Finance Lead South Africa

About Kerry

Kerry is the world's leading taste and nutrition company for the food, beverage and pharmaceutical industries. Every day we partner with customers to create healthier, tastier and more sustainable products that are consumed by billions of people across the world. Our vision is to be our customers' most valued partner, creating a world of sustainable nutrition. A career with Kerry offers you an opportunity to shape the future of food while providing you opportunities to explore and grow in a truly global environment.

About the role

The role of Finance Lead SA is a Senior Leadership position within the management team for the South African 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 Finance Lead SA 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.

Key responsibilities

• 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
• Coordination and analysis of performance across all functions using defined Enterprise Performance Metrics (EPM) as defined by the overall organization, e.g., Gross Margin Adherence to Target, Conversion Cost, Shippable %
• Preparation of various reports (monthly, yearly and strategic) for the South Africa business. This will incorporate:
• Reporting of business wins/losses to understand changing business dynamics
• Reporting and challenging the business pipeline to ensure alignment with business strategy
• Development of Business Intelligence reporting in the area of Customers, Competitors and Suppliers
• Constantly striving to improve overall margin through the following
• 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.
• Constantly challenging the business to ensure we are maximizing our margins across all customer types and product families.
• 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
• 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.
• Demonstrate strategic leadership and flawless excellence in execution around the critical areas of debtors and cost management.
• As a senior manager on the South African 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.

Qualifications and skills

• Bachelor’s degree or foreign equivalent in accounting/finance/business or related area
• 7 or more years of professional experience
• Extensive P&L Management (including margin & risk management)
• Excellent numerical and verbal reasoning
• Excellent data analysis & insight led solutions orientation
• Development and utilization of performance-based measurements
• Strong Project Management skills/experience
• Proficient in Microsoft Office suite
• SAP experience an advantage
• Fluent in English with other language capability an advantage

For further information, and to apply, please visit our website via the “Apply” button below.