Senior Manager, Financial Performance & Strategy

The Senior Manager, Financial Performance & Strategy, will be assigned to specific client accounts and will be responsible for driving the overall profitability and customer experience of their assigned accounts.  In Supply Chain Channel Management, we often call senior managers, “Leads,” because the ideal candidate will fully own program performance monitoring, decision making, communication to leadership, prioritization of work across SCM teams when necessary, and pushing the broader SCM group for full potential results both on financial performance and customer experience metrics.  As the supply chain owner for specific accounts, this person will be seen as the decision maker for the account within supply chain and will need to be comfortable leading and influencing others to achieve program goals.

The successful candidate must be a self-starter with experience leading a team of direct and indirect reports.  The successful candidate must possess strong financial, analytical, problem solving, and basic project management skills as well as be able to work cross-functionally with Asurion supply chain and finance stakeholders. The ideal candidate will have a proven track record of 1) building or analyzing financial analyses and using the results to implement business changes across a cross-functional team and 2) influencing other teams to reach full potential on program financial and customer experience targets.

ESSENTIAL FUNCTIONS

Program decision making

• Own all aspects of business strategy and prioritization work on financial or customer-experience decisions.  This includes building or leading a team to build a financial scenario analysis, making a recommendation on the best path forward to leadership, prioritizing that work for a cross-functional team, and building commitment across that cross-functional team to implement a change in strategy.
• Understand and validate accuracy of complex financial modeling built by others.  Use this modeling to make recommendations to the business on areas where we have not optimized value or performance has declined.  
• Ability to understand program economics related to risk ownership and use this understanding to guide decisions for maximizing profitability.
• Provide inputs into pricing exercises, including highlighting potential opportunities or risks.  These inputs will be gathered from dashboards or analysis from multiple sources but will potentially need to be adjusted to address each pricing exercise.
• This person will be responsible for creating or directing a team to create compelling material and commentary and will present this information to supply chain leadership to explain financial findings, business cases, and monthly results/priorities. 

Performance tracking and monitoring

• Be the SCM voice to question “why things are as they are” and continually push the team for improvement that is in keeping with Asurion’s core values.
• Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for their program and work with teams across supply chain to ensure there is appropriate ownership and monitoring for their metrics. Constantly evaluate KPIs to ensure the most impactful metrics are being prioritized accordingly. Ensure the appropriate forums exist for discussing KPIs with key partners across supply chain.
• Ability to understand financial, customer experience, and operational impacts of program changes as accounts evolve and ensure teams are aware of changes and understand how these changes impact performance monitoring.
• Lead a team to effectively monitor and explain changes in program performance.  This will require cross-functional work with the supply chain teams to understand root causes of issues as well as articulating what the team is doing to address the issues. Hold teams accountable to deliver on commitments.
• Understand financial impact of movements in KPIs to help prioritize work for self, direct, and indirect reports.
• Understand and hold teams accountable for documenting supply chain processes and guiding principles.  If current guiding principles do not make sense or are not aligned with contract/client requirements, propose changes and work with the necessary stakeholders to make changes.  This will help identify process gaps, similarities and differences by program that may need to be standardized, and identify potential areas to explore for initiative savings.
• Serve as an inspector in forums such as the WPM and initiative meeting, asking critical questions about impacts to metrics. Influence others to investigate issues and hold them accountable to report back findings to the broader program team.
• Create and guide direct reports to follow an intentional and consistent performance management structure so that working teams and leadership have regular and predictable forums to review and challenge each other to reach for full potential.

Program communication

• Working with supply chain team and finance, coordinate flow of information and assimilate data necessary to prepare required weekly and monthly dashboarding and presentations that will be used in meetings.
• Effectively communicate holistic program performance and metrics in standard weekly and monthly forums such as the MBR and Monthly Operations Review
• Ability to determine when performance needs to be escalated and communicated to executive leadership across the organization
• Serve as a key business connection between supply chain, Program Management, and finance, communicating changes, trends, and forecast inputs to finance so as to keep our financial projections as updated as possible.

Issue Management

• In a complex and dynamic business such as ours, things break and exceptions arise.  When alerted by leaders across supply chain of an event that requires research, this person will work with the supply chain team to identify what happened and what we may need to do to fix it.
• Identify root causes of issues and hold the supply chain team accountable to fix processes in sustainable ways.
• Determine when issues are impactful enough that escalation is needed to drive resolution (examples include systematic or operational issues that need immediate prioritization or focus). Escalate to leadership and communicate progress on resolution to stakeholders.

Project Management

• Constantly solicit ideas for initiatives and projects that could help drive financial benefit from partners and stakeholders
• Compile or validate analysis to determine financial benefit of initiatives
• Lead alignment conversations with cross-functional teams to prioritize and execute initiatives that improve processes or financial results
• Hold team members accountable for pulling together project plan timelines and deliverables

MINIMUM REQUIREMENTS

Skills/Knowledge: 

• Bachelor’s Degree and 6+ years work experience in Finance, Accounting, or Project Management required.  If experience falls outside of these disciplines, then candidate must show cross-functional work experience that demonstrates aptitude to create and analyze financial information, form business recommendations, and implement those strategies across a cross-functional team.
• Experience with financial or analytical scenario analysis in excel with complex data sets.
• The ability to develop and teach others to use complex formulas, perform calculations and demonstrate how data was derived and then use this analysis to make business recommendations.
• Systems aptitude
• Position requires a strong verbal & written communication skill set and the ability to communicate complex financial and operational data well with all levels of management as well as across various disciplines.
• Demonstrated ability to challenge the status quo and ask tough questions in large forums to constantly look for ways to improve processes
• Ability to maintain multiple/overlapping deadlines and deliver in a timely order
• Experience leading a team preferred (1-3 people).  The ideal candidate will have experience delegating responsibilities and holding a team accountable to delivering on results.
• A self-directed individual with a strong ability to manage ambiguity and who adapts readily and easily to changes in priorities and business conditions
• Ability to indirectly lead and influence a large group of subject matter experts across many leadership levels through complex problems to achieve desired outcomes
• Ability to excel in an open, flexible, results-oriented, performance-based environment