SUMMARY:

• Senior SAP S/4HANA Finance and Controlling solutions architect with 23 years of experience successfully implementing SAP’s Financials (FI) and Controlling (CO) modules.
• He has served as a Team Lead across a range of industries, including Confidential & Beverages, Consumer Packaged Goods and process manufacturing.
• Has led numerous full life cycle SAP implementations, continuous improvement, and system/process optimization projects for multi - national companies across multiple geographies.
• Extensive experience in all phases of SAP system projects; including requirements definition, process analysis and design, gap analysis, prototype/configuration, detailed design, system test, training development and delivery and data conversion.
• Aside from core SAP Finance and Controlling, experienced with the key integration points to the Sales and Distribution, Materials Management and Production Planning modules as well as with external system integration.
• Proven leader and team player focused on using SAP to deliver on business objectives.
• Background as a Chartered Accountant who has previous experience as a Manufacturing Controller.

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

• SAP FI/CO: CO-PC, Confidential, CO-PS, CO-IO, FI-AA, FI-GL, FI-AR, FI-AP, FI-CM
• MS Office, MS Project, HPQC

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE:

Confidential, Sacramento, CA

FICO Global COE Head

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens led the FI/CO global center of excellence, responsible for staffing global projects and resolving users’ ticketed issues for a $4 billion Confidential and Confidential manufacturer.
• Significant accomplishments included:
• Re-engineered an existing Confidential implementation to address inconsistencies with FI reporting.
• Revised design rolled to HANA database
• Worked on an Open Text VIM implementation, integrating Ariba to AP
• Worked on a client billing project to retire a mainframe billing system and move the billing for corporate clients onto SAP.
• Specifically concerned with automation of the cash application using pre-processors and bank interfaces

Confidential

Project Costing Lead / Financial Data Conversion Lead

Responsibilities:

• Led the Product Costing and Financial Data Cutover Lead on a project merging a newly acquired tequila manufacturing company into an existing Mexican operating company.
• Cutover involved significant changes to the Mexican corporate structure in order to comply with local fiscal regulations as well as internal divisional responsibilities.
• Build involved deployment of global design with attendant systems, processes and policies to this new business
• Design of new, simplified solution for the costing of maturing distillate blends
• Cutover of detailed financial history from multiple legacy systems to SAP, for legal and management accounting.

Confidential

FI/CO Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens was the sole FICO consultant on the rollout of SAP to a newly acquired Canadian subsidiary, responsible for all design, configuration and cutover tasks.
• Rolled out global design to Canadian subsidiary, replacing their existing SAP system with USA acquiring company’s design
• Master data harmonization between systems
• Full Canadian localization - Canadian sales tax, forms localization for bilingual market
• Replaced existing product costing design with acquiring company’s model
• Full, detailed Profit and Loss account conversion for 6 months of data

Confidential

Inter-Company Accounting Consultant / Product Costing Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens worked in this multi-national engineering company with a complex manufacturing environment encompassing make to stock, make to order with variant configurator and a trading model that sourced product amongst a number of European plants, direct shipping to other company’s customers.
• Built the configuration to get correct inter-company postings consistent with the group’s tax and transfer price requirements from make to sales order transactions
• Ensured the system was capable of adhering to local European legal reporting requirements for VAT, EC Sales List and Intrastat
• Delivered training to European end users on basic GL, A/P and AR functionality to support the implemented business processes and appropriate month end processing
• Added user exits in Confidential derivations to address system reporting shortfalls

Confidential

FI/CO Lead / Conversion lead

Responsibilities:

• Led the integration of this Central American business into the global design of an international Confidential & Confidential business.
• Working closely with the local Controller, resolved difficulties with the businesses legacy financial accounts and successfully restated these to the point where balances could be substantiated in SAP.
• Work mostly centered on validating AR and AP details and reworking the currency postings to conform to corporate ways of working.
• Full data migration of a summarized Confidential P&L (to brand / customer level), detailed stock with associated revaluation, and all balance sheet balances moved for both businesses

Confidential, Pittsburgh, PA

Business IT Co-coordinator

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens worked with this multi-national business in managing the interface between the Finance community and IT department.
• This involved working with the business in prioritizing resources, developing submissions for project spend and approval, as well as working of emergency user issues.
• Lead efforts to build a solution for Confidential compliance reporting across multiple ERP platforms with a single consolidation tool
• Resolved issues with their cash application pre-processor program
• Worked on numerous process and technology related issues with inventory accounting reports

Confidential

Designer and implementer

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens lead this rapid project to addressed functional gaps in the local SAP model for Argentina.
• Principle gaps worked on were customer / brand profitability which meant a 2-month implementation of account-based Confidential .
• Solution included change in point where COGS was recognized (to point of billing) with resultant changes to the SD pricing model
• Additionally, stock valuation model was changed with nationalization & importation conditions being model to a later part of the supply chain using STO’s
• Training of staff and post go-live support provided

Confidential

RTR Process Owner / FICO Lead / Financial Conversion Lead

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens led a team of 10 international SAP FICO consultants to roll out a global SAP design for an international $1.7 billion business.
• In the role of Latin American Regional Process Owner for Finance, he led the design from blueprint through implementation and warranty.
• These markets were characterized by high regulation, currency instability, specialized reporting and complex inventory valuation models.
• Led localization workshops for all markets, produced gaps and managed ABAP developed related to same
• Up to 3 currencies per business implemented, including local currency valued at fixed Central Bank specified daily rates.
• Specific interface built to compute this for Peru, Paraguay and Uruguay
• Material ledger implemented for the Chilean business to get ‘real’ inventory valuation for local reporting needs
• Worked with global tax compliance and transfer pricing teams to get Peru Duty Free business (separate company code) set up and operating in line with local laws and corporate governance rules.
• Complex inventory valuation model developed to in corporate costs of importation and nationalization of product moving through bonded / non-bonded warehouses.
• Developed a data conversion application in Excel using VBA allowing large data volume conversion, summarization and upload preparation from Chilean legacy system.
• Using this application, significant savings were made in cutover time and expense to SAP.
• Acted as the cutover consultant for Paraguay and Peru, and managed Uruguay cutover.
• All cutovers were detailed current year P&L’s down to brand level.
• Sales & purchase book implemented for Chile and Peru
• Non-leading ledgers implements for Fiscal Year and currency divergences

Confidential

Financial Conversion lead / Product costing & Confidential Lead

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens was initially contracted to take control of the FI/CO cutover for a Colombian roll out of this multi-national corporation which had difficulties.
• Once this was resolved, he was retained to lead the Venezuelan cutover too.
• These were complex cutovers due to the highly regulated nature of these markets with their specific multi-faceted reporting requirements, fiscal environments and currency issues.
• In addition to cutover, Material ledger was implemented in Venezuela to deal with the significant valuation variations arising from importation and nationalization costs on product purchases.

Confidential, CA

FI/CO Lead

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens was the lead SAP Product Costing consultant in the Wine division of this multi-national.
• Implemented Product Costing with innovative solution for recovery of capitalized overheads from prior years for maturing wines.
• This worked in conjunction with an existing industry wine making legacy system.
• Developed a solution to bottling of Tax Paid Bulk Wines imported from overseas using movement types, allowing recovery of excise taxes.
• Acted as Cutover lead for the project.
• This meant plan development and control, liaison with other projects, and the handling of technical and business cutovers.
• Work with project team in pushing project through milestones, communications with stakeholders and leadership, and external developers.

Confidential, Northridge, CA

Lead FI/CO Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens worked with this international audio equipment corporation to resolve critical issues on their SAP system.
• Most of the issues on the financial modules resulted from their prior implementation of new GL with profit center and split accounting.
• Resolved issues surrounding Profit Center postings missing due to prior implementations problems with inheritance functionality on their new GL go live.
• The business impact was critical as the assignment of receivables to divisions was impossible
• Implemented Lockbox as part of a mini project on AR fixes

Confidential, Norwalk, CT

FI/CO Back Office SME

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens was engaged as a FI/CO subject matter expert (SME) on a CRM implementation project.
• Responsible for developing the back-office interfaces to Confidential, data design, process changes, BI integration and enhancements to support the rollout of CRM in Spirits division of this Fortune 500 company.
• Interfaces included WBS creation integration with Confidential, expense passback to Concur, plan upload to BI.
• Enhancements included user exits dealing with year-end accounting for accruals and prepayments, FI document consolidation from CRM postings and the integration of CRM / Confidential .
• This SAP CRM design was highly customized, with many pioneering features such as WBS and Procurement integration which SAP included in future releases of their software
• Back Office testing of design and training of divisional staff.

Confidential

Architect and Design Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens worked as an Architecture and Design consultant for this $1.7 billion corporation.
• Worked as the technical lead in the review of a new cash forecasting and planning system.
• This involved gathering business requirements, finding the appropriate software vendors who met preliminary requirements and ultimately working with them to investigate their capabilities, scalability, and fit to the business needs.
• Concluded investigation in 12 weeks with recommendation to the board.
• Participated as a technical architect on the discovery phase of a project to determine the most appropriate replacement for the company's consolidation system, Magnitude.
• Involved working within an environment where all financial reporting systems were already changing under another project so inter project impacts added to a complicated evaluation process.
• In depth work with SAP on their BFC solutions as well as with the business users in Hungary.
• Recommendations delivered in Mar 2011 to the finance leadership team.

Confidential

FI/CO Lead / Legacy System Lead / UAT Lead

Responsibilities:

• This was a business-critical SAP project to change the product hierarchy in the production system of this major Confidential company.
• This involved using the SLO toolset and working with SAP Waldorf in implementing the changed hierarchy for all master and transaction data as well as all configuration tables where this object was used.
• Additionally, 30 significant downstream systems with their interfaces have been changed to accommodate the changes.
• The RtR Lead responsible for planning, leading and designing all financial systems changes.
• The UAT lead looking after worldwide user acceptance testing.
• This encompassed business engagement, test design, communications, defect handling and resolution.
• My UAT testers ranged from North America, South America, Europe, Africa and Asia-Pacific.
• The Legacy application lead, looking after the design of changes in non-SAP applications using product hierarchy data.
• This meant liaising with developers across all major markets in a variety of technologies and working with them through design, implementation, testing and cutover.
• The project involved over 1,000 RICEF objects and 300 million data records being changed over a 2-day period, and was SAP’s largest SLO project at the time.

Confidential

FI/CO Lead

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens architected the financial solutions for a newly acquired subsidiary of this major case manufacturer.
• Solution involved designing and building two major FI/CO interfaces to acquiring company’s existing SAP / BCS system from the subsidiary’s legacy system.
• Built of complex substitution rules to deal with the accounting surrounding drop shipment and replenishment postings to the US and European subsidiaries.
• Rolled out SAP to UK subsidiary.
• Configured product costing based on repetitive manufacturing design (product cost collectors used).
• Concurrent with the UK and US subsidiary implementation, proposed a 7 point FI/CO re-optimization plan to CFO which was accepted.
• This was implemented successfully.
• It concerned functional improvements in the existing SAP design by adding profit center accounting, a new suite of financial reports based on the cost of sales accounting methodology as well as implementing full electronic banking.

Confidential, TX

Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Partnered with a local SAP integrator to propose and implement SAP Confidential for this manufacturer of piping products had SAP already implemented.
• The project that is billed as a ‘rapid implementation’ of 7 weeks involving a single consultant in conjunction with a couple of client resources.
• The main features of the design were the tie back of purchase price variances to finished goods sold as raw materials price fluctuations are highly volatile resulting in violent swings in profitability.
• Implemented changes in their product costing design with new cost component structure and new activity rates structure supporting a new design for ‘contribution margin’ reporting.

Confidential, Northridge, CA

Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Mr. Owens was engaged by this world class player in the medical engineering field to review their Confidential design and write a report as to how it would integrate in their SAP system once they substituted a third-party billing package for SAP’s SD module.
• This involved extensive design review meetings with the project team, their BW designers as well as business users.
• After 4-weeks the report was presented to the project team and IT leadership.
• This report highlighted risks and opportunities as well as a detailed proposal for a Confidential re-build project showing timelines, project plan and resourcing required.

Confidential, St. Louis, MO

Consultant

Responsibilities:

• Rolled out of Order-to-Cash processes to the Container division of a multi-national paper company.
• This was a client who already operated SAP FI and Profit Center Accounting.
• Responsible for the Confidential design and configuration.
• Participated in the Product Costing design, testing and roll out.
• Developed design and specification of code for Sales Billing document (invoices, credit notes).