Zürich Metropolitan Area
As a senior finance leader within the global manufacturing industry, I take pride in unlocking new growth and value creation opportunities and creating more robust, agile organizations. With 20+ years in metals manufacturing, including 12+ years in executive-level finance and supply chain roles, I leverage: ➡️ A full gamut of functional finance capabilities – including core strengths in optimizing controllership, treasury, and global accounting operations – having grown through increasingly responsible finance leadership roles over the course of my career. ➡️ Cross-functional exposure, with experience leading the European supply chain and logistics organization for Novelis, the top producer of flat-rolled aluminium products and the world’s largest recycler. ➡️ An award-winning track record for building new growth-driving entities from scratch and steering sharp turnarounds – achieving record production, EBITDA, and customer-satisfaction levels through business transformation and digitalization. ➡️ A global, multilingual profile, having lived and worked in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. I am a fluent speaker of Italian, German, English, and Portuguese with proficiency in French. ✴️ MY LEADERSHIP STYLE & COMMITMENT I strive to deliver record-breaking financial outcomes by acting as a strategic business partner to my executive peers – working collaboratively to shed light on true growth levers, steer continuous improvement efforts, and tackle competitive threats. Leading both directly and laterally, I am committed to tapping into the latent power in people, and gaining buy-in across the full stakeholder value chain to bring disjointed teams together behind a winning vision. ✴️ EXPERTISE: Finance & Accounting Leadership • Finance & Business Transformation • Turnarounds • Mergers & Acquisitions • Business Process Improvement • Talent Development • Risk Management • Data Analytics & Business Intelligence • Digitalization • Capital-Investment Management • Cross-Functional Partnership • Change & Crisis Management • Restructuring • Continuous Improvement
✴️IMPACT: Optimized supply chain and set digitalization roadmap across European plants, building state-of-the-art entity with record-breaking performance. Fostered collaborative, engaged organization. Achieved highest production levels in company history, optimal inventory levels, high customer satisfaction scores, minimal costs. Created CO2 reduction strategy to support company-wide sustainability targets. ✴️ ROLE: Led Supply Chain/Logistics organization (11 production plants, 5 countries), including S&OP and 5-year strategic plan, demand/master planning, production and metal flows, inventory, warehousing, distribution, and transportation, and respective continuous improvement programs, and sustainability agenda. Member of AluNorf shareholder committee (JV and largest aluminium rolling mill world-wide) and Novelis Deutschland GmbH supervisory board. ✴️INITIATIVES: ➡️ Created tech-savvy team via professional development and talent strategy to boost digitalization journey and fuel buy-in for change. ➡️ Co-built competency model to fuel talent development program, identifying core supply chain skills needed to create agile, customer-driven, and innovative organization. ➡️ Collaboratively led comprehensive business automation via digital analytics platform, supply chain dashboard, and o9 planning solution. Reduced Excel-based reporting, enhanced visibility and accountability, and redirected resources from data generation to growth-driving, risk-mitigating data analysis. ➡️ Completed o9 digital pilot on ingot casting optimization with high EBIT impact and CO2 reduction. ➡️ Stabilized SAP APO implementation, increasing plant throughput. ➡️ Supported major capital investment decisions via in-depth analysis and simulation exercises to seize multibillion-dollar market opportunities. ➡️ Played key role in post-merger integration of Aleris plants under intense pressure to extract maximum M&A value. Steered business alignment, restructuring, and production remapping.
✴️ IMPACT: Positioned finance function as highly credible strategic business partner and growth driver amidst inflationary pressure. Won 2014 European Leadership Summit Award for key role in European turnaround. Drove consistent EBITDA growth, reaching record-high levels despite dramatic cost increases. Achieved less than 1% deviation forecasting accuracy for key financial metrics (EBITDA, working capital, inventory value, and SG&A). ✴️ ROLES: Responsibility grew from steering budgeting, forecasting, reporting, and analysis with 7 FP&A reports to leading entire European finance function across 5 countries. At peak of accountability, oversaw accounting, controllership, compliance, FP&A, treasury, risk management, procurement, and investment planning with P&L responsibility. Strategic business partner to Group CFO, European President, and leadership team. Member of AluNorf shareholder committee, and Novelis Deutschland GmbH supervisory board. ✴️ INITIATIVES: ➡️ Created state-of-the-art FP&A organization, introducing reporting automation and controls to maximize data quality and reliability. ➡️ Developed team to fill skills gaps, resulting in multiple team members being promoted to more strategic roles. ➡️ Implemented European segment profitability and risk exposure reporting capabilities to bring leaders nuanced understanding of core business drivers across plants, products, and currency exposures. ➡️ Introduced self-service daily performance monitoring system (Power BI) leveraged by entire European organization and management team. Ranked among top 10 worldwide for daily users and making Novelis Europe leading region on digitalization self-service reports. ➡️ Supported critical strategic decisions, including plant closures, divestitures, and asset relocations, and led major restructuring initiatives.
✴️ IMPACT: Built China organization from scratch, realizing key corporate initiative to expand footprint in region. Earned CFO Excellence award for rapidly launching compliant, Wholly Owned Foreign Entity and major revenue driver under extreme time constraints. Exceeded ROI expectations, leading to additional investment on further line launches. ✴️ ROLE: Entrepreneurial, start-up role building and then leading China-wide accounting, transaction processing, financial reporting, internal controls, compliance (China GAAP, US GAAP, IFRS, and regulatory compliance requirements of US SEC and local Chinese government), treasury, FP&A, and risk management. ✴️ INITIATIVES: ➡️ Built local controllership capabilities to support adherence to complex Chinese accounting requirements. ➡️ Drove equity injection to ensure timely payment to new employees and suppliers, collaborating closely with local legal teams, corporate tax team, and Asia regional offices. ➡️ Launched accounting system to fulfil GAAP accounting requirements (US and China) and enable reporting and established forecasting, planning, and controllership capabilities. ➡️ Protected bottom-line performance in complex negotiations with Chinese construction/equipment suppliers. ➡️ Developed action-oriented, flexible, mission-driven, and self-directed approach while strengthening cross-cultural communication, decision-making, and organizational management skills.
✴️ IMPACT: Hit the ground running in first leadership role in a new country (learning Portuguese in 3 months). Stabilized function struggling to close books on time and provide accurate reporting, transforming it into a highly reliable business partner. Won VIP Award for FP&A improvements (best practices category). Played critical role in driving growth through reliable, timely visibility of core business drivers. ✴️ ROLE: Led FP&A function for multibillion-dollar enterprise, including all financial planning, forecasting, budgeting, and strategic planning for South America. Responsible for digitalization and process improvement. ✴️ INITIATIVES: ➡️ Comprehensively overhauled reporting, forecasting, and planning system to create more reliable, efficient, and automation-driven financial planning (via Hyperion Financial Planning). Collaborated closely across functional areas to design integrated system matching needs of all major stakeholders.