Paul Orchard

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT PAUL ORCHARD

I have generally exceeded expectations throughout my career primarily by providing insightful analysis and proactively shaping activities to drive efficiencies. I enjoy building good relationships / communications channels and believe this sits behind my successes. Below I have highlighted some career achievements to showcase skills I would like to utilise for other organisations in the future. Whilst at Centrica I performed roles within Financial Control, FP & A, Business Finance as well as a specialist Transformation Manager. The examples below are taken from my time at Centrica. In role of Transformation Manager, I was asked to move all journals from FP & A into the remit of FC. There were c250 journals being posted within FP & A. I recruited 3 contractors to assist. By listening to the FP & A team and understanding these processes I was able to reduce the number to c70 by elimination and consolidation of similar processes. I took ownership for the Purchase Order accrual process which resulted in c40 journals. I extracted the required data and made this one process, this saved one contractor worth of resource and the final process was able to release £ms back to the P+L. Following the project I oversaw documentation and moved offshore.In role of Business Finance Manager, I was tasked with compiling Finance plan c£100m during a reorganisation. Through working with senior Finance stakeholders and Transformation team I was able to deliver first draft of plan in a timely manner, however this still had c£17m of ungrounded challenge. Working with Finance Leadership Team manage to get this challenge assigned. Grounding the final plan enabled this to serve as a meaningful comparator for the year ahead. Finally, I locked and loaded into the planning system (BPC) and produced causals for sign-off.In role of People Cost Manager I assumed responsibility for the control and reporting of people related costs for North America. Workday payroll had recently been implemented and key people had exited the business, whilst other stakeholders were wanting detailed reporting akin to what they had before. By working with the HR Systems team, I was able to run detailed Workday reports I then reconciled to SAP financials. I loaded the Workday data into Power BI to make the reporting of payroll information more user friendly than had ever been before and upskilled the offshore team. Additionally, after thorough investigation of the balance sheet I was able to release £ms back to the P+L in relation to provisions held.