Spent 11 very productive years at Ford where I achieved 3 significant promotions, two of which were into new areas of responsibility. The career path was:
Accounting Analyst, Ford Motor Company Ltd
(18 months)
- part of the Ford of Britain (FoB) consolidation team, responsible for all accounted reporting including FoB’s published accounts and 10K submissions to Detroit.
Supervisor Treasury Accounting, FoB
(18 months)
- responsible for determining the accounting for financing and hedging transactions undertaken by Ford of Europe (FoE) Treasury, whilst supervising a team responsible for FoB’s P&L ledger, bank accounts, and Pension Fund accounting.
Co-ordinator, Profit Analysis, FoE
(5 years to December 1988)
- this department was the pinnacle of financial reporting in FoE. I had two roles, initially monthly corporate analysis and reporting, subsequently being responsible for FoE’s variable cost budget development (the Blue Book) which analysed product profit data and was the basis of all FoE’s vehicle-related decision analysis.
Insurance Manager, Ford of Europe (FoE)
(3 years to December 1991)
- responsible for corporate insurance matters for c. 30 Ford businesses in Europe, and for assisting sales companies throughout Europe with their insurance based products, (e.g. Ford Credit Britain’s credit life product), and marketing programmes (e.g. Ford Britain’s free insurance programme with General Accident).
Ford provided me with considerable breadth and depth of experience combined with outstanding managerial and technical training that has proved invaluable.
Key Achievements:
· Introduced data mining techniques to Profit Analysis (seeking incongruous data, e.g. in price lists, and verifying or correcting it) and to Insurance Operations (analysing incident data to identify causation and mitigate exposures).
· Designed and contracted a 3 year rolling general liability insurance programme providing cover for the £1-25m loss band, including a mutual agreement to cancel and renew after each year so that there’s always at least two years of the contract to run.
· Solved a serious issue regarding high transportation damage losses on shipments to Italy, involving researching causation and designing a solution, which included revising shipping contracts, standards, and audit processes. This saved over $1m per annum.
· Successful in making insurance recoveries from three multi-million pound frauds.