Michael Prochnow Email & Phone Number

Appleton, Wisconsin, United States

Longueuil, Quebec, CA

• Business Partner Process Transformation (November 2021 to July 2023)
• Define, create, implement SAP Financials (General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Cash Management, Projects, Fixed Assets, and various manufacturing operational modules including costing and inventory.
• Participated in the definition of the chart of accounts and the cost expense values including the financial coding block (company, business area, cost center and accounts) for Canada and the United States.
• Validate and define the business process design, functional design, and key design decisions for the US financial operations.
• Determined the configuration rational documents, data conversion, form templates and role mapping for general ledger, fixed assets, projects, accounts receivable, and accounts payable.
• Defined the end-to-end system test scenarios and iterations for Record to Report, Procure to Pay (Coupa, VIM, and Concur), Order to Cash, Dairy Management, and Make to Stock/Ship business processes.

• Assistant Financial Controller (November 2020 to November 2021)
• Provide financial support for two ERP systems including Oracle R12 and Adage for the US Operations. This includes all journal entries, account reconciliations and month-end processes.
• Assemble the documentation for the year-end audit including most schedules, account reconciliations, fixed assets, book and tax depreciation, and US Master tax package for all the US locations.
• Participate on the EBS Migration team to convert the Adage Financials over to Oracle Financial. This included validation of the data conversion of the general ledger, accounts payable, accounts receivable, purchase.
• Participate on the Accelerated Adage Retirement Project (AARP) team to transition all modules to Oracle.
• Project the book depreciation out for ten years for the Board of Director approval of a major capital expansion.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Provide leadership over treasury, cash management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, employee payroll, fixed assets/projects, sales & use taxes, and audit.
• Lead the Financial Management team with proactive and collaborative leadership to meet all internal and external requirements in a timely and accurate basis.
• Establish all the sources and inputs to develop a cash projection model to meet the requirements of the banks to help make strategic decisions on the cash management process.
• Redesign the Borrowing Basis calculation to meet the new bank amendment requirements to include other financial reporting requirements for the State of Wisconsin and Michigan.
• Lead, organize, and schedule the interim and annual financial audit process to include items such as inventories, confirmations, and account reconciliations.
• Participate on the pension and 401k Strategic Planning Team.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Provide leadership as the Plant Controller to the Richland Center and Lancaster, Wisconsin plants.
• Provide collaborative leadership with the Plant Controller team across 12 plants in the Foremost Finance Department.
• Facilitate meetings regarding cost saving ideas to help reduce costs at the plants and participate in all the team meetings. The saving projects varied from small returns up to a project which had a return of over $1.
• Facilitate the month-end close process by identifying all the tasks for the plant controllers, general ledger accounting, and at the plant with the implementation of Oracle R12. Oracle R12’s Enterprise Resource.
• Establish new processes and procedures for the standard costs, capital budgets, manufacturing budgets, and the month-end close at Richland Center and Lancaster. These processes had to be re-engineered with the changes.
• Define and provide the auditors the information regarding the inventory testing in R12 for the interim and annual audit

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Define, create, implement and the Oracle R12 Financials and various Oracle Process Manufacturing (OPM) modules such as costing, inventory, and items.
• Facilitate a definition and test process for all R12 Modules with the business process owners.
• Define and create all the setup steps for all the financial and OPM costing applications.
• Facilitate each phase of testing with Subject Matter Experts and Business Process Owners and provide solution options for each functional area utilizing Oracle Standard functionality.
• Complete updates to the business process owners on a regular basis both written and verbal for all business areas (AR, AP, GL, FA, CM, Project, EBTax and OPM Financials) for six test environments.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Supervise the Cost Accounting Team to document procedures and drive out manual processes to streamline monthly processes and evaluate overall understanding of the team’s knowledge of Foremost Farms USA (FFUSA) and the.
• Provide collaborative leadership with the team to reformulate the standard costs multiple times as well as defining processes to monitor variances.
• Guide the team in reformulating all the cheese plants to reduce the yield, usage, and substitution variances. This reduced the month yield, usage, and substitution variances by over $4M. This included balancing all the.
• Supervise and coordinate the updating of 1,200 finished good formulas and 500 contact packaging item numbers.
• Perform many costing studies such as the cost of direct vat sets versus bulk starter to provide better information to switch to using the direct vat sets in our plants versus the bulk starter.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Improve the FFUSA costing views as well as drive non-value-added activities out of the monthly and annual processes with the plant managers and cost accountants.
• Develop the associated warehouses which eliminated about 10 hours of work in the cost accounting department each month.
• Complete the cleanup of two plant items to eliminate errors from occurring in the cost rollups after the plants were closed to reduce time in the month-end close resulting in a reduction of about 5 hours of re-work.
• Change all the Plover formulas to reflect current yields and processing resources along with the inactivating obsolete SKU’s.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Manage general accounting, cash management, fixed assets, accounts payable, accounts receivable, sales & use tax compliance, and mail room.
• Manage the relationships with the banks from the treasury management side, determined the daily cash needs, and projected the cash needs out for 90 days.
• Work with the banks on a regular basis to improve our transaction processing to reduce our monthly bank fees.
• Implement the first installation of Oracle and GEMMS for a process manufacturing system to define all the original setups steps to the final test iterations.
• Implement and install the BlackLine application to process journal entries plus account reconciliations per the auditor requirements.
• Define and implement all the tax books based on the changing tax laws.

Middleton, Wisconsin, US

• Establish the contribution margin by-product for the ingredient division.
• Develop a standard cost system for the ingredient division to calculate the contribution margin by product.