Job Summary
The Director, Business Performance plays a pivotal enterprise wide role in driving value creation across Elementis. You lead the end to end performance insight agenda across Strategy & Innovation, Commercial and Supply Chain, and Manufacturing and Procurement, ensuring the organisation has a single, integrated view of financial performance. You act as a senior strategic partner to the CFO, Executive Team, and functional leaders, providing challenge, insight, and decision support across the full value chain. You lead a team who deliver deep functional and cross functional analysis, scenario modelling, and performance insights. The role will work closely with the Head of Group Financial Planning & Reporting (the owner of Group reporting and planning) to deliver business performance insights. This role is central to ensuring Elementis operates with a “one version of the truth” mindset, enabling better decisions, stronger accountability, and a disciplined performance rhythm. You also own the company’s efficiency and simplification agenda, ensuring cost, productivity, and value creation initiatives are tracked, governed, and delivered.
Job Description
Responsibilities
1. End‑to‑End Value Chain Performance Management
- You own performance analysis and insight across Strategy & Innovation, Commercial and Supply Chain, and Manufacturing and Procurement, ensuring a holistic view of value creation across the organisation.
- Deliver the flash results narrative to the CEO, CFO, Group Controller and Head of Group FP&R
- You co-lead the monthly Group Performance call, clearly communicating and quantifying the risks and opportunities facing the business and delivering actionable insights to drive better performance.
- You drive the quarterly deep dives, which are prepared and led by your team of Performance Managers, and track business delivery against its strategic objectives.
- You identify cross‑functional trade‑offs (e.g., pricing vs. capacity, inventory vs. service levels) and ensure decisions are made with full enterprise visibility.
- You ensure performance insights are integrated, consistent, and aligned with Elementis strategic and financial goals.
2. Functional Budgeting & Forecasting
- With your team, you drive the bottom-up forecasting for the annual budget, reforecasts, and inputs to the long‑range plan (P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash).
- You ensure alignment across functions to achieve Elementis financial goals and operational commitments.
- You support finance managers, analysts, and functional leaders with budgeting and forecasting activities, ensuring clarity, consistency, and accountability.
- You work closely with the FP&R team who own the overall forecasting timeline, consolidation process and associated deliverables for the Executive and Board.
3. Decision Support & Business Partnering
- You lead investment and scenario modelling for cross‑functional decisions, while your team covers functional specific decision support, such as pricing actions, capacity expansion, make‑vs‑buy, supplier changes, and network optimization.
- You provide the Executive Team with integrated insight on how decisions impact margin, cost, service, and value creation.
- You act as the primary finance partner to Strategy & Innovation function, focused on adding value to innovation stage gate process and ensuring returns on investment are in line with targets. Your team will focus on ensuring strategy and innovation outputs are aligned with the SIOP and financial forecasting activities.
- You provide challenge, insight, and decision support across the full value chain, ensuring decisions are financially sound, operationally feasible, and strategically aligned.
- You support NPD business cases, ROI assessments, CAPEX evaluations, and look‑back reviews of strategic projects.
4. Owner of the Elementis Efficiency Agenda
- You own the efficiency and simplification KPIs for the enterprise.
- You partner with functional teams to track savings, inflation impacts, contract value delivery, and other efficiency levers.
- You ensure the efficiency agenda is transparent, measurable, and aligned with Elementis’ long‑term financial goals.
- The team will have direct responsibility for global inventory management at Elementis, working with the supply chain organisation to unlock value from the Groups inventory and drive more efficient ways of working, with particular emphasis on corrective actions around slow moving and obsolete inventory.
5. Finance Leadership & Collaboration
- You foster a culture of financial discipline, transparency, and data‑driven decision making.
- You develop and mentor performance management team, building strong modelling, analytical, and communication capabilities.
- You work across organisational boundaries and geographies, building strong relationships with Finance, Operations, Commercial, and Supply Chain teams.
- You contribute to the multi‑year finance transformation roadmap, ensuring processes and systems continue to be standardized across the globe, and capabilities evolve with business needs.
- You foster a culture of a single Elementis global approach and data driven decision making based on the global data platform and PowerBi analytical capabilities.
Job Competencies
1.Strategic Commercial Mindset: You understand markets, customers, and competitive dynamics, connecting financial insight to commercial strategy and growth opportunities. You anticipate trends, challenge assumptions, and help shape decisions that strengthen Elementis’ commercial and financial performance.
2.Moves Seamlessly from Strategy to Detail: You demonstrate curiosity and the ability to step back and see the big picture, while also being able to deep‑dive into customer, product, and margin drivers to understand what is really happening in the business. You balance strategic thinking with analytical rigour, ensuring commercial decisions are grounded in both insight and accuracy.
3.Plans and Aligns: You take a proactive and responsive approach to planning, managing multiple commercial and financial workstreams with clarity and discipline. You bring the drive and energy needed to work within tight deadlines, ensuring planning cycles, pricing reviews, and commercial processes are well‑structured and aligned with business priorities.
4.Influences and Communicates Effectively: You communicate financial and commercial insights in a clear, compelling way that resonates with senior leaders, sales teams, plant directors and other cross‑functional partners. You build trust, challenge constructively, and ensure stakeholders understand the financial implications of customer, pricing, manufacturing, and investment decisions.
5.Acts with Integrity and Professionalism: You consistently demonstrate the highest ethical standards, exercising sound judgement and maintaining confidentiality when handling sensitive information, building trust across the organisation.
Decision making
You have authority over performance management methodologies, modelling frameworks, KPI definitions, reporting standards, and efficiency governance. You make decisions related to timelines, processes, and resource allocation within the Performance Management team in line with the Group priorities. You influence capital allocation decisions, operational trade‑offs, and strategic direction across the entire Elementis value chain.
What will it take
Technical Knowledge and Skills
- Proven experience leading performance management, FP&A, or finance teams in a complex, international environment
- Strong understanding of Group P&L, cashflow and balance sheet dynamics.
- Strong understanding of Commercial, Manufacturing, Procurement, and Supply Chain performance drivers
- Advanced financial modelling and scenario planning expertise
- Experience with enterprise planning tools (Anaplan preferred)
- Strong Power BI and data visualisation understanding
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills
Position Requirements
Education: Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Economics, or related field. Master’s degree or professional qualification (ACA/ACCA/CIMA) is a strong advantage.
Experience: 10+ years in performance management, FP&A, or value‑chain finance roles, including leadership of teams, ideally in a global manufacturing environment.
IT Skills: Proficient in JD Edwards (highly advantageous), Power BI (highly advantageous), Anaplan (highly advantageous) and Hyperion/FCCS (helpful). Highly proficient or expert level in MS Excel.
Language Skills: Verbal and written fluency in English, other languages are a plus.
Working arrangements: Minimum 3 days in the Porto office as per the hybrid working policy.
Traveling required: The role will be required to travel as per the needs of the business and where necessary to interact in person with leaders of the business.