Associate Director, Financial Forecasting (Commercial Finance)
Buckingham Search
- North Chicago, IL
Position Overview:
The primary objective of this position is to provide an end-to-end U.S. Demand & Revenue forecast for a leading product within one of the organization’s essential business units, accounting for ~$5Bn of Gross Sales per year. Specifically, this role owns the entire market model and revenue model used to calculate the product line Revenue Forecast, and is responsible for producing comprehensive analytics & presentations around the forecast to leadership.
The forecaster will support leadership within this business unit including: President, Commercial VP, Controller, and Finance Director, explaining the brand evolution/outlook to executive leadership, facilitating optimal decision making & investment in the marketplace as well as providing precise financial guidance to stakeholders.
This role manages a Sr. Manager of Forecasting & Manager of Forecasting directly, and partners closely with the Revenue Recognition/Gross to Net (GTN), Business Analytics & Insights (BAI), Sales & Marketing, and Market Access teams.
Core Responsibilities:
Actuals Reporting & Interpretation
• Partner with the Revenue Recognition and Business Analytics & Insights (BAI) teams as well as consultants/external vendor to populate actuals data in the market and revenue models, while performing careful quality checks and asking analytical questions to ensure data integrity
• Complete key financial close schedules for a variety of stakeholders to demonstrate the brand’s financial results for monthly, quarterly, and annual fiscal periods
• Triangulate the data described above and derive vital takeaways, trends, risks, and opportunities, highlighting them to leadership in a clear & concise manner
• Synthesize the aggregated data & associated insights and leverage them into a more accurate forecast going forward, accounting for the conclusions from recent data while bifurcating the ‘signal’ from the ‘noise’ in statistical fluctuations
• Forecast Cycles – Latest Best Estimate (LBE), Plan, Long Range Plan (LRP)
• Drive the LBE, Plan, and LRP US Revenue forecast for the brand end to end. This entails:
- Align with commercial business partners and finance leaders on pro-forma hypotheses for forecast variables, supported by quantitative evidence as well as qualitative insights on past & future market events
- Integrate hypotheses into market model and revenue model variable forecasts, while ensuring the models are calibrated to provide the most precise outputs
- Curate the outputs from the forecast models into
- Comprehensive analytical reports cut from several angles to provide sufficient brand detail to key finance customers
- Thoughtful & streamlined presentations to provide leadership with a holistic understanding of the market dynamics and resulting financial outcomes
• Partnership With Customers for Related Deliverables. While the Forecasting Cycles are the primary deliverable and most crucial objective for the Forecasting Team, there are a myriad of secondary deliverables, which are also integral to successful performance. These include, but are not limited to:
- Investor Relations quarterly and ad-hoc reports to prepare for earnings calls and external facing interactions, ranging from market and share related reports to sales & margin focused deliverables
- Sales & Marketing field incentive compensation planning forecast scenarios as well as key commercial program rollout situation planning
- Market Access payer/provider deal-related negotiation strategy input
- Revenue Recognition / Gross to Net forecast inputs to inform upon required balance sheet accruals, releases, and adjustments
- Trade Team collaboration to ensure optimal business practices with brand customers as well as anticipating ordering patterns and inventory fluctuations
- Competitive Intelligence teamwork to align on recent developments with competitor earnings reports, clinical trial data, filing, and approval timelines
- Global Commercial Development cooperation to understand internal clinical trial timelines and probabilities for success / approval and commercialization in new disease indications and lines of therapy
Qualifications:
- 7+ years progressive finance and forecasting + analytics experience
- Bachelor’s Degree in Finance or Statistics/Analytics
- Proficiency in triangulating significant amounts of data and statistics from multiple sources, and building strong assumptions & hypotheses supported by the data
- High organization skills, ability to dealing with multiple variables, up to 10+ variables simultaneously each with multiple scenarios & sensitivities
- Comfort working with large amounts of uncertainty through creative scenario modeling, data triangulation, & cross-functional collaboration
- Experience presenting complex concepts to an organization’s executive leadership in high pressure settings
- Strong proficiency in Microsoft Excel & Microsoft PowerPoint; above standard corporate finance usage
- Experience managing direct reports in at least one prior role
Preferred:
- Experience with U.S. healthcare industry-standard data sets, specifically IMS/Quintiles (IQVIA) claims, Specialty Pharmacy claims, NPA Rx, 867 and 852 feeds from pharmacies and wholesalers
- SAS and/or SQL coding proficiency
Posted On: Thursday, March 9, 2023