Senior Functional Analyst, Finance Performance Management and Digital Enablement
Role purpose
Own the business and functional operation of the financial planning platform across North America. Ensure accurate financial outputs, reliable planning cycles, effective user support, and controlled changes across SAC Planning and its project reporting (ProjectDash) and SAP integrations.
Combine financial analysis with platform expertise, training, communication, issue resolution, and coordination across Accounting (CFR), Project Management (CPM), Financial Excellence (FE), FPM, and IT. Own coordination of the annual changeover of master data, hierarchies, mappings, and metadata.
Support the planned transition from SAC to Anaplan in approximately three years, followed by SAP E1P to P22 in approximately four years. Continue functional ownership of the planning platform after both transitions.
Core financial and platform responsibilities
Financial planning and forecasting tool enablement
• Own the functional and system coordination of NAM planning processes for monthly forecasts, budgets, and multi-year outlooks covering FY+1 through FY+3, aligned with global guidance and NAM requirements.
• Support commercial project managers (CPM) and FPMs to validate project and business gross profit (GP), free cash flow (FCF), warranty, loss provisions, and balance sheet logic across BUs and Legal Entities.
• Partner with SAC support, CPMs and finance managers to resolve material discrepancies and validation errors before submission deadlines, supporting accurate executive reporting.
SAC and integrated planning support
• Serve as the functional subject matter expert for SAC Planning, including data actions, calculated measures, account logic, mappings, stories, and performance.
• Stabilize ProjectDash and SAC Planning integration through cross-system reconciliation, validation-threshold review, and clarification of business rules.
• Translate finance needs into specifications and acceptance criteria. Challenge proposed technical solutions where their financial logic or outputs are incorrect.
Service delivery and user enablement
Issue resolution and change management
• Own issue intake, the functional backlog, business-impact assessment, prioritization recommendations, and follow-through to resolution, using incident tickets, change requests, and shared issue logs.
• Support investigation of GP and FCF discrepancies, warranty creation and usage, project issues, balance sheet misstatements, and revenue or cost misalignment across systems.
• Support root-cause sessions with IT, business team, application support, and offshore teams. Distinguish financial-rule, process, source-data, mapping, and application causes.
• Support validation of fixes in test environments and confirm correct production results and business acceptance before closure. Escalate unresolved risks with financial impact, deadlines, and recommended actions.
Coordination across CFR, CPM, FE, FPM, and IT
• Maintain a common action and decision log with named owners, dependencies, due dates, and escalation routes.
• Facilitate agreement on accounting requirements, project logic, planning processes, source data, and expected system behavior. Obtain decisions from the appropriate domain owners.
• Coordinate delivery and communicate status while finance owners retain accounting approvals and technical teams retain deployment and integration authority.
Training and communications
• Own the training calendar, user onboarding, workshops, office hours, and individual CPM and finance-user coaching.
• Maintain practical process instructions, FAQs, reference materials, and a searchable knowledge base. Check whether users can complete critical tasks independently.
• Communicate planning deadlines, process changes, releases, outages, known issues, workarounds, and required user actions.
• Prepare clear leadership summaries explaining financial exposure, operational risks, trade-offs, and decisions required.
Process improvement and analytics
• Standardize planning processes and project reporting across the portfolio. Map processes, identify recurring causes of errors, and reduce manual work and repeated incidents.
• Contribute to SAC optimization, planning-form redesign, predictive analytics, and appropriate AI-enabled finance improvements.
• Work with Digital Transformation and Data teams to improve usability and insight delivery through relevant reporting, data, and automation tools.
Annual financial year changeover
Own the changeover calendar and runbook from preparation through post-changeover support. Coordinate approved inputs, dependencies, testing, business acceptance, and reopening readiness across finance and IT.
• Collect and reconcile approved master-data, metadata, mapping, and account, entity, and alternate-hierarchy changes. Maintain effective dates and version history.
• Execute authorized SAC changes and coordinate upstream SAP, interface, automation, and technical changes with the responsible teams.
• Coordinate metadata freezes and restarts, cleanup of unused members, approved archival or backup, and preservation of historical reporting. Obtain approval before deleting metadata.
• Manage current-year to prior-year hierarchy treatment where permitted by close requirements, respecting elimination-specific restrictions.
• Coordinate fiscal-year updates in planning forms, dashboards, data actions, HANA views, and year-specific scripts or calculations.
• Validate SAP-to-planning comparisons, final actuals, planning seeding, mappings, financial rollups, allocation rules, and divisional validation rules.
• Coordinate access reviews, data locks, release or transport approvals, and recovery arrangements. Complete hierarchy changes before dependent historical elimination recalculations.
• Obtain the relevant business and technical acceptance, retain completion evidence, communicate reopening and user actions, and provide training and post-changeover support.
Anaplan and P22 transition readiness
• Document financial rules, data definitions, source-to-target mappings, interfaces, reconciliations, controls, and reporting requirements so they can be reused across both transitions.
• Represent NAM finance in requirements, design reviews, data preparation, testing, user acceptance, training, and cutover preparation for Anaplan.
• Assess the interim E1P environment and the later P22 impact on the planning platform, interfaces, mappings, and reconciliations in line with the approved implementation design.
• Maintain current planning operations while delivering agreed project work. Escalate capacity or priority conflicts to FPM and the relevant project owners.
Required skills and experience
• Typically 5–7 years of relevant experience in finance systems, SAC Planning, SAP, and large-scale EPM platforms, with strong financial judgment.
• Solid understanding of forecasting, budgeting, cash flow, project financial mechanics, and financial reconciliation.
• Hands-on SAC Planning functional support, including investigation of data actions, calculated measures, account logic, mappings, stories, and user issues.
• Experience governing master data, hierarchies, mappings, and metadata, including annual financial-year or planning changeover.
• Ability to trace discrepancies across financial rules, processes, source data, and system behavior and quantify their business impact.
• Experience translating requirements into clear specifications, coordinating changes, testing results, and maintaining approval and closure evidence.
• Proven training, facilitation, written communication, and stakeholder-management skills across finance and IT in a matrix organization.
• Strong Excel and analytical skills, disciplined documentation, and the ability to prioritize time-critical issues during forecast and year-end cycles.
Preferred skills and experience
• Anaplan implementation, planning-model support, or migration from another enterprise planning platform.
• SAP finance transformation or ERP migration experience, including interface and data-reconciliation work.
• Familiarity with ProjectDash, SAC Planning, and related tools such as SAP HANA, Snowflake, Power BI, SharePoint, and Power Automate.
• Experience with planning-process automation, predictive analytics, or practical AI applications in finance.
