Senior Manager, Commercial Finance and Transformation

A Place Where People Matter. Start your career journey with Univar Solutions! Here you can make an impact on the world around you and accelerate your career in areas that energize and excite you.

A Place Where People Matter. Start your career journey with Univar Solutions! Here you can make an impact on the world around you and accelerate your career in areas that energize and excite you.

The Senior Manager, Commercial Finance & Transformation plays a critical role in driving financial, commercial, and operational performance across the organization. The role leads a portfolio of high-impact initiatives focused on accelerating revenue growth, optimizing pricing, and improving margin through data-driven insight, disciplined execution, and cross-functional partnership.

As part of the Transformation Office and the UnivarONE program, this role partners closely with the business, Finance, and the Innovation Office to identify opportunities, shape solutions with subject matter experts, and move initiatives from idea through pilot to validated, finance-signed value. The role is expected to leverage AI, automation, and analytics capabilities delivered through UnivarONE and the FRONTIER Factory, ensuring commercial initiatives are grounded in real business context and translate into measurable EBITDA and cash impact.

The ideal candidate brings a strong background in Commercial Finance, Sales Finance, Strategy, or Consulting, exceptional analytical capability, and a proven ability to lead complex, cross-functional projects. This role works in close partnership with Sales, Operations, and Finance leadership to influence strategy and guide critical commercial decisions.

• Analyze commercial, operational, and financial data to develop and test hypotheses about performance drivers, particularly for complex, multi-stakeholder decisions with downstream impact.
• Translate pain points, observations, and current-state KPIs into clearly defined opportunities, partnering with the business and SMEs to get the context and problem statement right before jumping to recommendations.
• Model and quantify the financial and operational impact of proposed improvements, mapping value levers to the P&L and sizing opportunity at proof-of-concept, pilot, and scale.
• Monitor and interpret sales and margin performance to generate actionable insight supporting revenue growth and margin expansion.

• Identify where AI, automation, and analytics capabilities delivered through UnivarONE can accelerate commercial and margin outcomes, partnering with the Innovation Office and FRONTIER Factory.
• Route qualifying AI and technology ideas through Factory intake, and partner with product owners and SMEs to co-develop solutions grounded in business context.
• Support adoption of AI-enabled tools (e.g., pricing, Next Best Action, margin management) within commercial workflows, driving behavior change and sustained usage, not just deployment.
• Ensure initiatives progress through stage gates with clear value hypotheses, and align technology work to proven business value rather than technology for its own sake.

• Build comprehensive business cases to validate ROI, assess feasibility, and secure funding for high-impact initiatives.
• Partner with Finance/FP&A so value is validated and signed off before it is counted, and reflected in One Stream, the AOP, and Strategic Plan.
• Distinguish opportunity sizing, targeted value, and finance-validated value, maintaining credible, investor-grade reporting.
• Track realized versus committed value and drive corrective action when…