Simon Jones Email & Phone Number

Cabot Financial (Europe) ltd – Senior Configuration AnalystWorking within an Agile IT Solutions team as the organisation’s configuration specialist and business SME, responsible and accountable for the control and development of Cabot’s business critical core customer data and transactional system FICO Debt Manager (DM9), Key responsibilities and achievements within this role include• Development of smart and workable system solutions to enable business change initiatives, improving process effectiveness and efficiency across many key system and business processes.• Managing system wide configuration and control, implementing changes both to the control environment and how applications interface with the core system to ensure system integrity.• Leading on large scale projects including application upgrades, development of a joint accounts methodology and developing a robust Archiving and anonymisation solution to meet GDPR requirements.• By Building relationships across the business and with third party partners have developed an effective interface between the IT Solutions team and the wider business community.• Managing 2nd line Application Support function for Dm9 and associated interfacing applications, making improvements to the existing process to ensure all issues are logged, investigated, and actioned within defined SLA’s.• Supporting multiple Agile workstreams on many system developments as well as leading daily scrums and performing Scrum Master activities as required.

Ashford

As manager of a small team managing Internal Control and Governance for global instance of Oracle ERP system with extensive footprint, my main responsibilities included - Acting as Finance lead globally for major R12 upgrade project as well as acting as global process owner for the governance risk and compliance Oracle system and central financial reporting systems. - Responsibility for maintaining and developing the organisations Internal control processes and environment as well as ensuring business compliance with defined minimum controls and associated Segregation of Duty policies. - Acting as subject matter expert and providing sign off for any changes globally to the Oracle systems that impact either the control environment or financial modules - Managing the yearly global internal control processes including the global Internal Control Review and Risk Management process. - Responsible for Maintaining the relationship between third party IT support and both the finance community and senior management team. - Providing system and reporting support to the global finance community. - Acting as primary contact for full system control and compliance audit activities.

Kings Hill

As one of the UK’s largest Debt management companies Cabot’s collections systems contain over 2 million accounts and receive thousands of receipts of all types into their bank accounts on a daily basis. Within Cabot I played a pivotal role in a number of business critical projects.Banking Migration – Project ManagerI managed the set up of banking facilities with the new banking provider and ensured a smooth transition between banking systems, managing the re-routing of collections receipts and all associated changes to interfacing systems and business processes. I successfully delivered this high risk project within agreed timescales and with minimal impact to the business. Collections System Implementation – Finance Lead As finance lead on the implementation of a new collections system I successfully delivered changes to business critical processes (Credit Card Payments, Direct Debit System design, finance reports) overseeing elements of the system design, reporting requirements, systems testing and UAT and coordinating finance resources to ensure finance processes got full coverage.

Provided finance lead on a number of IT and finance system change and upgrade projects acting as an interface between Finance and IT, • Supporting future SAP upgrade/developments• Planning and performing UAT testing of developments to the organisations Management Information System (SAP BI) and inter system AR interfaces.• Acting as financial lead on inception of project to help develop the organisations costing methodology within SAP• Mapping the organisations intercompany and cross system accounting, and associated business processes with a view to creating a new consolidated process.

This role gave me the opportunity to play an important part in a major Business Process Reengineering Project, the key deliverable of which was to enable the implementation of a new banking system (ActiveBank). My main responsibilities within the project team were to manage the mapping of the current business process (using IDEF methodology) and associated documentation, identify opportunities for improvement and in conjunction with the business and the rest of the project team develop a new set of robust business processes and rules. As part of developing the new business processes I was also able to play a major role in managing the strategic direction of the project and ensuring both the quality and timeliness of key deliverables. As part of managing the direction of the project I was able to gain experience in both the design and running BPR workshop sessions

As part of this role I was heavily involved in testing and managing change to the General Ledger prior to a fundamental change in the organisations chart of accounts. Key functions of the job also included management of junior staff, performing month end system closedown procedures, producing New Year budgets on the system and managing the implementation/providing support for a third party reports access systemMy underlying responsibility within this role was to ensure the integrity of financial information within the general ledger. Key elements of this included overseeing daily bank reconciliations, importing of data from sub ledgers, running key reports, monitoring postings, setting up and monitoring batch jobs, reconciling balance sheet accounts, maintaining content sets, security rules and responsibilities, monitoring the performance of the system, providing systems support to the financial community and liaising with Oracle support partners to resolve system issues.