Head of Financial Planning & Analysis

Ultra PCS Limited; Bamfurlong; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

A leading engineering firm in the UK is seeking a Head of Financial Planning and Analysis to design and deliver impactful FP&A across UK and US entities. This role involves leading business intelligence and FP&A functions, reporting directly to the CFO, and collaborating with senior management to drive financial performance. The ideal candidate will be a qualified accountant with experience in operational finance, strong analytical skills, and capable of influencing stakeholders at various levels. This position offers an opportunity to make significant contributions to the finance team and the business overall.

Qualifications

• Experience in operational/manufacturing finance roles.
• Ability to communicate with senior stakeholders.
• Well-developed understanding of Engineering and Operations.
• Comfortable working with data warehouses.
• Experience in process improvement and change management.

Responsibilities

• Lead FP&A including financial business partnering.
• Manage monthly Actuals reporting and forecasting.
• Develop high-quality financial reports for the board.
• Collaborate on the Strategic Plan for the business.
• Create insightful margin analysis tools.

Skills

Financial modeling

Data analysis

Stakeholder communication

Process improvement

Operational accounting

Education

Qualified accountant

Tools

BI tools

ERP systems

Job description

Ultra Precision Control Systems are looking for a Head of Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) to join the PCS Finance Function to design and deliver impactful FP&A, including Finance Business Partnering, across the PCS UK and US entities with oversight of FP&A at the CEMS business. This role will have a sizeable commercial angle to it, with the individual expected to help generate meaningful value within the business. This role also has management responsibility for the Business Intelligence team.

This role will report directly to the CFO. The role will work very closely with the Financial Controller, forming a key finance leadership team.

Key Responsibilities

• Leading the analytics associated with monthly Actuals reporting, including variances to Budget, Forecast, Prior Year etc. Analysis will cover all aspects of the P&L, especially focusing on revenue and margins within Value Streams (i.e. platforms, portfolios, part numbers etc)
• The creation and production of meaningful MI to support the timely and robust month end close, culminating in the production of a high-quality, timely and complete proposed (finance) board report to be prepared for the CFO
• Leading the weekly Flash forecasting process, the output of which will be a forecast of orders, revenue, contribution margin, gross margin, IRAD, opex and EBITDA BOO, together with Operating Cash BOO for the current and subsequent two months (i.e. a 3 month rolling forecast). The output should be commercially insightful (with risk & opportunities and variance analysis for example) and should have the buy-in of the key business stakeholders. Actions arising should be noted and project managed to a timely conclusion
• Leading the Quarterly and annual Budget forecasting processes to agreed timelines, based on meaningful and detailed supporting schedules built on bottom-up and analysable data sources. The process should be managed through an integrated financial model with appropriate automation and clearly and easily identifiable assumptions. The output will comprise of a high quality, insightful presentation pack aligned to a complete and timely OneStream data submission
• Working collaboratively across the business to lead the annual creation, submission and subsequent periodic refreshes of the 5 year Strategic Plan. The Strategic Plan will cover the front end of the business and project financially through a P&L, Balance Sheet and Cashflow. The process should ensure a robust audit trail which is relatively easy for a reviewer to navigate their way through. The ultimate output will be a significant presentation pack providing analysis of the business through the prism of numerous different cuts and slices of the business
• Developing and maintaining deep and meaningful margin analysis tools providing insight on historical and projected margins across the product range within the business. The analysis must be intrinsically linked and reconcilable to the General Ledger. The analysis should be produced in a way that enables finance and non-finance users of the tool to identify margins and make impactful decisions based on this information
• Leading the creation and evolution of a robust, granular and well-presented MI suite, providing meaningful insight on business metrics in a timely fashion
• Be the point Finance person for interacting with, and supporting the S&OOP process, as well as ensuring it is fully integrated with financial forecasts. To enable this a keen interest will be required to ensure the Opportunities Tracker remains relevant for financial forecasting purposes

To lead finance business partnering, to include, but not be limited to :

Working very closely with the VP of Engineering and COO, providing day to day business partnering support, being a key member of their functional senior management, offering finance support, guidance and leadership to them and their teams

Embedding a culture of managing finance by operational metrics. Lead on the creation, capture, streamlining, cleansing and challenge of all financial operational metrics including key elements such as labour utilisation, efficiency, standard costs including labour routings, absorption, turnaround times etc

Be the point person for providing commercial finance leadership to the Repairs business, supporting growth in the business and improvement in margins. Additionally, working closely with the Financial Controller to provide financial comfort and controls of the warranty reserve, identifying opportunities to reduce the financial impact and identifying trends in warranty exposure

Partner in the creation of financially meaningful business cases for investment in IRAD, capitalised development, impairment testing etc

Finance lead on targeting and driving VCP opportunities

• Working very closely with the Financial Controller (and team), especially to support the timely and accurate submission of month end reporting, year end audits, project accounting, bid submission and associate cost audits, and by providing insight and input to support meaningful balance sheet reconciliations on areas with significant Engineering or Operations underlying ownership
• Leading the Business Intelligence team to improve the quality of data, reporting and systems across the business. Partner with the business to understand key business requirements, reporting challenges, manual processes and the like, transforming them through a structured program management approach into live, accurate, meaningful reports which are based on data which is integrally tied to the financials within the business
• Identify opportunities to make improvements to IFS for capture of data, improvement of processes, creation of robust master data etc
• Driving consistency of approach across all aspects of PCS and CEMS Support ad hoc projects that may arise from time to time

Required Skills & Experience

• A qualified accountant
• This desired candidate will have experience within an operational / manufacturing / engineering finance team having previously held positions of responsibility
• The ability to communicate and influence with a variety of different stakeholders at a senior level is of paramount importance
• Someone who will not be put off by the size of the task, rather will be motivated by the opportunity to clearly demonstrate the impact they are having on the Engineering & Operations teams and within the finance environment
• A well developed understanding of the Engineering and Operational functional environments including teams such as Supply Chain, Stores, Manufacturing Engineering, Quality etc
• Able to effect change, drive and imbed process improvement
• A detailed understanding of accounting dynamics, including operational accounting interactions within an ERP system. Experienced in and comfortable working with the dynamics and interactions of cost centres, projects (WBS), labour and overhead rates, material handling rates, percentage of completion accounting chine (over time) etc
• Comfortable working with BI and data warehouses
• Comfortable working with, and experienced linking and reconciling ERP and financial model data / outputs to, group reporting systems
• Able to create high quality and commercially meaningful outputs, including robust audit trail, process notes etc
• Operates with a data, systems and ‘one source of the truth’ mindset
• Routinely adopts a root cause data analysis approach rather than putting in place manual fixes and overrides