Turn Operations Finance From Reporting What Happened Into Anticipating What Happens NextGood Works Talent is partnering with a large, established organization in the agriculture and manufacturing sector to recruit a Senior Operations Finance Analyst for its Wichita-based operations finance team. This is an FP&A role with a broader mandate than producing forecasts and explaining variances. You’ll work across a multi-site North American manufacturing network, helping leaders understand how reliability, production, lost opportunity, cost, and other operating drivers translate into financial performance - and what they should do next. You’ll also help modernize how finance works by improving forecasting and planning models, strengthening business insights, experimenting with AI and automation, and shifting analyst time from assembling information toward interpreting it. There’s an immediate leadership dimension as well. You’ll mentor early-career analysts and help raise the analytical capability of the team, creating an opportunity to build leadership experience without waiting for a formal management title. What You’ll Accomplish Become a trusted FP&A partner. During your first 90 days, you’ll learn the economics and operating drivers behind a complex manufacturing network, build relationships with site analysts and finance partners, and develop command of the team’s forecasting, reporting, and planning processes. The goal isn’t simply knowing where the numbers come from - you’ll need to explain what they mean. Strengthen forecasting and planning. You’ll take increasing ownership of monthly forecasts, actual-to-plan analysis, quarterly forecasting, and annual planning. You’ll dig beneath variances to understand the operational variables driving them and turn that understanding into scenarios, recommendations, and forward-looking insights. Help leaders understand reliability and lost opportunity. You’ll connect operating performance to economic impact, investigating root causes, assumptions, reliability factors, and lost production opportunities so leaders can better understand where value is being created or left on the table. Modernize operations finance. You’ll evaluate forecasting models, reporting processes, data flows, and recurring deliverables to determine what can be simplified, automated, standardized, or redesigned. One of your first opportunities will be helping automate a recurring operations results presentation used by senior leadership. The objective is to automate repeatable compilation work so analyst time can shift toward commentary, business drivers, recommendations, and what comes next. Develop the analysts around you. You’ll mentor early-career analysts in financial analysis, business judgment, data literacy, problem solving, and communication while building toward broader leadership responsibility. Why This Could Be a Significant Career MoveThis role sits close to the operating engine of the business. When a manufacturing facility improves reliability or produces for additional time, there can be a meaningful financial impact. Your job is to connect those operating realities to the financial story and help leaders decide where to focus. By the six-month point, success should look less like waiting for assignments and more like asking “What if?” identifying opportunities, anticipating what the business will need next, developing a point of view, and bringing recommendations. The scale and breadth of the organization can also create future paths into areas such as operations finance, site finance, commercial finance, accounting, and leadership. What Will Make You Successful You’ll likely bring a solid foundation in FP&A, finance, accounting, economics, analytics, or business support, along with experience working with forecasts, plans, or business performance. Manufacturing experience is helpful, but not required. A strong FP&A professional from another industry can succeed if you know how to unpack a forecast, understand the business levers behind it, and translate analysis into recommendations. A more traditional accounting background can also work if your mindset extends beyond closing the books. The question here is: What can we learn from the numbers that changes what the business does next? You should also be comfortable learning technology rather than defining yourself by one particular tool. The environment includes Microsoft Fabric, Power BI, AI/Copilot-style tools, automation, and evolving data capabilities. You don’t need to be a programmer—the bigger differentiators are curiosity, learning agility, and knowing how to use technology to solve business problems. The Environment This role is based in Wichita, Kansas in a collaborative hybrid environment. Flexibility exists, but this is not intended to be primarily remote. Building relationships in person will be particularly important during onboarding, with periodic travel to manufacturing locations. The environment fits someone who brings ideas, constructively challenges existing approaches, investigates root causes, experiments with better solutions, and takes ownership rather than simply executing a checklist. Interested? Start With What You’ve Accomplished. Instead of simply matching your résumé against a checklist, we’re interested in the work you’ve actually done. If you’ve improved a forecasting model, automated a finance process, uncovered the business drivers behind a difficult variance, turned complex data into a decision, challenged an established process and made it better, or helped other analysts develop, we’d like to hear the story. Those accomplishments may tell us considerably more about your fit than whether every keyword on your résumé matches the job description.
