Senior FP&A Analyst

#9475 Job Description
Position Overview 
The Senior Analyst will play a crucial role in providing granular data and analysis on business issues, planning, budgeting, and forecasting for the business for management’s use in strategic and tactical decision making.  Analyzes operational and financial data and KPIs for due diligence and continuous improvement opportunities.  The ideal candidate will possess a strong financial acumen, exceptional organizational and analytical skills, and the ability to communicate complex financial concepts to various stakeholders. This individual will work on a variety of projects with multiple stakeholders, build and maintain financial models, completing complex analysis involving multiple data sources, assessing opportunities for process improvement, developing plans for capturing and utilizing supplemental data, and supporting the implementation of strategic initiatives. The ideal candidate possesses knowledge of the dairy industry, development and use of key performance indicators (KPIs) and demonstrates an ability to identify underlying causes and correlations. The candidate must exhibit exceptional analytic problem-solving abilities, strong attention to detail, as well as strong communication and presentation skills that enable them to lead discussions to drive data-based decisions to be made. 
Primary Responsibilities

• Engage business and operations partners to create detailed financial plans and influence investment decisions.
• Analyze performance, identify areas of risk and opportunity, and make recommendations to finance and business leadership for improvements.
• Support the financial planning process at the department level, inclusive of budgets, re-forecasts, capital planning and long-term plans. Helps to define and load data into models.
• Consolidate smaller forecasts and models into the overall plan and reports.
• Conduct analysis of business units, portfolio segments, geographic territories, business lines and acquisitions.
• Gather data to track and review performance of strategic initiatives (the investment portfolio).
• Learn, prepare, and maintain financial models and tools; learn and master the budget forecast model, making enhancements as necessary.
• Develop relevant reporting including data preparation, report creation and quality control; strive to deliver insight, consistent data, and effective visualizations.
• Provide oversight to business KPIs; report trends, variances, and issues; take appropriate action including proactively notifying business or financial partners/superiors.
• Provide data and analyses to support periodic (monthly, quarterly, year-end) financial and operational performance reviews with the business and finance teams, and the board of directors.
• Build databases and prepare reports for senior management.
• Perform other ad hoc analyses.
• Assist in building business cases and perform due diligence on potential opportunities, deals, partnerships, etc.
• Apply financial and economic concepts including financial modeling, economic analysis, cash flow (DCF), profitability, earnings, balance sheet, taxes, financial ratios, alignment to KPIs, ROIC/NPV/IRR, customer lifetime value, cost of capital benchmarks, market analysis, and strategic analysis.
• Manage cash flow forecast models, variance analysis, and other financial performance tools.
• Leverage analytical tools and methodologies including visualizations to present findings.
• Collaborate on processes and projects while representing the goals of the business.
• Demonstrate finance, business, and industry expertise; learn the strategy, drivers, metrics, and data elements of the company.
• Establish credibility through respectful, thoughtful interactions, attention to detail, professional integrity, and excellent financial insight.

Competencies & Characteristics Required
To effectively perform the duties this position, individuals must be able to demonstrate several competencies which include:

• Ability to thoughtfully exercise judgment to improve processes and advance the reporting outputs for the team.
• Strong financial, analytical, and detail-oriented aptitude applying advanced knowledge of business protocols and metrics; a high degree of accuracy is required.
• Ability to assess metric outcomes on a relative basis and create sound recommendations based on accurate data evaluation.
• Be skilled in communicating and presenting complex trends and analysis both verbally and in writing to all levels of the organization.
• Ability to manage time effectively, set priorities and meet deadlines.
• Ability to standardize business processes and provide support to a variety of critical initiatives and projects.
• Highly proficient in Microsoft office, specifically Excel’s analytical capability, PowerPoint, Outlook, Tableau, Power BI.
• Apply diverse experience across functions and basic understanding of continuous improvement tools and processes to drive business results.
• Utilize experience with SAP / ERP systems to access and analyze data.

Required Education and Experience

• Bachelor’s degree in Business, Finance, Accounting required.
• 7+ years’ experience in a financial planning and analytical role is required, ideally in a dairy / food manufacturing environment.
• Thorough understanding of SQL methods to query various size data sets.
• Experience with data visualization tools such as Power BI and Tableau.
• Knowledge of statistical tools such as R or Data Analysis in Excel.

Minimum Requirements

• Must successfully complete a background and reference check.
• Must have proof of legal authorization to work in USA.

Physical Requirements

• May be required to sit or stand for extended periods of time and demonstrate manual dexterity while performing job duties.
• While performing the duties of this job, the employee is frequently required to talk, see, and hear; use hands to handle objects, and reach with hands and arms.
• Must be able to concentrate for extended periods of time, paying attention to detail.
• Requires constant operation of standard office machines, including computers.
• Requires frequent ability to move freely about the office building.

Environment

• Environment involved is regularly inside the office, and plant locations to support key initiatives. 
• The noise level in the work environment is usually moderate.

Travel

• As needed to support key initiatives; expected to be less than 20%.

Additional Information
The above statements are intended to describe the general nature and level of the work. This is not an exhaustive list of all duties and responsibilities. Employees are expected to perform duties assigned and directed by management, which may be modified when deemed appropriate by management.