Head of Costing

Position Title: Head of Costing 

Location: Remote

Role Purpose 

• Develop business insights in areas relating to costs and inventory. Advise stakeholders at units (MD, Commercial, FP&A lead etc.) on key factors affecting costs, margin and variances.
• Provide leadership to product costing and operational analysis on a global scale by focusing on quality, efficiency and timeliness.
• Optimize resource utilization and unlock capacity by standardization, process improvement and automation.
• Collaborate with operational teams (Commercial, supply chain, manufacturing and procurement) both at market and divisional levels in identifying opportunities (cost reduction, margin improvement, stock obsolescence avoidance, analysis of variances) and support implementation of action plan.

Principal Accountabilities and Key Activities 

• Business insights and business partnering

• Develop business insights relating to costs, variances and operational efficiency.
• Benchmark performance of plants in terms of production cost and demonstrate the rationale for unit cost movement
• Maintain robust variance analysis (price and factory) and ensure standard processes are adhered to and rationale behind the numbers are correctly interpreted with relevant business context.
• Advise market/cluster/divisional management/ FP&A teams on reason for variances including capacity utilization and profitability impact.
• Collaborate with wider business teams in planning and forecasting activities and application of judgements in the best possible ways to have solid assumptions behind plans and forecast.
• Partner with operations teams in decisions involving plant operations that have a financial aspect such as alignment on manufacturing productivity savings and improvement in cost structure due to operational changes.

• Product costing

• Lead end to product costing processes for Coats subsidiaries – Annual & Routine
• Partner with plant operational personnel (manufacturing, supply chain) to ensure that accurate and valid assumptions relating to allocation of costs, capacity utilization and production volume data.
• Ensure accuracy of Production Planning and Material Management components that affects the accuracy of product costs – BoM, Routing, Material Master etc.
• Collaborate with industrial engineering and commercial teams in determining costs of new products. Play an active role in leading discussion relating to operational resource requirement and cost impact of new products.

• Strategy/Project leadership and support

• Play an active role in projects that aim at optimizing plant operations or inventory rationalization by providing guidance and insights.
• Guidance on business decisions such as make or buy, outsourcing decisions.
• Assess the impact on profitability from critical business decisions that have a bearing on conversion cost and production levels.

• Team Management

• Develop team members including the new recruits by assigning systematic training plan after considering the areas of strength and areas of improvement at individual level.
• Deliver the service expectations and consistently exceed them. Ensure building a high performance team to support the wider consolidation move. In steady state post all consolidation, this will be a 20+ team
• Motivate team to develop Individual Development Plans (IDP) and support them in their pursuit of their career goals.
• Put in place a robust succession plan and ensure that team is exposed to all required activities to gain required skillsets and knowledge to be on a progressive career path.
• Structure work allocation ensuring backups for all major activities so that absence delivery is not hindered due to the absence of resources during critical times (Example – month close, annual costing)

Education, Qualifications and Experience

Essential

• Qualified Accountant with minimum 5 years of accounting and finance experience.
• Certified/Qualified Accountant: An accountant certified by a professional accounting body (Chartered accountant or Cost and Management Accountant)
• Minimum of 15 years of post-qualification work experience with a product manufacturing organisation with at least 10 years of experience in handling product costing activities on SAP platform.
• Expert knowledge of SAP FI, CO, MM and PP modules and understanding of SAP SD module and Business Warehousing (BW).
• Expert level proficiency in MS office applications - particularly Microsoft excel programming using VBA and MS PowerPoint.
• Data mining and analytics experience – hands on experience in analysing complex and vast data relating to production, inventory and costs and develop actionable insight.
• Expert in product costing, inventory valuation and operational analysis and all related accounting practices and regulatory framework including transfer pricing rules.
• Team management and remote workforce coordination experience. Experience in collaborating with remote teams.
• Highly analytical – experience in deep dive into millions of lines of data and present insights to top management in effective but non-technical way without losing substance of findings.
• Effective written and oral communication and ability to interact efficiently with colleagues of all levels (top, mid-level management and operational staff) of different countries.

Desirable

• Self-motivated and self-starter.
• Ability to understand complex business problems and develop practical solutions on a timely manner.
• Self-learner: Continuous learning and improvements
• Flexible to work in multiple time zones collaborating with remote teams working for different regions.
• Versatility – Ability to learn new areas and willingness to accept challenges.

At Coats Group, we are committed to innovation, excellence, and fostering a diverse and collaborative environment where every team member can thrive. If you are passionate about making an impact in the textile industry and eager to join a global leader with a rich heritage and a forward-thinking approach, we invite you to take the next step in your career with us.