Business Finance Manager

Job description

Job Mission:

In order to deliver a competitive advantage to our company, Business Finance function needs to be agile and dynamic, founded on insights from advanced analytics and tools, proactive business partnering with the aim to influence strategic decision where possible. With the ever-changing business environment and technologies, there have been significant changes in the role of the Business Finance function, as it pivots towards a more predictive and analytical future as opposed to descriptive analysis.

We shall no longer just report the news but help making the news.  Connect the internal and external insights and proactively drive end-to-end business processes, challenge the status-quo, shape the governance of the local, regional or global agendas for business discussions.

Our job is to provide Smart Analytics that can be turned into actionable insights and enables management to effectively solve their business problems.  Smart analytics are:

·  Relevant:  it makes a difference, especially with regard to making predictions
·  Timely:  it's relevant now
·  Faithful:  it's complete, neutral, and error-free
·  Verifiable:  it can be replicated and verified
·  Actionable:  it' true to what it claims to represent and is deemed beneficial to the user
·  Understandable:  it's quickly comprehensible by those familiar with the situation

Our role will be multifunctional: performed as Risk professionals, BI experts, Managers driving on risk management, Modelers, Idea-generators and Business Finance Partners working side-by-side with cross-functions and Divisions, creating synergetic teams with strategic vision and enormous analytical capabilities. 

Business skills and leadership attributes:

·  Transformational: The position shall have the attributes to challenge the status quo, equipped with end-to-end business processes mindset, be creative and innovative.  Visionary: able to foresee outcomes and setting trend.  Be sensible to changes in market place, data, analytics upon which predicting impact to our House.  
·  Agile: Work independently and be comfortable with complexity and ambiguity. Be curious to find out what we don’t know, a proactive and continuous Finance learner.
·  Team Player and Relationships-focused: Be collaborative with various teams including finance, business and other corporate functions at local, regional and global.  Proactively provide solutions and supports to stakeholders 
·  Leading oneself, changes, and others: Possess strong growth mindset and takes ownership of self-development.  Inspires and develops others to drive constructive changes and create followship.

Key Responsibilities:

Become the TW Region finance business partner to support cross-functional teams; collaborating with business leaders across departments and divisions to plan, organize, and monitor business activities to achieve performance excellence.  This position is expected to support on financial and resource matters with the ability to influence decision-making, improve the understanding of business performance, deliver analysis and insight on business opportunities, providing options and scenarios for business decisions.

 

Drive business performance & financial management -

•      The position proactively leads the utilization of robust and advanced analytics to provide value-added financial/predictive analyses, modelling, advisory and insights into business performance and, whether at regional, divisional or local level to influence management decision making. 

•      Profitability and productivity scope 360 – by customer/by area, by division and consolidated.  By channel of distribution / point of sale and product category.  The focus is qualitative profitability growth while never compromising on our brand equity 

•      Collaborate with Divisions, budget owners and coordinate with Regional Finance teams on developing analytical KPIs and automated reports to support business decision making and enhance work efficiency.  Ensure adopting regional developed reports and templates where applicable, and focus local templates/analysis on value adding to business, prescriptive with insights and proposed actions

•      Lead the establishment of regular cadence with business partners, drive the monthly performance meeting for monthly actual vs budget variance analysis, sales and expense forecast updates as well as improvements to operating expense efficiency and forecasting. Recommend appropriate course of action when results differ from plan.

•      Monitor and enforce the adoption of budget and forecast guidelines.  Support to oversee the overall governance, end-to-end process and development of budget and forecasts.

•      Consolidate, measure and challenge expenses based on YTD/YTG trends and forecast accuracy. Establish routine contingency planning practices and scenario studies with key stakeholders as part of the business evolution and managing the overall financial performance

•      Lead inventory management with divisions through reviewing stock proposals with commercial teams, sales forecast, follow up on stock obsolescence and write offs to determine the financial implications.

•      Provide ad hoc financial analysis and presentation as required by senior management.

 

Contribute to strategic business decisions -

•      The position is actively involved in shaping strategic goals and investment with management teams

•      Forward thinking, utilize robust and advanced analytics to derive business scenarios, predictive and prescriptive analysis to come up with possible actions and guide stakeholders towards a solution

•      Co-create capital expenditure request with business and budget owners and provide its expertise on the subject, ensure financial and qualitative KPIs are met, carry out post mortem review to ensure actual project outcome as per plan

•      Monitor external environment such as macro factors, competitors’ movements and recommend appropriate course of strategic actions where applicable

•      Ensure business strategy and planning is appropriately covered and be able to bring insight with key financial implications to the management teams

•      Anticipate the business’s changing needs and adapt approach to suit in finance business partnership

 

Drive efficient process -

•      Manage the process and development of Monthly/quarterly forecasts, Budgets, Latest Estimates, 3-5 year plan (MTP) where applicable

•      Contribute to development of Annual Business Review and Strategic Alignment Meetings and presentations

•      Support in streamlining planning and forecast processes:

•      Forecast efficiently and effectively, i.e. forecasting process balances speed with accuracy, work closely with business partners to develop a “lighter” operating budgeting process to minimize reworks

•      Proactively provide feedbacks on the design of planning Systems, software, and tools: Our financial systems and software are designed to integrate historical and predictive financial information and reduce time spent on manual data manipulation

•      Review processes/issues with the intention of improving efficiency in actuals and forecast review, reducing time/effort spent on preparation in the detail, providing the business with timely data and insight required to make decisions and ensure clarity on and solving for the root cause of any arising issue.

 

Contribute to finance team development and project management -

•      Proactively look for opportunities to develop and take on that could further enhance the overall processes, addressing issues and pain-points in the organization as part of the Corporate Finance function in TW.

•      Contribute in building Business Finance community capabilities within the country via on the job training and coaching, support the information and best practice sharing across the region

•      Drive a continuous improvement mindset and culture within the organization by prioritizing opportunities and execution locally. Leverage global/regional finance transformation strategy and metrics when it is applicable for market to use.

•      Act as a champion for change, challenging the status quo and identifying new ways of agile working.

Provide ad hoc support and be able to lead projects that are related to business and finance as required by senior management.

Academic / Professional Qualifications

·  University degree in Business Administration with major in Finance, Accounting, Management Systems, or Economics, or Quantitative Finance
·  Thorough knowledge of accounting / financial / internal controls concepts and principles

Work Experience

·  Minimum 10 years working experience, inclusive of 2-3 years of managerial experience
·  Solid experience in the FMCG or retail industry of F&BP / FA / W&FJ is preferred

Required Competencies

·  Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, be able to listen to and empathize with others to build trust and cohesion
·  Agile, commercial curiosity and business acumen with strong finance sense
·  Proactive, take self-initiated actions on opportunities for continuous improvement
·  Entrepreneur, motivated and driven –  mentality is one of creative “solution provider” and not “problem giver”
·  Strong interpreter of data to generate insights that enable decision making with data analytics and reporting
·  Ability to see both the big picture and the details.  Capable of being hands-on yet strategic.
·  Strong Excel skills required, Power BI/query/VBA are plus
·  Comfortable aggregating and manipulating large data sets from multiple systems to derive insightful analysis and create financial models
·  Innovative: This is the paramount skill
·  Personality types that thrive on new ideas and creative thinking when managing financial activities and P&L, rather than just number crunching
·  A genuine interest in learning systems and becoming a ‘power user’.

At Chanel, we are focused on creating an inclusive culture that nurtures personal growth, contributing to collective progress. We believe the uniqueness of each individual increases the diversity, complementarity and effectiveness of our teams. We strongly encourage your application, as we value the perspective, experience and potential you could bring to CHANEL.