George Lee Email & Phone Number

Essen, De

Setting the strategic direction for Digitalisation; driving digital transformation within Finance and the wider Commercial Services function, and the maintenance, support and development of finance systems.

Leeds, West Yorkshire, Gb

Extended interim position reporting to the CFO of a global technology and engineering business; leading elements of finance operations and systems teams, a high profile system upgrade and driving change in the finance function.• Strategic review of the finance function aligned to the business and IT Strategy• Conducted an end-to-end process review to identify areas of improvement; driving actions across multiple functions to improve process efficiency• Financial control review across the finance function to identify risk and mitigating actions• Review and optimisation of MI to provide meaningful and timely information to the business• Line management of the Sales Ledger & Billing (I2C) and Finance Systems teams including responsibility for system uptime, SLAs, service desk / help desk and data quality• Led the Salesforce (Kimble) system upgrade project - 1,400 users across 4 countries and a 7 version step to a SaaS platform

Darlington, Gb

Reported to the UK Finance Director and managed a team of 25 employees across Financial Accounting, Financial Control, Credit Services and Business Intelligence & Reporting, with matrix management of Record to Report and Payroll teams. • Strategically lead the credit services team to proactively manage the risk profile and ensure alignment with UK strategy• Coordinate the consolidation and production of the UK management accounts, financial and statutory reporting for the senior management team • Review and sign-off financial statements, balance sheet, cash flow, working capital, VAT return and UK payroll• Member of the Northgate Leadership Team; c25 senior leaders across the business cross-collaborating on strategic and tactical initiatives and cascading communications across the business• Internal audit point of contact, leading the external audit process for the UK business and member of the Senior Accounting Office (SAO) group taking a risk-based approach to review and action the tax obligations of the organisation• A key member of the finance leadership team designing and deploying the new finance operating model and presenting at monthly town hall meetings with 100+ finance staff• Established the BI & Reporting team through internal and external recruitment, leading the software strategy to establish the tools and processes to govern an agile / scrum methodology realising £200k of annualised savings in 6 months and enabling capacity for value-add through automation• Developed and implemented the UK finance framework and governance model that resulted in improved finance controls and tangible process efficiency across end-to-end business process

Darlington, Gb

Reported to the UK Finance Director with a dotted line to the Programme Director. The project lead on all financial aspects of the transformation change programme (100+ team) to transition to new systems and ways of working.• Member of the Transformation Programme Leadership Team working with the key stakeholders and management teams to assign project resources, define roles and responsibilities and create a project plan for successful project delivery• Recruited and managed a team of 15 with a mix of full-time and part-time SMEs and contractors through direct and matrix management across the programme and business• Managed and developed a communication plan to ensure all key stakeholders were informed on project success, project status, assumptions, dependencies, decisions, risks, issues and other events affecting delivery• Contributed to, and produced, business cases that supported changes required for project implementation• Owned the delivery for project artefacts such as as-is and to-be process mapping, chart of accounts redesign, data source to target mapping for migration, financial controls and the end to end business journeyHighlights• Delivered the Design stage for the ERP implementation from business case / RFI / RFP stage including a comprehensive reporting business requirements document and solution framework document with high-level requirements fit• Established the Finance Governance model and the Financial Control and Benefits realisation strategy with a global third-party supplier• Project lead on a finance restructure to centralise regional finance across the UK into the shared service centre, achieving a 20% reduction in FTE while maintaining service levels• Led and project managed the upgrade from Sage 50 to Sage 200 for a small business unit c£10m pa delivering a seamless upgrade without business interruption within a 3-month timeframe

Darlington, Gb

Reported to the UK Finance Director, responsible for the strategy, improvements and implementation of new and existing financial systems in the UK business. • Reviewed system ownership and SLA agreements, and developed strategies for improved system performance• Regular meetings with system owners, decision-makers and end-user to identify and resolve issues, defined business requirements and ensured ongoing and professional relationships• Defined the scope of works, deliverables, timeframes and methodology for updates and issues • Full project lifecycle experience implementing ‘on-prem’ and cloud based SaaS applications with responsibility for finance software configuration and customisation through change control including requirements, development specification, regression testing, implementation and optimisation. Highlights• Finance lead for business application testing and migration for the Dynamics CRM implementation• Project managed outsourcing UK billing (c£300m pa) partnering with a document management specialist converting Print & Post to 80%+ electronic billing• Finance lead for the migration of over 100 business applications from physical hardware (on premise) to a VMware farm in CoLo datacentres• Finance Lead for the P2P and sales booking implementations• Member of the Master Data Management (MDM) Steering Committee implementing MDM across 6 domains in 6 months including data discovery, dashboard design and data quality continuous improvement; collaborating with a leading Multi-Domain MDM vendor (Gartner Magic Quadrant Leader)• Familiar with technical initiatives such as Data Centre migration, data migration, VMware, Data Warehouse upgrades (SQL2016) and Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery planning. • Multiple software implementations in line with structured methodologies governed by the PMO/BTO; project management experience using Waterfall, Prince2, Agile and Scrum using Kanban, MS project and MS Excel.

Darlington, Gb

The UK business made a strategic decision to rebrand the 20 subsidiaries from 20 unique brands (and profit centres) into one Northgate brand, and in parallel, centralising the accounting functions into one Finance Shared Service Centre. • Responsible for the accounting consolidation of 20 subsidiary business units into 1, and the centralisation of the accounting units into the newly established shared service centre• Managing a small team of finance professionals, responsible for implementing and maintaining a strong financial control environment.• Increasing operational process efficiency to improve ERP adoption and ways of working with BI and the DBA teams to develop cube analysis, SQL scripts and SSRS reporting.• With a strong focus on change management, collaborating with senior finance stakeholders (internal/external) to manage expectations.• Responsibilities included (at a UK level): bank, stock, accounts payable and receivable reconciliations; bad debt, insurance, property, rent & rates. Producing monthly management accounts, budgets and forecasts; data analysis to support strategic decision making.• Managing the Dynamics AX 3rd party supplier relationship (Finance) including processing configurations/customisations through change control: challenge, validate, define, build, test, implement and quality review.

Darlington, County Durham, Gb

The 'Vehicle Procurement' function integrated into the Van Monster business to create a significantly larger business unit of 'Vehicle Asset Management'.• Leading a larger finance team of c15, responsible for the monthly management accounts production. • Providing meaningful commentary, vehicle purchase and sales reporting, VAT returns and payroll, and presenting results and budget variance analysis.• As part of the project team for the Microsoft Dynamics AX upgrade from 3.0 to 2009, managed the data cleansing, migration, reconciliation, report specification and finance system development across the multi site roll out• Led Finance AX Training for the Vehicle Asset Management team held at multiple locations around the UK• As the Finance Lead, working with 3rd party support partners on-site and remotely to create value adding customisations through change control including workflow, SQL scripts, SSRS and bespoke report development.

Darlington, Gb

As part of a strategic focus to maximise asset profitability, a new department was created to increase procurement operations efficiency. My role was to establish and head the 'Vehicle Purchasing' department. • Established a new department from scratch responsible for vehicle purchases of £400m assets per annum and managing sensitive commercial purchasing terms• Recruited a team of 9 finance professionals; job descriptions, contracts, ways of working, objectives, KPIs, development reviews.• Finance lead for the system implementation of Microsoft Axapta 3.0 (migrating from Pegasus Opera). • With a focus on operations efficiency, developed accounting systems, processes and reporting for Fixed Asset Accounting, Purchase Ledger, Cash & Banking, VAT and payroll.

Darlington, Gb

Promoted from Finance Assistant to Asset Accountant.• Took ownership of the Group Fixed Asset Register building strong business relationships with Finance Managers across c70 companies in the UK and Ireland• Responsible for commercially sensitive procurement terms and rebate income• Working with the Head of Group Treasury and Risk, maximising ROI from excess funds, and hedging to manage risk in line with policy.• Responsible for settling legacy HP agreements across 20 companies and securing more profitable loans to finance capital procurement• Other responsibilities included petty cash, bank reconciliations, purchase ledger and sales ledger reconciliations.Complemented practical experience with weekend study to qualify as a Chartered Management Accountant (ACMA CGMA).

Acma Cgma

Ba (Hons), Accountancy And Finance