakdown/corrective) by work centre and equipment, tracking maintenance cost, spares consumption and external service cost.
• Work closely with the Plant and Maintenance teams to challenge cost, correctly distinguish capex from revenue/repair, and ensure proper settlement of maintenance orders.
• Provide cost-per-machine and cost-of-downtime insight, linking maintenance spend to OEE and to routing-time variance.

F. Factory Controller - Period Close, Inventory & Margin

• Support the month-end close: order settlement, WIP and variance calculation, overhead absorption, inventory valuation and COGS analysis.
• Collaborate with Production and Planning to resolve issues affecting production-order settlement.
• Prepare plant cost reports, variance bridges and conversion-cost analysis, clearly explaining movements against budget and standard to plant and finance leadership.
• Safeguard inventory accuracy (cycle-count / physical-verification reconciliation) and the correct valuation of raw material, WIP and finished goods.

G. Business Partnering & Capex Evaluation

• Act as finance business partner to the Plant Manager and operations leadership, providing cost transparency and decision support.
• Evaluate capex ideas originating on the shop floor - quantifying cost savings and yield, throughput and quality benefits - build the business case (payback, NPV, IRR) and develop proposals for the capital budget.
• Track the benefits realisation of approved capex against the original business case.

H. Time & Motion Studies

• Conduct periodic time-and-motion studies across manufacturing operations to validate whether standard routing times accurately reflect actual shop-floor performance.
• Identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks and productivity-improvement opportunities, recommending updates to routing standards based on study findings.

I. Capacity Planning & Manufacturing Performance

• Evaluate production capacity-planning activities across the plants in order to maximise profit by minimizing the costs & wastages
• Evaluate machine and labour utilisation against available capacity.
• Identify capacity constraints and underutilized resources.
• Support management in evaluating expansion, automation and productivity-improvement opportunities.
• Analyze and report on Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) across manufacturing plants.

Qualifications & Experience

• CMA (US) / ICWA (India) / CIMA qualified, or an equivalent professional cost & management accounting qualification.
• Approximately 4–7 years' cost accounting experience, preferably in cable, wire or metals manufacturing, or another process / discrete manufacturing environment.
• Strong working knowledge of standard costing, product costing and variance analysis in a manufacturing environment.

Technical & System Skills

• SAP (CO / Product Costing / Material Ledger / PM) or equivalent ERP - strong preference.
• Advanced Excel; familiarity with BI tools (e.g. Power BI) and large datasets an advantage.
• Understanding LME-linked metal costing and inventory valuation is a distinct advantage.

JOB Location: Jabel Ali, Dubai.