Finance Business Partner Manager

1. Finance Business Partnering
- Act as a hands-on partner to the VP of Operations, Production Directors, and Commercial leads.
- Bridge the gap between corporate goals and departmental execution.
- Help drive one set of consolidated numbers together with FPA Team and lead finance meetings with production. Standardize Business Partner commentary and templates so insights are comparable across plants/businesses.
- Lead financial evaluation of key strategic initiatives including pricing / margin and various efficiency projects in operations which drive improvement in labour and material efficiency.
- Own the business narrative and recommendations for each unit (Casegoods, Upholstery, Metal, Prototype, Bespoke).
- Build and develop a high‐performing BP team (coaching, prioritization, workload balancing, capability growth).
- Influence & Coaching: Train non-finance managers (Plant Managers, Warehouse Leads) on how to interpret financial KPIs to make better day-to-day decisions.
- Deep-Dive Analysis: Provides actionable insights on plant metrics like labor efficiency, yield, and throughput.
- Financial Evaluation: Leads the review of pricing, margins, and cost-saving initiatives (labor/material).
- Corrective Action: Identifies performance gaps and recommends specific P&L-improving fixes.
- Drive Performance Management through Monthly & Weekly Reporting of Key Performance Metrics as well as Visibility, which drives Accountability and ownership on improvement initiatives.
2. Commercial Intelligence
- Profitability Analysis: Build systems to analyze customer groups and product lines.
- Support to drive margin analysis per customer (group) and product Line - including semi variable costs & R&D costs: (e.g. Engineering Costs, Prototype costs, claims etc).
- Decision Support: Provide data-driven insights to steer commercial strategy and pricing.
3. Operational Excellence & Efficiency
- Consolidate & interpret key variances with Plant Controllers and FP&A:
- Factory Insights: Analyze production variances (yield, labor, price) alongside the Std Costing and Engineering teams - and drive improvement actions.
- Material: PPV, usage, scrap/offcuts; allocation of chemicals/consumables/overheads to output.
- Labor: Direct Labor productivity, K‐factor trends.
- Turn variance analysis into focused actions (root cause, owner, due date, expected value); monitor closure
- Work with Costing & Production team to ensure processes are followed and improved where needed
- Lean Support: Collaborate with operational teams to quantify the financial impact of Lean/Kaizen projects and validate actual vs. planned savings.
- Asset Management: Drive Slow moving inventory reduction and optimize working capital/cash flow.
- Critical Challenger: Proactively challenges business assumptions using data to steer executive decisions.
- Capex ROI: Lead capital allocation reviews and perform "post-mortem" analysis on project business cases.
- Support Procurement with cost impact analysis, PPV drivers, and vendor/commercial terms assessment.