AstraZeneca is a leading global biopharmaceutical company. We believe the best way we can help patients is to focus on breakthrough science to uncover disease mechanisms and develop novel, targeted therapies that interact with them. This is at the heart of our purpose as a company: to push the boundaries of science to deliver life-changing medicines.
As the Asia Area Finance Business Partner, you will support the Asia Area Chief Financial Officer in ensuring strategic alignment between International Finance and Commercial leadership and ultimately driving achievement of the agreed growth drivers and Area Profit and Loss.
The Area Finance Business Partner is a key local role, providing robust and insightful decision support to Area Business and Finance management team to enable delivery of our financial objectives at both operational and strategic level.
The role will be responsible for delivering accurate and timely Reporting and Management of performance to deliver targets/objectives across the Area, owning the planning and forecasting process as well as support key finance projects impacting the Area. This will involve liaising with international region, markets and commercial teams and ensuring Area performance is fully understood with mitigation/actions in place if required.
Business partnering:
- Contribute to ensure strategic and operational objectives of the business are delivered
- Supporting and providing clarity through financial/business analysis/benchmarks to Area leaders/markets to facilitate the decision-making process
- Ensuring accurate forecast (including implementation of new forecasting models)
- Close collaboration with markets and Area commercialteam to understand key business drivers such as markets, competitors, share of voice ensuring knowledge dissemination
- Future new launches support including business cases, business model definition, what if scenarios, projections, trend analysis and resourcing
- Provide finance insights into Area business cases, financial modelling and meaningful information consolidation
- Report on monthly sales estimates and actual sales to Area leadership team, providing meaningful variance analysis commentary
- Work closely with the regional head office on budget setting, spend monitoring, set targets and plans to mitigate if there is a risk to the full year spend
- Lead and collaborate on key strategic projects and working with stakeholders on high priority questions and decisions
- Develop plans, forecasts, and analyses for strategic initiatives and ad hoc projects, including new business divisions / markets / products analysis, strategic decision-making in day-to-day operations, and other growth initiatives
- Be agile and support ad hoc and key projects cross area as per business needs and priorities by the leadership team
Business Planning Processes:
- Deliver high quality PB (Phased Budget), RBU’s (Rolling Business Updates) and MTP (Mid Term Planning)
- Ensuring markets are organised to submit timely and in line with requirements
- Delivering / managing the PB/RBU/MTP and MBR MPR Processes
- Allocating targets (sales / investment / profit) to markets based on robust analysis / benchmarking
- Ensuring high quality business planning reviews allowing confident decision making / review
- Oversight of Inventory tracking across key markets
- Manage interactions with GFS/AREA/markets and collaboration with International Finance
- Drive standardization and harmonization across the Area
Area Finance Business Partner Network Development and Process Optimisation:
- Organise and run regular virtual Finance Business Partner network meetings and annual Finance Business Partner workshop
- Provide regular expert support for selected local markets in the area, and act as their conduit for project deliverables, and information
- Identify opportunities to deliver on regional and global specialist finance objectives
- Provide support to markets in identifying and resolving process inefficiencies
- Drive the simplification agenda in Asia Area with the appropriate implementation of harmonised global processes
Qualifications Required:
- Finance/Business related degree or other equivalent level academic qualification
- Minimum qualification level: Chartered Accountant, ACCA
Experience Required:
- Extensive work in a Finance Function
- Significant area/region/group level project work
- Working with Senior Management International project management, ideally including internal and external stakeholders
Skills Required:
- Thriving in a position with both high levels of visibility and recognition, combining strong technical abilities with solid business partnering experience
- Ability to rapidly adapt to and learn about the requirements and details of highly diverse projects, with the ambition to drive process improvement and simplification
- Ability to independently set, adapt and communicate priorities with multiple concurrent projects
- Professional and subject orientated communication and delivery on projects with tight timelines
- Excellent communicator, able to build good working relationships with highly diverse internal stakeholders at group and market level, from operational to board level
