Business Analyst - Finance Analytics & Reporting
Grainger is a broad line, business-to-business distributor of maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) supplies and other related products and services. More than 3.2 million businesses and institutions worldwide rely on Grainger for products such as safety gloves, ladders, motors and janitorial supplies, along with services like inventory management and technical support. These customers represent a broad collection of industries including commercial, government, healthcare and manufacturing. They place orders online, on mobile devices, through sales representatives, over the phone and at local branches. Approximately 5,000 suppliers provide Grainger with more than 1.6 million products stocked in Grainger’s distribution centers and branches worldwide.
Primary Purpose
The Finance Analytics & Reporting team oversees the creation, production, and management of key metrics, dashboards, databases, and tools used to make business decisions in Grainger Finance. The primary role of this position is to identify systemic solutions that solve critical financial and business needs for Grainger’s North America business units, which drives results for $8B of revenue and $2B of expense.
The primary role of this position is to serve as financial advisor integrating systemic solutions that solve critical financial and business needs for the Grainger US business units. This role will help management navigate automated solutions while driving strategic decision support to finance, sales, operations, and all other functional areas. He or she is a strong business partner who must work directly with leaders of each GUS Business Unit and Grainger Enterprise System Teams on topics such as financial analyses and profitability focusing on streamlining/automating processes or analyses, sales growth strategies, productivity, KPI’s for any business unit function, and other analytical needs that involve systemic solutions. He or she will rotate through providing financial and technical expertise to any and/or all Business units based on priority.
Key Responsibilities
- Function as a liaison working with stakeholders in order to elicit, analyze, communicate, and validate requirements for changes to business processes, policies and information systems.
- Understand business problems and opportunities in the context of the requirements, recommends, and implements solutions that enable the organization to achieve its goals.
- Ability to use A3 Thinking to identify the tasks, knowledge, and techniques required to determine and assess proposed solutions to business problems.
- System Development – Analysis work performed to review the current stated solutions used by an organization, to identify the issues, define the requirements, and suggest best possible solutions, in addition to configuration development and testing.
- Continuous Improvement – Analysis work to review current manual or workflow activities and tasks performed by people, functional areas, and systems, which are designed to achieve a specific outcome, while assuring data quality/integrity. Understands relationships, information exchanges/handoffs, procedures, policies, and observations of work performed to achieve specific outcomes. Within the context of the relationship with the business, assures alignment for continuous improvement within the systems landscape.
- Quickly build relationships and partner with management to provide solutions that will drive strategy and organizational vision to all functional areas in the business.
- Provide financial advice and recommendations to all levels within the organization.
- Develop financial analyses to support the growth and productivity metrics KPI’s in the business unit through continuous improvement of data extraction and end-user functionality.
- Provide recommendations and lead discussions with leadership to understand business gaps in order to provide analytical solutions and an implementation plans that includes a systemic component to reduce time spent on data mining or validating the integrity of data.
- Work cross-functionally with other businesses on initiatives and new projects, to ensure standardization (SOP’s) is being utilized if applicable when helping each business unit.
- Document procedures and processes appropriately to build a library of solutions that future business units can leverage.
Requirements
- Bachelor degree in Accounting, Finance or equivalent.
- 2 - 4 years in progressive finance roles.
- Working knowledge with big data and related data analytics tools (e.g. R, VBA, Python)
- Working experience with emerging reporting tools and technologies (e.g. Tableau, BusinessObjects).
- Working experience in SQL coding across enterprise data warehouses (e.g. Teradata,).
- Working system knowledge of SAP
- Working competency in relevant financial skills such as P&L analysis along with other various decision making financial analysis tools.
- Broad business knowledge and organizational awareness as well as an understanding of business profitability drivers.
- Proven analytic and quantitative decision making skills.
- Excellent verbal and written communication skills and the ability to interface effectively with senior team members.
- The ability to influence decision making processes without having specific authority.
- Ability to operate in a complex, rapidly changing environment, and the ability to balance and prioritize work on multiple projects.
- Must be technologically savvy in order to drive effective means of analyzing and reporting critical business information.
This role requires providing leadership and guidance in financial matters and the need to interface at very senior levels of the organization. A strong work ethic and results orientation is required to succeed in a fast paced, customer focused environment. Strong team skills are required in order to be effective in integrating solutions to support the business going forward.
Impact on the Organization
- Responsible for integrating financial analyses with system based solutions regardless of that business unit being on SAP or not.
- Directly influences the adoption and implementation of new or improved processes in Grainger’s business departments and application development environment.
- Through accurate problem identification, determination, and documentation, the position can reduce the mean time to repair for the organization, and influence current/future development efforts through root cause determination.
- The performance of this position will impact how the department coordinates technology and change throughout the organization.
- Demonstrate and bridge the gap between lines of business and IT and is often a key player brought in early to complete projects that fuel business objectives.
- Facilitate project lifecycle management; provide high quality analysis based on facts is vital to the process of delivering business system solutions.
Work Partnerships and Relationships
Reports to the Manager, Business Analysis & Reporting and interfaces with all levels of management within the GUS business units along with the Enterprise systems organization.