R2R Global Process Delivery and Change Manager

AstraZeneca is one of the world’s most exciting bio-pharmaceutical companies. From scientists to sales, lab techs to legal, we’re on a mission to turn ideas into life-changing medicines that improve patients’ lives and benefit society. We are active in over 130 countries, and we employ over 83,000 people. We are an innovation-driven biopharmaceutical with over 60 years of experience. Working here means being entrepreneurial, thinking big and working together to make the impossible a reality.

Global Finance Services (GFS) is AstraZeneca Finance’s financial services division covering Record to Report (including Controlling), Purchase to Pay, Contract to Cash, Performance and Management Reporting and Tax delivered from our in-house and BPO service centres located across the globe. GFS was established to support AstraZeneca’s Finance function on a transformation journey with the objective of delivering excellence in financial operations and insight through global simplification and standardization that enable our colleagues focus on AZ’s strategic priorities.

Record to Report’s (R2R) 2030 vision is to seamlessly deliver trusted financial reporting through scalable and sustainable R2R process excellence and there is a clear strategic roadmap in place to deliver the R2R vision. GFS R2R will play a key role in supporting the delivery of the R2R strategy, ensuring the transformation changes are effectively embedded within our processes and operating model.

GFS has two distinct operations - Middle Office (MO) and Back Office (BO). The R2R MO teams are aligned to the business areas and act as the single point of contact for their respective business area. The MO is customer aligned, providing controllership support and undertaking activities requiring judgement. The MOs are in three strategic locations - Warsaw (EMEA), San Jose (Americas) and Kuala Lumpur (Asia). The MO works closely with the BO to ensure the financial results are robust and processes are well controlled. The R2R BO delivers the standard, repeatable, transactional activities and is aligned to a process tower structure, ensuring process excellence is delivered whilst driving productivity through process efficiency and automation. The BO is delivered via both a BPO outsource provider and through an in-house shared service centre.

We are currently searching for candidates in the GFS Global Record to Report Team. This team drives the global process delivery and oversight for the R2R process tower, translating the R2R strategy into clear operational deliverables. The team drives the R2R global performance and service management, ensuring consistency across the service centres, as well as supporting the global transformation agenda. The role holder will report to the Controlling and Standardisation Associate Director and will work closely with the R2R Global Process Delivery Director (GPDD), the Record to Report Leadership team, the Global Process Owner team (GPO), the various finance teams (e.g. Group Reporting, Global Business Services, Tax, Commercial etc) as well as with the wider R2R teams within the sites to support the delivery of the R2R strategy and services.

GFS R2R’s vision is to provide globally consistent service to the business centred around our standardisation, automation, and continuous improvement agenda. The successful role holder will play a pivotal role in supporting the drive of process optimization, continuous improvement, and standardization of best practices across GFS, facilitating, and aligning objectives of cross-functional and cross-regional project teams in the region.

They will provide technical and functional support regarding the process to the relevant technology strategy and change implementations teams and support in deployment and training of individuals on the new and enhanced tools across the business to enable standardized effective processes. In addition, their process expertise will support issue resolution within BAU where required.

The finance area has to respond quickly to change within the business and the role holder will be required to proactively support the regional delivery centre to respond at speed through proactive engagement and effective communication, working through key changes with relevant stakeholders.

Typical Accountabilities

• Supporting the delivery of global processes by working through a matrix model with members of the various sites, setting deliverables and outcomes to ensure global consistency within the process tower.
• Working alongside the R2R GPDD and GPO teams to drive the standardisation agenda, ensuring standardisation initiatives are in line with the R2R strategic roadmap and providing oversight of implementation of these into the global sites.
• Act as the critical interface and provide technical and functional support regarding the process to the relevant technology strategy and broader business change implementation teams, ensuring that change management for all business change/projects impacting the R2R process is appropriate to mitigate risk to ongoing BAU delivery.
• Drive the R2R global service and performance management processes utilising a robust governance model to provide a joined up and holistic end to end view of R2R performance, data and analytics whilst providing clear linkages to the standardization and continuous improvement agenda.
• Provide deep analysis of core process and operational data with the aim to deliver tangible trends and insights to deliver outcomes at a tactical and strategic level across the full scope of R2R processes. This includes process standardization, process adherence, month end reporting, ways of working and dependencies.
• Working collaboratively with the GFS R2R Leads to identify and develop key measures and analytics across the R2R processes and technologies with the aim of developing consistent end to end measures across the R2R organization. The output of this will include setting and measuring contractual performance obligations for the BPO provider and in house shared service teams, as well as using these insights to develop and drive continuous improvement plans to improve process efficiency of R2R core processes.
• Leverage process and accounting knowledge to deploy new tools/visualizations to provide insights and process efficiency to the wider R2R team and GFS stakeholders in line with the Lean Digital agenda.
• Provide expertise to complex issue resolution within delivery centres with a clear focus on root cause analysis and remediation. Analyse and resolve issues arising in both businesses as usual and projects.
• Share process expertise and act as a point of contact for internal stakeholders and projects (e.g. Axial)
• Ensure project work demand is anticipated, managed, resourced, and communicated effectively

• Act as a deputy to the Associate Director- Controlling and Standardisation and coach R2R process analyst as relevant.

Education, Qualifications, Skills, and Experience

Essential

• Energetic, proactive, and self-motivated qualified finance professional with the capability to build strong internal and external relationships with stakeholders
• Solid understanding of finance and accounting principles including experience of accounting for complex transactions.
• Expertise in the end-to-end R2R process
• Demonstrable experience of delivering process optimization and identifying/implementing best practice within a process area.
• Experience of driving issue resolution across complex system and process landscapes.
• Cross boundary experience including building relationships remotely and cross-culturally.
• Ability to work well in and across diverse global teams whilst demonstrating strong ability to influence.
• Experience of effectively operating in a global organization with multiple delivery teams and stakeholders.
• Experience of implementing significant business change across different national and business boundaries.
• Track record of driving simplification and continuous improvement across key business processes.
• Experience of using lean concepts and digital tools (e.g. Power Platforms)

Desirable

• Ideal candidates will have specific industry and process experience including benchmarking.
• Project Management experience.

Date Posted

Closing Date

AstraZeneca embraces diversity and equality of opportunity. We are committed to building an inclusive and diverse team representing all backgrounds, with as wide a range of perspectives as possible, and harnessing industry-leading skills. We believe that the more inclusive we are, the better our work will be. We welcome and consider applications to join our team from all qualified candidates, regardless of their characteristics. We comply with all applicable laws and regulations on non-discrimination in employment (and recruitment), as well as work authorization and employment eligibility verification requirements.