Operations Finance roles?
Interviewing with a large consumer goods corporation. Does anyone have an insight on what an operations financial analyst does? I know I'm not being too descriptive but just curious about the field.
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Ops finance (sometimes called commercial finance) is generally a group that partners more closely with line-level managers to provide analytic support. Some examples of deliverables might include: developing pro forma financial models to support basic business decisions, reporting customer/location/salesmen performance versus benchmarks, identifying product-line/market growth opportunities, etc.
Good ops finance folks have the opportunity to move around within the finance/accounting functions or move into administrative business roles. I find those who start in these roles tend to be stronger FP&A candidates as they're generally more familiar with key drivers and challenges within the business.
Thanks for the response! Are you in ops Finance or were you in it before?
I've worked within an ops finance group in the past (~$10B annual revenues), and currently am head of FP&A at a different company (~$1B annual revenues). I've structured my team into ops/commercial finance and corporate finance. Ops focuses on business/execution work while corporate focuses on strategic planning, investor relations, treasury, and generally more 'high-level' tasks.
I actually have a complete opposite view point as I have been in a Fin Ops type role.
Financial Operations to me, is basically invoice processing, a lot of process improvement and back office accounting type stuff. Billing can fall between it has well. I guess it depends on the company you're at. I would say at a massive corporation, Financial Ops will be similar to what I said as there numerous segregated groups even within Finance. With a smaller firm, it can be the best of both worlds doing an array of things.
I see. Are you considered a financial analyst within your company?
Operations Finance @ F50 - Am I Stuck or can I switch to other CorpFin roles? (Originally Posted: 06/10/2014)
Hi friends,
I am a rising senior currently doing essentially what is an Operations Finance role at a Fortune 50 company . My role entails dealing with a lot of my company's suppliers of their final product and essentially doing pricing/estimation analysis on the items they supply to see if its a sound choice. Aside from the financial analysis I also get to be apart of a lot of negotiations and deals going on between the supplier and my company which is also a unique perspective to see and experience which has been pretty cool so far.
From this you can see it truly is a combination of a Supply Chain and Finance (FP&A role) and the formal title for this job is Procurement Financial Analyst. Coming into the internship I thought working on the product we make would be fascinating and getting to be apart of what I though would be a pivotal part in product would also be cool as well but it turns out its really not that great since the team I'm in are essentially puppets for the actual pure supply chain people.
From this I was wondering since I will have Operations Finance experience, am I sorta pigeonholed in this type of career because I am wanting to move into a more "purely" finance/accounting CF role often discussed on here (e.g: Treasury or FP&A). It seems like as of now my only opportunity going on into Full time recruiting would be working like for Amazon in Operations Finance. Are my Full Time CorpFin prospect done for as far as getting a diversified role at another F500 since my current role is somewhat pretty specific?
Any feedback/suggestions/guidance on this matter would be greatly appreciated
No it's only an internship. Find alumni in the corp fin areas that interest you and reach out to them. This seems like an easy sell since you can say "I didn't like ops finance because...and I found out I'm extremely interested in...which corp fin can provide exposure to."
Not only is it only an internship, most companies value finance people that have that experience. If you do an FLDP type program at least one rotation will likely be in something similar because they want you to understand that part of how it works. In my aerospace company quite a few high level finance execs had spent a decent part of their career doing a project and operations based finance role.
This is slightly off topic, but when I was deciding between Big 4 and Corp Fin, one of the people I spoke with was a controller at a F100 tech company. He said that he often interacts with people from various departments (finance, marketing, etc.) and has had offers to internally transfer or at least help out with a department (kind of a trial hire deal). If you can switch from accounting to finance, I'm sure you can switch from ops finance to another area, provided you are a high performer and can demonstrate worth to your employer.
If all else fails, getting an MBA will help your case as well.
You aren't pigeon holded in any way, shape or form. You are way, way too young for that to occur. Just work hard and gain analytical and presentational experience for a couple years out of school and then apply for other opportunities in other areas of Finance, or Operations for that matter, that appeal to you. Management is pleased with those trying to broaden their experience and areas of knowledge/expertise.
You should be able to easily transition to another area. Supply chain finance isn't a huge area at my company but the people I know who have done it have easily transitioned into other areas.
Areas where you should worry about getting pigeon-holed:
Just about every other finance role should allow you to move around fairly easily. And even as a finance person doing a 2-3 year rotation in Treasury or IA is hardly a career killer. Procurement finance should easily allow you to move into FP&A, Pricing, MFG finance, or whatever else.
Operations Finance Tech Company Exit Opps (Originally Posted: 04/11/2012)
Hey Everyone,
I've received a really great offer from Amazon for their operations finance team. Amazon is APPARENTLY (no idea if this is true) big on switching roles every 1.5 years or so I think I can switch to corp finance pretty easily - what are the exit opps? I would, like everyone else in the world, love to end up in a corp finance/strategy role at Facebook, Zynga, Google, etc.
Do b-schools like finance roles at tech companies?
Thanks! Aiko
My research has indicated that BSchools -love- people with big tech firms on their resumes. Amazon's a little boring, and sure ain't no FB/Google/Dropbox, but it's no slouch, either.
I work for a f500 tech firm in their corpdev & strat group.
From my understanding, Amazon, like many tech companies, advocates people switching jobs every 1.5-2 years. This is pretty normal in tech. Assuming you do well in the OpsFin role you could try to transition to a more Corp FP&A type role at Amazon after 1.5-2 years. This type of job would definitely help you land corp fin jobs at any major tech firm sine Amazon is very well regarded in the industry. In terms of moving to strategy / corpdev, this is generally very tough to do in the industry if you don't have prior banking, consulting, or corpdev /strat experience. That said, Amazon is one the few places where I've herd of people in traditional corpfin jobs move to the corpdev team. If you are able to do this then it will open up other strategy / M&A jobs in the industry.
In terms of b-school, coming from a top tech player like Amazon is really good. However, it will depend on how you craft your story and talk about the work you did there, the impact you had, etc. I've known people in traditional corpfin jobs at my company and at other F500 tech firms that have landed at top b-schools so it's definitely doable.
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