Head of Financial Planning & Analysis

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 and 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 and should have the buy-in of the key business stakeholders.
• 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.
• Working collaboratively across the business to lead the annual creation, submission and subsequent periodic refreshes of the 5 year Strategic Plan.
• Developing and maintaining deep and meaningful margin analysis tools providing insight on historical and projected margins across the product range within the business.
• 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&OP process, as well as ensuring it is fully integrated with financial forecasts.
• To lead finance business partnering, including working very closely with the VP of Engineering and COO, providing day to day business partnering support.
• Embedding a culture of managing finance by operational metrics.
• Be the point person for providing commercial finance leadership to the Repairs business.
• 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) to support the timely and accurate submission of month end reporting, year end audits, project accounting, bid submission and associate cost audits.
• Leading the Business Intelligence team to improve the quality of data, reporting and systems across 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.
• Able to effect change, drive and imbed process improvement.
• A detailed understanding of accounting dynamics, including operational accounting interactions within an ERP system.
• Comfortable working with BI and data warehouses.
• 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.