Bid & Quotation Governance
• Own and administer formal finance review and sign-off of the pricing and quotation tool, establishing a scheduled, owned process in place of ad hoc review.
• Define review thresholds, calendar, and turnaround standards in partnership with Sales and Operations, so that governance improves bid quality without becoming a constraint on bid timing.
• Build and maintain the bid review standard covering direct material, labour, scrap factor, contingency, freight, tariff, subcontract, and overhead assumptions, validated against current supplier quotations.
• Serve as the principal finance partner to Application Engineering on cost assumptions, unit economics, and sign-off, including normalised metrics that allow comparison across opportunities.
• Challenge cost assumptions constructively and identify margin improvement opportunities before a quotation is submitted.
• Reconcile awarded purchase orders and executed contracts back to the quotation tool to confirm that quoted and committed costs agree.
Project & Program Margin Analysis
• Own project-based margin analysis for major customer programs, tracking margin from quotation through production to delivery.
• Develop cost bridges explaining margin movement by driver — supplier pricing, commodities, tariffs, freight, engineering change, volume, and manufacturing assumptions.
• Quantify the cost and margin impact of customer- and engineering-driven scope changes, ensuring the increment is captured through change management and communicated to Sales so that customer pricing can be adjusted.
• Identify emerging margin risk on live programs early enough for corrective action, with defined ownership and timing.
• Conduct post-project reviews comparing estimated to actual cost and drive the findings into the next quotation cycle.
Annual Budget & Standard Cost Inputs
• Own the gross margin, pricing, and product cost assumptions within the annual operating budget working to the budget calendar, templates, and submission standards set by FP&A.
• Lead the annual standard cost exercise — material, labour, overhead, freight, and tariff assumptions — and quantify the P&L effect of the change before the plan is locked.
• Build the budgeted margin view by product line, program, and site, including expected bid pipeline conversion and mix, and defend those assumptions through budget review.
• Explain in-year gross margin variance against budget by driver, and feed the findings into the reforecast and the next quoting cycle.
• Query ERP and quotation-tool data directly — SQL or an equivalent BI toolset — to build those libraries and to reconcile quoted cost against committed and actual cost, rather than depending on manual extracts for routine analysis.
• Use AI tooling to accelerate recurring cost work such as supplier quotation comparison, benchmark refresh, and first-draft variance commentary, verifying every output before it informs a customer price.
• Improve the automation and self-service capability of cost and margin reporting, so that routine commercial questions can be answered without a manual build each time.
Commercial Partnership & Continuous Improvement
• Act as a trusted business partner to Sales, Sourcing, Engineering, and Operations, engaged early in the opportunity rather than late in escalation.
• Support make-versus-buy, value engineering, and total cost of ownership analysis alongside Strategic Sourcing.
• Develop and report KPIs monitoring quotation accuracy and margin performance.
• Improve quotation tools, costing methodology, and estimating standards, promoting consistency across the organisation.