The posting
Your mission
Project Controlling & Financial Performance
- Own and develop the company’s project controlling framework, providing consistent financial visibility across the project portfolio.
- Establish processes for project budgeting, forecasting, cost tracking, margin analysis, and variance management.
- Develop a standardized approach to monitoring project financial performance from project initiation through completion.
- Partner with Project Management and Scientific Operations to monitor project progress against budget, timeline, resource plan, and expected financial outcome.
- Identify projects at risk of cost overruns, margin erosion, or delivery delays and ensure these risks are visible to management.
- Provide independent Finance challenge to project assumptions, resource requirements, timelines, and expected costs.
- Establish clear financial ownership and accountability for project performance across Business Units and Project Management.
Project Margin & Costing
- Lead the implementation of project margin analysis, providing management with a clear understanding of the profitability of individual projects.
- Develop and maintain a methodology for calculating fully loaded project costs, including appropriate allocation of direct and indirect costs.
- Ensure project margins reflect the full economic cost of delivering projects, including relevant personnel, laboratory/scientific resources, facilities, equipment, and other operational overheads.
- Develop appropriate cost rates and allocation methodologies in partnership with Finance and operational stakeholders.
- Establish consistent definitions and methodologies for project revenue, direct costs, indirect costs, contribution/margin, and project profitability.
- Continuously improve the accuracy and relevance of project cost and margin reporting.
Business Partnering with Operations & Project Management
- Act as the key Finance Business Partner to Scientific Operations, Business Unit leadership, and Project Management on project economics and operational performance.
- Work closely with project teams to understand the operational drivers behind financial performance.
- Translate project status, resource utilization, scope changes, and delivery risks into financial implications.
- Participate in project and operational review meetings, providing a financial perspective on project performance.
- Challenge project teams constructively where assumptions, resource requirements, or delivery expectations are inconsistent with financial targets.
- Support project managers and operational leaders in identifying corrective actions to improve project delivery, cost efficiency, and margins.
- Build strong relationships with scientific and operational stakeholders while maintaining appropriate Finance independence and control.
Project Forecasting & Variance Analysis
- Develop regular project cost-to-complete forecasts, incorporating actual costs, project progress, remaining activities, resource requirements, and expected completion dates.
- Monitor actual project costs against budget and forecast and provide detailed variance analysis.
- Identify the operational drivers of material variances rather than simply reporting financial deviations.
- Track changes in project scope, timelines, resource requirements, and other factors that may affect project economics.
- Establish early-warning indicators for projects experiencing cost or margin pressure.
- Improve forecasting accuracy through systematic analysis of historical project performance and operational drivers.
- Provide portfolio-level analysis of project performance, identifying trends, recurring issues, and opportunities for operational improvement.
Process Development & Controls
- Design and implement a scalable project controlling process, including governance, responsibilities, reporting cadence, and standardized methodologies.
- Establish appropriate controls to ensure project financial data is complete, accurate, and timely.
- Define clear interfaces between Finance, Business Units, Scientific Operations, Project Management, and other relevant functions.
- Improve the integration of operational and financial data to reduce reliance on manual reporting and improve transparency.
- Develop and maintain project controlling tools and models, including Excel-based models where appropriate.
- Identify opportunities to automate and improve project reporting and analysis as the organization and project portfolio scale.
- Establish consistent project financial KPIs and performance standards across the organization.
Planning & Strategic Support
- Support the annual budgeting and forecasting process with detailed project-level operational and cost assumptions.
- Provide input into resource planning and capacity decisions by translating expected project activity into financial requirements.
- Support investment and resource allocation decisions through project economics and scenario analysis.
- Analyze historical project performance to improve future pricing, costing, resource planning, and operational decision-making.
- Work closely with the Sales & Revenue Controller to connect commercial assumptions, project delivery, and financial performance, ensuring consistency between revenue forecasts and project cost forecasts.
Your profile
Experience
- Significant experience in project controlling, operational controlling, FP&A, or finance business partnering in a project-based, services, R&D, contract research, engineering, or similarly complex environment.
- Proven experience establishing or improving project controlling processes and frameworks.
- Strong experience with project budgeting, forecasting, cost-to-complete analysis, variance analysis, and project margin management.
- Experience developing fully loaded costing methodologies and project profitability analysis.
- Demonstrated ability to work closely with operational and project teams and translate operational activity into financial outcomes.
- Experience working with resource-intensive projects where personnel capacity and utilization are significant cost drivers.
- Strong Excel and financial modelling skills.
- Experience with ERP, project management, resource planning, or other operational data systems would be advantageous.
Skills & Attributes
- Strong project controlling and financial modelling expertise with excellent attention to detail.
- Commercially and operationally minded, with a strong understanding of the drivers of project profitability.
- Confident challenging project managers, scientific leaders, and Business Unit leadership in a constructive and collaborative manner.
- Excellent stakeholder management and communication skills, including the ability to work effectively with non-financial stakeholders.
- Highly analytical, structured, and pragmatic.
- Comfortable building processes and frameworks in an environment where systems and processes are still developing.
- Hands-on and entrepreneurial, with the ability to operate independently and take ownership of a critical business process.
- Able to communicate complex financial information clearly to senior management.
Why us?
- An industry leader at an inflection point, with considerable growth and expanding capabilities ahead.
- An organization positioned for disruptive changes in the CRO market.
- Detail oriented with strong organizational skills.
- An innovative field of work in an exciting industry.
- A long-term, responsible position in a healthy, growing and future-oriented company.
- Comprehensive onboarding to prepare you optimally for your area of responsibility.
- Multicultural teams and an open corporate culture.
- A competitive salary.
Contact Details
Proteros biostructures GmbH People Team Bunsenstr. 7a, 82152 Martinsried +49 89 700761 0 [email protected]
