Senior Manager - Business Application Owner in London

Reports to: Senior Manager – Global Financial Accounting and Reporting team

Location: London, UK – Global Headquarters

Type: Permanent

Department: Global Financial Accounting and Reporting team

What impact you can create at Chanel

As Chanel continues to drive process efficiencies through more harmonised processes and streamlining its systems landscape, we are looking for a Business Application Owner in a truly global function. You will be in charge of a large portfolio of portals including Oracle (FCCS, ARCS, TRCS, Narrative Reporting) and Powerplan in the larger Finance ecosystem in the Record-to-Report area.

In very close collaboration with IT Application Owners, Process Owners and Data Owners, as well as managing relationships with multiple stakeholders within the Finance community, you will cover 5 main areas:

• Run Operations Excellence: Together with the IT Application owner and an offshore team, you will be responsible for providing service excellence to the Finance community, enhance operational efficiency and compliance:
• As a gatekeeper, you will be the first line of contact for any questions from the Finance community, provide functional answers to their questions and re-direct to other expert teams across Finance and Tech.
• Develop a culture of continuous improvements, engage with users to understand their pain points, generate ideas on how to automate processes and define priorities for enhancements to maximise business value.
• Drive requirements gathering and define functional design to hand over to the IT Application owners for technical design and development.
• Define test scenarios to ensure that your systems perform at the highest quality, coordinate users to test and/or perform tests yourself.
• Optimise licenses in the best way, review system access regularly and ensure highest levels of internal controls and external audits on access management with your partners in Tech.
• Data Quality Management: As a data steward, you will be responsible for the data quality in the system, setting up monitoring processes and work with the IT application owner to develop data quality monitoring tools that allow you to ensure the highest level of data quality in systems that provide insights for decision making at Chanel. You will also be working with the process owners to suggest changes to data models and liaise with the relevant data owners to represent the needs of Financial Reporting in elements like the Standard Chart of Accounts and other Financial dimensions and work with accounting and business users to improve data quality and code costs in the right way.
• Project Management: As processes adapt to new business challenges and technology will continue to provide more opportunities to transform our Finance function, you will be in charge of project managing these projects end-to-end from mobilising teams, defining scope, orchestrating requirements gathering and process design, overseeing the development phase with the help of the IT application owner, run tests and change management activities.
• Training Academy: You will actively drive adoption of the solutions and driving process efficiencies by setting up training plans and training paths for new joiners and more experienced users across the year, define the training content and making it relevant and updated by working with users and understanding their challenges, analysing frequent support tickets and anticipating transformation needs in the Finance community.
• Reporting & Dashboarding: Being embedded in the Finance function, you are close to the business needs and will be able to assist your peers in Finance to create, maintain and make reports available to Finance analysts. Besides operational reporting, you will also be able to invest yourself in the Dashboarding strategy for the data coming from your systems and push topics related to self-service reporting.

You are energised by:

• Working in global organisations with high degrees of complexity.
• Providing excellent tools and services to users all while setting up relevant governance processes.
• Building effective relationships across a diverse range of teams.
• Delivering high quality solutions and aiming for continuous improvement.

What you will bring:

• BS or BA required, preferably in Accounting, Finance or Information Systems. MBA or CPA is a plus.
• Strong experience in Legal Accounting Reporting. Software certification is a plus, particularly regarding full suite of offerings from Oracle and Powerplan and ERPs.
• Minimum 6 years of experience in accounting, data analytics and/or systems implementations/administration.
• Strong hands-on experience in IT Service Management.
• Project Management from A to Z.
• Strong analytical skills to ensure data quality and define impactful reporting.
• International and multicultural experience working with markets outside of Europe is a must.

You are:

• Able to understand and handle situations/decisions across a complex ecosystem.
• Able to communicate with people with different backgrounds and ways of working and easily explain technical problems to people without a deep technical understanding.
• You have the ability to think “Global” and to align regions in this common vision.
• A team player!

About Us

Chanel is a world leader in creating, manufacturing and distributing luxury products, including Ready-to-Wear, Accessories, Fragrances, Makeup, Skincare, Jewellery and Watches. Founded by Gabrielle Chanel in 1910, the House remains dedicated to quality craftsmanship and offering high-end creations. At present, Chanel employs more than 32,000 people worldwide.

As an independent company, its core values are grounded in:

• Exceptional creation and client experience.
• Nurturing human potential.
• Having a positive impact – on people, the environment and communities around the world.

As part of this, the House promotes arts, culture and creativity, while investing significantly in key areas including research & development, sustainability, and innovation. Chanel is dedicated to creating the conditions for people to perform at their best, building on their strengths and enabling them to benefit from new opportunities. It offers a unique working environment where people are given time to understand the brand, the business, and develop their personal motivations. This means everyone can grow, continue to be inspired and feel included, now and in the future. The company fosters true collaboration and respect for all, grounded in the belief that diversity is essential to the success of the organisation and its people. Chanel remains committed to rewarding people competitively, as well as offering initiatives such as wellbeing programmes, learning and development opportunities, and parental leave for all parents globally.