Finance Business Partner

About the role
Based in Dubai and reporting to the Finance Director, MISA is a Senior Leadership position within the management team for the Foodservice business. The key objectives of this role are to partner with the senior management team to grow the overall business profitability and ensure that there is a clear long-term strategic plan for the business which is aligned with the overall regional plan. The role also incorporates a strong business partnering role in terms of strategy, policy, and risk management. Ensuring the integrity of the overall financial reporting and processes is also a critical element of the role.
The Business Partner will be a hands-on senior financial business manager with a strong bias for action, demonstrable track record in driving bottom line impact through financial partnering, self-starting capabilities, and ability to navigate and influence effectively across a range of functions, markets, and environments. The role holder will lead by example in facilitating a high performing team culture.
The successful candidate will also be expected to support cross-functional initiatives. The position is a flexing role most suited to a commercially astute and ambitious person who is naturally comfortable working autonomously and acting with a high degree of stakeholder engagement and buy-in. The successful candidate will be a strong team player, capable of demonstrating key leadership competencies and working in a fast-paced and dynamic environment.

Key responsibilities

1. Ensuring that profitability forecasting for the business is accurate and constantly reviewed to reflect changing market dynamics. This will incorporate sales/raw material and cost forecasting and will span across all the various manufacturing sites.
2. Coordination and analysis of performance across all functions using defined Enterprise Performance Metrics (EPM) as defined by the overall organisation e.g. Gross Margin Adherence to Target, Conversion Cost, Shippable %.
3. Preparation of various reports (monthly, yearly, and strategic) for the Foodservice business. This will incorporate:
1. Reporting of business wins/losses to understand changing business dynamics.
2. Reporting and challenging the business pipeline to ensure alignment with business strategy.
3. Development of Business Intelligence reporting in the area of Customers, Competitors, and Suppliers.
4. Constantly striving to improve overall margin through the following:
1. Working with functions such as Procurement/Supply Chain/Sales to ensure we secure, anchor and retain raw material cost and process improvement benefits via the market costing approach.
2. Constantly challenging the business to ensure we are maximizing our margins across all customer types and product families.
3. Working cross-functionally on various initiatives such as business rules, customer segmentation, and SKU rationalization to ensure that unnecessary complexity is removed from the system.
5. Play a lead role in the area of risk management for the business which will involve collaborating with business, procurement, and central risk management teams to define the risk strategies for key raw materials and trading currencies and report on net positions to support commercial decision making.
6. Demonstrate strategic leadership and flawless excellence in execution around the critical areas of debtors and cost management.

As a senior manager on the Foodservice Leadership team you should:
• Raise the bar in terms of standards of performance across all functions.
• Ensure talent management and succession planning strategy is executed for the finance function within the team and align workforce planning with overall Finance structure regionally and globally.
• Play a leadership role in the business in constructively challenging the status quo, identifying and embedding new processes and ways of working.
• Drive a continuous improvement mind-set across all finance processes to ensure elimination of inefficiencies.
• Strategic business partner for the Foodservice Leadership Team.
• Coordinate with finance peers to ensure the timely and accurate completion of forecasts and actual results reporting.

Qualifications and skills

1. Degree or professional certificate in Accountancy/Finance.
2. 5 - 8 years of experience in accounting and/or financial analysis.
3. Proficiency with Microsoft Excel is required; familiarity with data query/data management tools extremely helpful (Microsoft Word, Power Point, Access, SQL, Business Objects).
4. Knowledge of ERP, ideally SAP and related data analysis tools are an added advantage.
5. Strong project management skills essential with broad understanding of functional workings of each department within a standalone business.
6. Self-starter who can manage fluctuating workloads and projects using a high degree of initiative.
7. Strong team player with a clear focus on stakeholder engagement and solution delivery.
8. Extensive P&L Management (including margin & risk management).
9. Excellent numerical and verbal reasoning.
10. Excellent data analysis & insight led solutions orientation.