Project Management Research Assistant

James W. Mukaisi

*****.*********@*****.*** 724-***-**** Indiana, PA LinkedIn

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Indiana University of Pennsylvania – Indiana, PA 02/2023 to 05/2024

Steamshop Project Management Coordinator

•Responsible for the sourcing of equipments and products worth circa $550,000, developed assessment /reporting for project partners and implementation of project marketing /communication plan as graduate research assistant.

•Collected assessment data and prepared reports for funding agency.

•Create STEAMSHOP project website within IUP Platform and frequent update of contents.

•Prepare quarterly reports for project leadership and stakeholders.

Finlays, LLC – 07/2021 to 06/2022

Financial Controller

•Preparation of financial reports, including Profit and Loss Statement and Balance sheet, as well as the year-end financial reports

•Oversee the general accounting process of inter company, fixed assets and financial reporting of all entities

•Responsible for review of critical macro and economic indicators to execute short to long term financial plans.

•Preparing and consolidating financial reports, budgets, forecast and Capex in five-years rolling budget.

•Created Balance sheet review models to predict expected variance between GL and Sub-Ledgers reconciliation.

•Accelerated months end close process by 8 days through process optimization and automations. Running of end month closing process of modules and journals that ensured accuracy in reporting.

•Manage to develop and execute inventory management systems leading to improving cashflow by circa $216 m.

•Foreign currency hedging leads to an increase in net gain of $2.3m based on the forward contract model.

•Oversaw the transition to automated ERP and analysis processes on Sage x3, Epicor, IDEA and Microsoft Excel.

•Orchestrated a discounted cashflow (DCF) model to help optimize the capital investments (CAPEX).

•Involved in Merger and Acquisition of Flower business by Black Tulip Group and capital gain tax (CGT).

•Liaison with the external stakeholders like banks, insurances, external auditors, suppliers and customers.

•Preparing dividend yields analysis, current and deferred tax computation in line with business performance.

•Tax planning and accounting activities in compliance with statutory requirements.

•Managing treasury and cash management resulting in OD reduction by 23% based on the working capital cycle.

•Implemented robust change order management system resulting in 80% reduction in billing disputes.

•Leadership responsibility for cultivating relationships for business growth for the 4 chief accountants and 32 indirect reports. Coaching and mentoring plus performance appraisal.

•Improving efficiency and cost containment using the standard costing system against actual performance in world class manufacturing operations and overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) target of 83%.

•Curated models to accurately predict (less 7% variance) the demand for upcoming 12 months including safety stock and dead stocks.

•Involved in payroll process for 7,000 staff as team lead with different payroll types through efficient payroll management.

Financial Planning and Analysis Manager 03/2020 to 06/2021

•Primary leadership with mandate to develop and manage preparation of divisional financial models for 7 strategic business units (SBU) by improving quality and consistency.

•Managing, using with IDEA and advanced excel, all aspects working capital, EBIT bridge, GRNI, GSNI, Inventory reductions, Account Payables and Account Receivable.

•Three-statement model framework in financial reporting to present the company financial health.

•Instituted processes that reduced the financing costs - bank overdraft - by $1m, improved cashflow and forecasting cash adequacy in daily business operations.

•Monitoring of quarterly perpetual stock take and cash count across the Central Services.

•Used advanced excel in gathering, preparation, presentation to the executive the budget macroeconomics assumptions, SBU budgets, Capex Analysis, Revenues and Expenditure budgets.

•Created a financial variance analysis of YOY/MOM performance against the budget to monitor returns and provide business commentary on variances above 10%.

•Quarterly predictive analysis on the business trends and forecasts on the impact of macroeconomic to the earnings and business performance.

•End month closing process by running the fixed assets depreciation, inventory posting, revaluations,

•Optimized the bank reconciliation for 13 bank accounts with 4 different currencies with no variance.

•Performed Intercompany reconciliation and interdivision reconciliation where no variance was reported.

•Utilized New IFRS for reporting like IFRS 16 – Leasing and IFRS 9 Financial Instruments aiming for greater transparency and risk management in financial reporting.

•Computation of IAS 41 – Biological Assets for forestry departments in compliance to the standards.

•Collaborated with materials management in vendors performance evaluation process, wrote and optimized IDEA queries to perform data extraction and merging from SQL server database.

ERP Finance Transformation Lead 09/2017 to 02/2020

•Seconded and perform an active role in successfully implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) - Sage x3 across the company finance, manufacturing, operations and supply chain process, resulting in cost saving benefits of circa $624,000.

•Lead and manage the finance workstream in the task of data migration, process re-engineering, system configuration and 625 users training.

•Bridged the gap between finance and ERP implementation partners by successfully ensuring the functionalities of ERP align with the business needs.

•Perform system testing and validation of the finance module within the ERP system to ensure it meets functional and performance requirements.

•Defining the Reports requirements and ensuring the new ERP generated accurate and timely financial reports.

•Drive user adoption of the new ERP system by developing the training program, addressing user concerns and ensure smooth transition from legacy system.

•Performed report rationalization down to 70% (539 reports to 162 reports) and uploading to Sage x3 Enterprise Management Data and Analytics (EMDA) by Zap-BI.

•Provide consultancy to Finlay Groups companies in the implementation of ERP based on the successful implementation.

Chief Accountant 07/2016 to 08/2017

•Responsible for providing finance leadership for central services divisional financial models for cost optimization.

•Analyzed GRNI data using IDEA and reduced by 75% by collaboration with the suppliers, AP team and Inventory team

•Streamlined billing cycle by 95% through process automation and improved communication with sales managers, leading to faster cash collection.

•Participate in 3 years Union Back pay worth Circa Kes.1.2 billion for 4,820 employees.

•Lead and contribute to assessment of long-term risk based on actuarial valuations under IFRS 19.

•Improved Costs of production, Activity Based Costing Model (ABC), Out-turns analysis and Standard Cost Accounting.

•Initiate and support efforts with general accounting, financial planning, financial reporting, payroll, sales, property tax preparation, and income tax preparation

•Perform as an active role in the preparation and review of federal and state tax returns for individuals, corporations, partnerships and estates

•Developed and implemented KPI for profitability and sales performance.

•Identified and implemented cost-savings measures resulting in circa $200k savings annually in Sawmill process.

Senior Group Internal Auditor 04/2009 to 06/2016

•Responsible for providing independent assurance on internal controls, proactive approach in risk management and process optimization specialist focus on streamlining operational efficiency for Finlay Group and John Swire & Sons business operations in Africa, Europe and North America

•Facilitating in designing internal audit charter, risk-based audit plan, audit process and execution of audit fieldwork for a $130m company with fixed assets of over $47M.

•Use of business analytics tools for 15 different system databases known as Integrated data evaluations and analysis (IDEA) for data mining, Tableau for data visualization and data analysis.

•Preformed financial, operational, statutory and sustainability audits leading to improvement in control and governance frameworks.

•Conducted fraud investigation that identified the gap in the purchase to pay process and leading the mitigations.

•Special audit to engineering department and job costing system leading to labor cost savings of circa $216,000 and efficient use of resources

•Identified valuable controls in inventory management eliminating the risk of loss and pilferage by improving the process and extracting insights from data for driving business transformations.

•Undertake conversion of Sawmill business from cost center to a profit center increasing the overall margin by $388,000

•Learned using the Audit software – Teammates used of audit life cycle of audit planning, resource allocation and management, fieldwork, Reporting and follow up.

•Build the Audit Risk Management Model that proactively identifies, assesses and mitigates risks using various strategies. Quarterly meeting and updating of the risk register.

•Successfully built and deployed dashboard model to rank KPI in business operations.

Other Past Experiences

•Monarch Group Limited/ Group Head of Internal Audit/August 2006 to April 2009

•African Heritage Design Company/Chief Accountant/September 2004 to July 2006

•Keroche Breweries Limited/ Sales Accountant/August 2003 to August 2004

Projects and Awards

•2024 Graduate Dean’s award – Eberly College of Business – IUP

•2022 Finlay United Global Recognition Awards for successful roll out of Sage X3 ERP.

EDUCATION

Master of Business Administration May 2024

Indiana University of Pennsylvania, Indiana, PA

Master of Science in Professional Accountancy December 2024

University of London, London, UK

Bachelor of Commerce in Accounting July 2000

Kenyatta University, Nairobi, KE

PROFESSIONAL CERTIFICATIONS AND SKILLS

•Fully Qualified Chartered Certified Accountant – ACCA-UK.

•Report presentation using Power BI, Advanced Excel and Tableau.

•Quality improvement expert with Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt.

TECHNICAL SKILLS AND TOOLS

Financial Modeling : Three-Statement Model (P&L, BS, Cash Flow), Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Model, Merger Model (M&A Model), Budget Model, Forecasting Model, Consolidation Model, Embedded Derivatives - Hedging and Forward Contract Model, FX Valuation Model, Depreciation Model, Pricing Models, Transfer-Pricing Model, MRP, Standard Costing Model.

Financial Analysis : MIS, EBITDA, EBIT, Break-Even Analysis, Statistics, Credit Risk.

Data Analysis : IDEA by CaseWare, SAP Analytics, SPSS, Python, Power BI, Tableau.

Advanced Excel : VLOOKUP, HLOOKUP, Index/Match, Pivot Tables, Data Tools/ Developer.

Accounting Standards : IFRS, GAAP.

Databases : DB, MySQL, Amazon Aurora, Amazon RDS, Amazon Dynamo DB.

Statistical Analysis : Time Series Analysis, Regression models, Principal Component Analysis and Dimensionality Reduction, cluster analysis, Optimization Techniques.

Risk Management and Audit: Risk Based Audit Plan, Audit Working Papers (AWP), Audit Sampling, IA Policy, Fraud Investigation, Audit Software (TeamMate), Business Risk, SOX, Assessment and Management, Finance Audit, Operation Audit, Statutory Audit.

Delivery Methodologies: Agile - Scrum, Agile – Kanban, Waterfall, Lean Six Sigma, Safety Model.

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