Cost & Budget Lead

The Cost & Budget Lead in Capital Projects is responsible for designing, implementing, and overseeing cost control and budgeting frameworks across large-scale capital project portfolios. This role ensures financial accuracy, thorough forecasting, strategic risk management, and informed decision-making throughout the project life cycle—from planning through execution and closure.

This includes oversight of both Capex and Opex budgets within the GCP portfolio, ensuring financial accuracy, proactive forecasting, and strategic cost governance throughout the project lifecycle.

This role will directly report to Director Cost & Risk Management within Project Controls Department, Global Capital Projects.

• Lead the development and consolidation of budgets for all GCP initiatives.
• Ensure alignment of project budgets with corporate financial objectives and governance standards.

• Manage operational expenditure budgets related to GCP activities (e.g., maintenance, sustaining capital, project support costs).
• Track and report Opex performance against forecasts, identifying optimization opportunities.

• Implement cost control systems and processes for global projects.
• Prepare monthly forecasts, variance analysis, and financial reports for Capex and Opex.

• Create and maintain cost control tools, procedures, and documentation to support robust budget management across project.

• Lead the creation of initial cost estimates and project budgets, including building detailed WBS breakdowns.

• Track actuals versus budget, drive accruals and periodic forecast updates, prepare monthly/weekly forecasts, and report variances.

• Maintain cost risk registers and manage change requests impacting budgets.
• Support contingency planning and scenario analysis for global projects.

• Collaborate with project managers, finance, procurement, and regional teams to ensure accurate reporting and compliance.
• Present cost performance updates to senior leadership and governance boards.

• Cost control & forecasting software (e.g., SAP, Oracle)
• Advanced Excel (pivot tables, macros, data modeling)
• ERP, Procurement systems (Ariba, Coupa etc)

Basic Qualifications & Skills:

• Bachelor's degree in Finance, Engineering, Project Management or related field.
• 8+ years of experience in Cost Controlling, with at least 3 years in a leadership role within the pharmaceutical/life sciences industry or similar industries (Oil & Gas, Power/Energy sector).
• Experience as Finance controller or Business Controller for Business budgeting and OPEX tracking.
• Experience in Cost control & forecasting software (e.g., SAP, Oracle etc).
• Advanced Excel (pivot tables, macros, data modeling).
• Senior stakeholder management and project reporting experience.

• MSc or other Chartered / Professional Qualification in a relevant discipline.
• Good pharma background or working experience from capital projects. Not mandatory.
• Solid knowledge of GSK project process, User requirement management, quality and compliance requirement, site project completion and pre-start processes, and how these impact engineering and design, construction, commissioning, and qualification contracts.
• Familiar with the GCP Project Management Framework (PMF), relevant engineering standards and compliance requirement as well as Quality Management Systems.
• PMP (Project Management Professional) or CCP (Certified Cost Professional) or PMI-SP (Scheduling Professional) or Lean Six Sigma or similar process improvement credentials.

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