Plant Controller: Manufacturing Finance Leader

Kilcoy Global Foods North America; Mundelein (IL); On-site; USD 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Kilcoy Global Foods North America seeks a Plant Controller to lead financial reporting, cost accounting, and budgeting for a major food manufacturing facility in the Midwest. This role partners with plant leadership to translate operations into financial insights, improve profitability, and strengthen controls across inventory, capital projects, and manufacturing variances.

Responsibilities include month-end close, standard costing, KPI reporting, and collaboration with Operations, Supply Chain,

Qualifications

• 5-8+ years of progressive accounting and finance experience, with meaningful experience in manufacturing.

Responsibilities

• Own plant-level financial reporting, month-end close, account reconciliations, journal entries, accruals, and variance analysis; ensure timely and accurate results in accordance with company policy and applicable accounting standards.
• Lead plant budgeting, forecasting, and periodic outlook processes, including labor, overhead, materials, production volumes, capital spending, and operating expenses.
• Maintain and improve standard costing, including bills of material, routings, labor and overhead rates, purchase price variance, material usage, yield, scrap, waste, and manufacturing variances.
• Analyze plant performance and convert financial and operational data into actionable insights for plant leadership; identify trends, risks, root causes, and opportunities.
• Partner with Operations to improve productivity, conversion cost, labor utilization, throughput, yield, waste reduction, and overall plant profitability.
• Oversee inventory accounting and controls, including raw materials, packaging, work‑in‑process, finished goods, cycle counts, physical inventories, reserves, adjustments, and inventory accuracy.
• Establish and maintain effective internal controls over plant financial processes, assets, inventory, purchasing, capital expenditures, and other areas of financial risk.
• Support capital expenditure requests and post‑investment reviews through financial modeling, ROI/payback analysis, project tracking, and validation of expected benefits.
• Prepare and communicate plant KPIs and management reporting, including cost per unit/pound/case, labor efficiency, material usage, yield, waste, overhead absorption, inventory, and spending performance.
• Partner with Procurement and Supply Chain on commodity, ingredient, packaging, freight, and supplier cost analysis and the financial implications of sourcing decisions.
• Support new product introductions, customer/product profitability analysis, make‑versus‑buy decisions, pricing inputs, and other business cases as needed.
• Coordinate plant support for internal and external audits and ensure documentation, reconciliations, and controls are audit‑ready.
• Ensure appropriate segregation of duties and compliance with corporate policies, financial procedures, and approval authorities.
• Develop finance capability within the plant; provide coaching and financial acumen to operational leaders and supervise plant accounting staff where applicable.
• Participate actively on the plant leadership team and contribute to continuous improvement, Lean, productivity, and cost‑reduction initiatives.

Skills

Business Partnership

Manufacturing & Cost Acumen

Financial Rigor

Analytical Thinking

Operational Orientation

Communication & Influence

Ownership & Accountability

Continuous Improvement

Collaboration

Judgment & Integrity

Education

Bachelor's degree in Accounting/Finance/Business

CPA / CMA / MBA preferred

Tools

SAP

Oracle

Microsoft Dynamics

JD Edwards

Excel

Job description

Kilcoy Global Foods North America seeks a Plant Controller to lead financial reporting, cost accounting, and budgeting for a major food manufacturing facility in the Midwest. This role partners with plant leadership to translate operations into financial insights, improve profitability, and strengthen controls across inventory, capital projects, and manufacturing variances.

Responsibilities include month-end close, standard costing, KPI reporting, and collaboration with Operations, Supply Chain,