The Business Process Owner (BPO) for Financial Planning is responsible for designing, governing, and continuously improving the end-to-end forecasting processes across the organization. This role serves as the key liaison between Finance, IT, and business stakeholders to ensure forecasting processes are efficient, standardized, and aligned with strategic objectives. The BPO plays a critical role in enabling accurate, timely, and insightful financial forecasts that support decision-making by the CFO, Group FP&A, BU Finance directors, Pricing Managers, Sales Controllers, Plant Controllers and FP&A teams. 
This role includes the process, system and tool enablement of the financial planning processes, closely related to SAP Analytics Cloud (SAC) to manage the process optimizations hand in hand with the right tool support. The role requires identifying and prioritizing business requirements and coordinating implementation from design to release. The individual will manage change (training and communication) with the SAC user community, monitor data quality, and collaborate with model managers to enhance SAC functionalities. In addition to ensuring standardized and optimized business processes, this role is responsible for fostering positive SAC user experience by delivering user-oriented solutions and actively maintaining stakeholder satisfaction within the SAC user community.

Responsibilities 
Process design, optimization and continuous improvement 

Tasks & Activities
•    Define and drive the global strategy for financial planning, ensuring continuous alignment with business growth and transformation goal
•    Drive global harmonization of planning processes across all business units and regions, balancing standardization with local needs
•    Serve as a trusted advisor to the CFO and executive team on all matters related to financial planning innovation and digitalization
•    Define and maintain the global standard for financial forecasting processes
•    Develop and document process maps, policies, and procedures
•    Ensure alignment with corporate planning cycles and financial reporting requirements
•    Oversee the execution of forecasting cycles, ensuring adherence to timelines and quality standards
•    Act as the first point of contact for process-related queries and escalations
•    Maintain close collaboration with the Finance Global Process Owner to align financial forecasting and transactional finance processes, ensuring that process improvements are coordinated effectively.
•    Support local finance teams in applying the standard forecasting process
•    Identify process inefficiencies and lead initiatives to enhance accuracy, speed, and usabilityStrong command of integrated business planning methodologies and financial forecasting best practices
•    Ability to design and implement robust process controls and compliance frameworks across planning cycles
•    Collaborate with data and analytics teams to integrate predictive forecasting techniques
•    Engage with key stakeholders (e.g., FP&A, Controlling, Business Units) to gather requirements and feedback
•    Facilitate cross-functional workshops and training sessions
•    Communicate process changes and updates effectively across the organization
•    Monitor and report on process KPIs and identify corrective actions when KPI are not up to the norm  

Responsibilities
•    Own the end-to-end financial forecasting process and ensure its effectiveness and compliance
•    Act as a change agent to drive adoption of standardized forecasting practices
•    Monitor process performance using KPIs and implement corrective actions as needed
•    Ensure documentation is up-to-date and accessible to all relevant stakeholders
•    Represent the Planning CoE in global forums and governance bodies related to forecasting

Tasks & Activities
•    Solution lead Planning & Forecasting (by SAC) having a clear “product” vision and development roadmap, lead the evaluation and adoption of emerging technologies (e.g., AI-driven forecasting, advanced analytics) to future-proof financial planning capabilities
•    Working with SAC user community, proactively seek and identify current and future requirements of business or improvement potentials
•    Assess demands, check cross-domain integration, feasibility, and effort
•    Prepare prioritization of demands and plan demand pipeline
•    Coordinate implementation from design to test & release, including user community sign off 
•    Prioritize incident resolutions by assigning them to development resources (internal & external)
•    Plan change management & enablement, lead communication w/ SAC user community 
•    Monitor quality and data processing efficiency for data models and overall SAC to pro-actively derive enhancements
•    Collaborate with SAC model managers: create value adding use cases, foster self-service and explorative BI, promote existing managed data models & functionalities
•    Design SAC technical architecture including interfaces and tool selections; continuously optimize SAC architecture and landscape to reflect business requirements

Responsibilities
•    Solution lead of SAC (and corresponding data process)
•    Approval of demands for SAC implementation (in alignment with business priorities; up to certain effort limit) 
•    Approval of transport to production (releases)
•    Responsible for performance, standardization, technical data quality and well-functioning of SAC architecture; compliance with defined technical guidelines

Education & Experience required    
•    BSC or MSC, MBA 
•    Fluent English is a must, any additional European language is welcome
•    8+ years of experience in financial planning & analysis (FP&A), controlling, or finance operations with a proven experience in financial planning process ownership and process improvement with at least 3–5 years in a senior specialist role 
•    Expert-level understanding of integrated business planning (IBP), driver-based forecasting, and rolling forecasts in manufacturing industries 
•    Proven track record of delivering complex planning solutions at scale, ideally in a global context, incl. strong project and resource management skills (incl. agile methodologies, e.g., SCRUM)
•    3+ years of people management experience
•    Leadership, training and coaching skills
•    Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a continuous improvement mindset.
•    Excellent communication and stakeholder management abilities
•    Ability to work independently and collaboratively in a global, matrixed environment
•    Structured, detail-oriented, and capable of managing multiple priorities
•    Strong coordination skills, collaboration with key stakeholder is a must
•    Expert knowledge of requirements engineering, data modelling & systems design, visualizations
•    Expert knowledge of SAC customizing and programming capabilities
•    Knowledge of DWH/ETL, SAC, architectures and tools
•    Ability and interest to identify and introduce new technologies and methods
•    Regularly follow up new developments and the SAP roadmap to stay on top of new technical functionalities and how they can be used for Trivium

Language:  

English    Level of proficiency: Business