Diamond Light Source is the UK’s national synchrotron science facility. Located on the Harwell Science & Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire a 20 minute drive south of Oxford in a designated Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Diamond Light Source conducts world-class research in virtually all fields of science and offers rewarding career opportunities covering both technical and scientific disciplines.

This role is central to influencing the future direction of the Finance Systems development and the post holder will take the lead technical role spanning Finance and IT, in the end to end implementation of the new finance system.

Once the new Finance system is implemented this role is responsible for ensuring that future systems and reporting developments are designed, built and utilised to facilitate data integrity, and to provide significantly improved reporting capability and business intelligence.

This hybrid of Finance and IT skills role is effectively a stand-alone position reporting to the Director of FCS.

This role splits into three key areas as detailed below:

Finance systems development and training

• Lead the technical role in the end-to-end implementation of any new systems, including data migration, post-implementation support, and data extraction from legacy systems;
• Manage the production of all appropriate technical processes including documentation and specifications as required; in the most optimal way;
• Ensure that systems and reports are built in the most efficient way possible and that processes and reporting run smoothly and on time;
• Obtain the appropriate resources to implement any key developments and then disseminate and deliver training where required;
• Translate and evaluate requests for changes and determine what are essential needs to then action and justify why others are rejected;

Finance systems design and support

• Lead on the continued development, maintenance and support of Finance’s databases and Business Intelligence solutions through the identification of issues; proposing, designing, problem solving, testing, building and implementing solutions which meet the needs of the end users and Diamond as a whole;
• Provide systems support and development to the Finance team and other Finance system users across the organisation;
• Collaborate with IT and the providers of eProc and Agresso and be responsible for driving and developing improved financial systems, processes and procedures  replacing manual processes where possible;
• Ensure the security and integrity of the finance system is maintained at all times (e.g. through managing and responding to change requests);
• Responsible for all upgrades and database administration, the key point of contact for issues, and gatekeeper for new codes etc.;
• Influence and communicate to all stakeholders at all levels in the organisation, to judge, challenge, push back and  be able to translate business needs into working solutions;
• Identify and develop disciplined and efficient procedures to minimise manual effort;

Business Intelligence Reporting

• Responsible for the designing, building, and production of financial and management reporting to meet the changing requirements of the company;
• Design and provide ad-hoc report solutions as and when required;

• A thorough understanding of financial accounting and financial management reporting;
• Confident in SQL with ability to write complex queries;
• Confident using VBA to integrate Microsoft Office applications;
• Proactive and self-motivated  to work autonomously and to prioritise and manage competing priorities;
• Ability to build relationships with system users of varying backgrounds and levels in the organisation;
• Experience working closely with SQL based ERP systems/applications;
• Prior experience with system implementation and/or system integration;
• Prior experience with leading the identification of and development of systems;
• Working knowledge of relational database management systems (RDMS) and the relational model;
• Requirements analysis and solution design;
• Working in a Finance environment
• Integration system testing (IST) and User acceptance testing (UAT);
• Microsoft SQL Server 2000/2008/2012;
• Experience of working to tight deadlines, and of setting and achieving targets;
• Experience of producing and publishing high quality reports based on analytical work.
• SQL Server, SQL, VBA and RDMS
• Microsoft information management certification (or working towards)
• Proactive and self motivated
   

• Finance qualification to minimum of AAT level;
• MCSE Business Intelligence;
• MCSA: SQL Server 2012;
• Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio;
• Experience with Unit 4 Business World (Agresso);
• Data mining / data warehousing;
• NET framework.