Lowes - Lead Analyst - Planning & Forecasting

- The primary purpose of this role is to partner with complex and highly visible areas of the business and/or work in support of initiatives aligned with the Company's strategy and focus areas. This is accomplished by cross-functional collaboration to convert complex business plans into quarterly forecasts, annual budgets, and long range plans; develop and maintain scorecards; develop business cases; and provide proactive analysis, insights, and recommendations to optimize business performance.

- The Lead Analyst is responsible for acting as a subject matter expert and thought leader on their respective team, as well as taking on the responsibility of mentoring and developing junior team members. To do this, the Lead Analyst must have strong knowledge of financial and business analytics principles, and the ability to leverage a matrixed environment to manage projects and analyses to completion by leveraging talent across Finance and other business areas. The Lead Analyst should also possess the ability to influence and interact with senior leaders at the Company.

Key Responsibilities & Attributes:

- Develops Analyst and Senior Analyst talent by managing and prioritizing day-to-day workload and direction; reviewing work output and providing feedback; coaching and mentoring on strengths and opportunities

- Act as a subject matter expert (SME) and thought leader on respective team

- Facilitates the financial forecasting and planning processes with functional partners and business units that result in quarterly forecast updates, annual plans, and long range plans (2-3 years)

- Collaborate across the business to provide root cause analysis and actionable insights based on financial and non-financial data to functional partners and business units

- Communicates financial and non-financial analysis and insights to leaders by preparing analyses through leveraging multiple data sources; identifying complete, consistent, and actionable insights & recommendations; translating insights into clear, understandable themes

- Completes work assignments by applying up-to-date expertise in subject area; leveraging an understanding of policies, data, and resources to support projects or initiatives; collaborating cross-functionally to solve business problems; identifying, recommending, and implementing ways to address improvement opportunities

- Utilizing advanced tools and methods to leverage financial data

- Comfortable exploring and understanding structured and unstructured data sources

- Work effectively in a matrixed organization and handle competing priorities with firm deadlines

Qualification

Required Minimum Qualifications:

- Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Quantitative or related field plus 6-7 years of experience in relevant finance and/or analytics environment

- Experience in Financial Forecasting, Budgeting and Forecasting working directly with business functions

- Familiar with commonly used analytical techniques for forecasting and budgeting

- Experience with business intelligence and reporting tools (e.g., SQL, MicroStrategy, IBM Cognos TM1, Essbase, Hyperion or similar multi-dimensional databases)

- Proficient in using MS Office - primarily Excel, PowerPoint and Access

Preferred Minimum Qualifications:

- Master's degree in Business Bachelor's Degree in Business, Finance, Quantitative or related field plus 8+ years of experience in relevant finance environment

- Experience with Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) based systems, multi-dimensional databases, such as TM1, Hyperion, or Essbase

- Experience with VBA coding