Job Summary:This role is a senior leadership position within Messer Americas Finance, combining core FP&A leadership and business partnering with responsibility for strengthening the commercial and operational finance capabilities that support decision-making. The Senior Manager, FP&A will lead planning, performance management, reporting, and decision support for the U.S. business while helping build a more scalable, automated, and data-driven finance operating model.
The successful candidate will be a commercially astute finance leader who can challenge business performance, understand the economics of an asset-intensive industrial business, influence senior stakeholders, develop a high-performing team, and translate strategic priorities into measurable financial outcomes. The role requires strong finance fundamentals together with sufficient systems and technical fluency to evaluate solutions, shape modernization efforts, and partner effectively across Finance, Operations, Sales, IT, Data & Analytics, and external providers.
Principal Responsibilities:Leadership, Business Partnership & Change - Lead, motivate, coach, and develop the U.S. FP&A team, establishing clear priorities, accountability, succession plans, and high standards for analytical quality and business partnership.
- Act as a senior finance partner to key commercial and operational executives, including Sales & Marketing and Operations leadership, and support the Executive Committee with decision-oriented analysis, constructive challenge, and clear recommendations.
- Translate strategic priorities into financial actions and help sponsor growth, margin-improvement, productivity, and cost-saving initiatives required to deliver business-performance targets.
- Lead cross-functional finance initiatives from problem definition and business-case development through implementation, adoption, and benefits realization, using disciplined project-management practices to manage scope, milestones, dependencies, risks, decisions, and stakeholder alignment.
- Promote a culture of ownership, collaboration, simplification, continuous improvement, fact-based decision-making, and active talent development across the FP&A team and broader finance organization.
Performance Management, Reporting & Planning - Be accountable for the accuracy and completeness of the U.S. month-end management view in close partnership with Accounting, ensuring timely and decision-useful reporting and confidence in the underlying data.
- Provide insightful analysis of financial and operational performance, interpret key KPIs, identify root causes, and clearly communicate drivers, risks, opportunities, and recommended actions to senior stakeholders.
- Lead periodic forecasting, annual budgeting, and strategic planning; challenge business assumptions and outlooks; and strengthen driver-based planning, scenario modeling, sensitivity analysis, and linkage between operational assumptions and financial outcomes.
- Develop forward-looking and exception-based analytics that improve the speed and quality of management decisions, while incorporating cash flow, working capital, and balance-sheet implications where relevant.
Operational & Commercial Finance - Lead analysis of revenue, gross margin, and operating performance, including price/volume/mix, pricing realization, customer and product mix, cost inflation and recovery, productivity, and other key commercial and operational drivers.
- Partner with Operations and Supply Chain to understand plant and network performance, including production volumes, utilization, efficiency, energy and other major input costs, fixed-cost absorption, productivity, logistics costs, and operational variances.
- Understand and critically assess standard costing, cost-center structures, fixed and variable cost behavior, absorption, allocation methodologies, and production and distribution cost flows so that management reporting appropriately reflects business economics.
- Analyze customer, product, plant, and channel profitability, including cost-to-serve, production and distribution economics, and opportunities to improve commercial and supply-network performance.
- Support pricing strategy, customer tenders, and contract decisions through analysis of customer profitability, incremental margins, cost-to-serve, pricing realization, volume commitments, and relevant escalation or pass-through mechanisms.
Strategic & Decision Support - Evaluate capital-intensive opportunities and major business decisions, including returns, risks, sensitivities, value-creation potential, and post-investment performance where appropriate.
- Lead deep-dive analyses on material business issues and present conclusions and recommendations clearly to the Executive Committee and other senior stakeholders.
- Assess external factors influencing business performance, including macroeconomic trends, customer developments, regulation, market structure, and competitor activity, and translate relevant changes into financial implications and actions.
Finance Transformation, Systems & Analytics - Own and continuously improve key FP&A processes end-to-end across people, process, data, and technology, simplifying, standardizing, documenting, and automating workflows while maintaining appropriate controls and clear service expectations.
- Apply sound judgment in determining whether finance requirements should be addressed through process change, source-system configuration, master data, data engineering, analytical tools, automation, or organizational change, avoiding unnecessary complexity and proliferation of local solutions.
- Serve as a strong finance counterpart to Accounting, Finance Systems, IT, Data & Analytics, and external vendors by translating business requirements into practical improvements and critically assessing system architecture, data flows, integrations, reporting logic, and proposed technical solutions.
- Use strong SAP finance and accounting knowledge to help modernize transaction flows, master data, costing and allocation structures, reporting, and interfaces, while preserving accounting integrity, auditability, and reliable management information.
- Participate actively in requirements definition, solution design, testing, reconciliation, implementation, data-quality improvement, and post-implementation review for material finance-system and process changes.
- Identify and implement practical AI, automation, and advanced-analytics use cases across FP&A, with appropriate validation, human oversight, data security, and accountability, while building reusable team capability and releasing capacity for higher-value analysis and business partnering.
Required Skills: - Strong accounting and operational-finance foundation with the ability to connect accounting treatment, standard costing, cost behavior, absorption and allocations, transaction flows, management reporting, and business economics.
- Advanced financial modeling, analytical, and numerical-reasoning skills, including experience with revenue and margin bridges, operational variance analysis, forecasting, budgeting, performance management, and decision support in a complex organization.
- Demonstrated process-improvement, finance-transformation, and project-leadership experience, including requirements definition, stakeholder alignment, prioritization, testing, implementation, change management, and sustained benefits realization.
- Strong SAP finance and systems knowledge, together with a high level of data and technical literacy across databases, data flows, reporting architectures, automation concepts, and solution design.
- Excellent written, verbal, and presentation skills, with the ability to influence financial and non-financial stakeholders at all levels, constructively challenge the status quo, lead change, and develop a high-performing team.
Preferred Skills - Experience in industrial gases, chemicals, energy, process manufacturing, or another asset-intensive industrial environment, with familiarity with complex manufacturing, supply-chain, and distribution economics.
- Experience participating in SAP modernization, S/4HANA transformation, finance-system implementation, or significant process redesign.
- Experience with SAP Analytics Cloud, Power BI or Tableau, Workday Adaptive Planning, Databricks, or comparable planning, data, and analytics platforms.
- Hands-on experience with analytical, data, or automation tools such as SQL, Power Query, Python, Power Automate, or similar technologies.
- Practical experience applying AI or advanced automation to finance processes, analytics, or productivity.
Basic Qualifications: - 8+ years of progressive finance experience, including substantial FP&A, business-partnering, people-management, and senior-stakeholder experience.
- Bachelor's degree in Finance, Accounting, Business, Economics, or a related field, or equivalent relevant experience.
Preferred Qualifications:- MBA, CPA, CMA, ACA, CIMA, or comparable finance/accounting qualification.
The salary range for this position is $135,000 - $180,000 . Messer provides medical, dental, vision, short term disability, life insurance and paid time off as well as other voluntary benefits, such as, long term disability in accordance with the terms and conditions of these Plans. Employees are eligible to enroll in Messer's 401(k) Plan. Employees may be eligible to participate in the company's bonus program.
