Interim Vice President Factory Finance — Food Cost Standards and Controller Leadership

The mandate

A food-production network is midway through a cost-standard revision and its plant controllers need senior arbitration of their assumptions. Operations needs usable financial evidence for the next production cycle, while the permanent search targets an expanded VP seat. Starting on 26 October 2026, the interim will hold that executive perimeter for twelve months. The immediate need is accountable judgement and team direction, not a missing costing system or an instruction to find a predetermined amount of savings.

Your first task is to separate legitimate standard changes from corrections that merely hide recurring loss. Recipe usage, packaging consumption, line speeds and accepted yield need corroboration from operating and quality records. Plants should not adopt assumptions that improve reported variance without changing the underlying process. You will also clarify who owns observations, revisions and approval, ensuring that controller challenge survives when production pressure rises. The annual standard reset must be explainable to procurement, operations and commercial finance without collapsing physical evidence into a convenient blended percentage.

Twenty-six controllers and specialists report within the interim perimeter. You can approve ordinary cost-standard updates inside the CFO's accounting delegation, set plant-finance priorities and authorise temporary diagnostic support within the agreed budget. Changes to costing policy, material write-offs and permanent organisation structure require CFO or board consent. Manufacturing owns operational performance and quality owns usable-output certification. Capacity expansion, supplier renegotiation and changing food formulations are excluded. You may quantify their economic consequences, but this cover engagement does not transfer those decisions into factory finance.

The term closes in October 2027, with no extension available. Handover requires an inducted permanent successor, a completed standard-setting cycle and three monthly reviews in which plant controllers can reproduce the cost bridge and defend approved assumptions. Material data or process weaknesses remain in a funded remediation register with owners. Bengaluru is the base, supported by weekly opening-quarter site engagement and a later risk-based travel schedule. A successful exit leaves an effective controller leadership team, not a set of unusually favourable standards that unravel as soon as interim scrutiny ends.

What you will own

• Approve the priority cost-standard review using physical process and quality evidence, refusing changes that improve the reported variance only by redefining loss without an authorised operating or accounting basis.
• Establish a recipe-and-consumption evidence bridge with plant owners, identifying which records support each material assumption and what uncertainty must remain visible before a revised standard enters financial reporting.
• Decide plant-finance diagnostic priorities from recurrence and exposure, deploying temporary support against defined gaps rather than treating every adverse variance as an equally urgent central investigation.
• Set controller review forums that connect source observations, approved assumptions and actual outcomes, requiring plants to explain deviations without replacing their local accountability with a centrally authored narrative.
• Escalate material write-offs or policy changes to the CFO with quantified alternatives and the operating evidence, preserving quality and manufacturing authority while making financial treatment decisions explicit.
• Induct the permanent vice president through the completed standard cycle and live monthly reviews, confirming that controllers can reproduce the bridge and maintain challenge after interim leadership withdraws.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate deep food or FMCG factory-finance experience, including a standard-setting cycle where you challenged physical assumptions rather than merely updated input prices. Explain an unsupported yield, recipe or speed assumption you corrected, the evidence you used and the consequence for production or financial reporting. Personal decision ownership is essential; an aggregate variance dashboard alone does not show the required judgement.
• Bring a finance career of at least twenty-eight years with meaningful GM, plant-finance head or equivalent leadership accountability. A strong accounting and costing foundation is required, whether established through professional qualification or sustained evidence of complex practice. You must connect physical production records to cost standards while recognising the distinct authority of quality teams to determine acceptable, saleable output.
• Have led controllers through disagreement with operations under demanding production schedules. Describe how you preserved constructive challenge, avoided arbitrary assumption changes and calibrated escalation to materiality. Experience should include developing deputies and reviewing the financial effect of recurring losses without either normalising them away or assuming finance can solve every underlying engineering or process problem directly.
• Commit five days weekly to the fixed twelve-month period beginning 26 October 2026, with regular factory exposure. Evidence a previous leadership handover that included usable judgement records and an owned remediation backlog. You should be comfortable leaving uncertainty honestly documented, declining unapproved scope additions and ensuring the successor inherits a functioning team rather than dependence on temporary specialists you brought into the engagement.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 11 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-INT-2026-IND-028.