Transition Manager Finance Operations

___ Job Title: Transition Manager Finance Operations

Location:
Porto, Portugal Type: Fixed-Term contract (18 months) Work arrangement: Full-time – Hybrid working (3 days/week in office) ___ About Unilabs Headquartered in Geneva and part of the A.
P. Moller Group, Unilabs is one of Europe’s leading medical diagnostics companies, offering a complete range of laboratory, pathology, genetics, and imaging services to patients across 14 countries. Unilabs invests heavily in technology, equipment, and people – using digital technologies in its state-of-the-art laboratories and imaging institutes – to improve the lives of close to 100 million people every year. Summary The Transition Manager, Finance Operations, is responsible for planning, managing, and successfully implementing one or more transition projects in the Accounting department. The focus is on transferring financial processes from local country organizations to the Unilabs Business Service Center in Porto. The position is responsible for end-to-end project management for transitions in areas such as General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, Treasury, Tax, and Financial Reporting. They ensure that processes are transferred in a structured, timely, and controlled manner without disrupting day-to-day business operations. The Transition Manager reports the head of the Business Service Center and works closely with local CFOs, finance leadership teams, process owners, IT, HR, compliance, external consultants, and the receiving teams in Portugal. The role combines in-depth accounting knowledge with project management, change management, and strong stakeholder management skills. Candidates are expected to have more than three years of professional experience, preferably at one of the Big Four accounting firms or in a comparable consulting environment. .

Key Responsibilities
Transition and Project Management
- Assume end-to-end responsibility for one or more concurrent accounting process migration projects.
- Develop detailed transition plans, including project scope, milestones, timeline, resources, dependencies, and success criteria.
- Managing all project phases, from analysis and preparation through knowledge transfer and parallel operation to stabilization and handover to line operations.
- Defining project governance, as well as organizing and facilitating steering committees, status meetings, and decision-making forums.
- Preparing regular status reports for local and global executives.
- Monitoring the schedule, budget, resources, quality, and agreed-upon project scope.
- Identifying, assessing, and actively managing project risks, issues, and dependencies.
- Developing and implementing appropriate measures in the event of deviations or delays.
- Ensuring complete project documentation and a controlled project closure.
- Conducting lessons-learned workshops and applying the insights to future transitions. Accounting and Process Relocation
- Analysis of existing accounting processes, organizational structures, systems, controls, and responsibilities in the transferring country organizations.
- Preparation and validation of process inventories, as well as definition of the specific transition scope.
- Coordination of the relocation of processes in areas such as:
- General Ledger and Record-to-Report
- Accounts Payable and Procure-to-Pay
- Accounts Receivable and Order-to-Cash
- Treasury and Cash Management
- Tax and Statutory Reporting
- Intercompany Accounting
- Fixed Assets
- Month-end and Year-end Closing
- Ensuring that IFRS, local GAAP requirements, tax regulations, and internal guidelines are taken into account during the process transfer.
- Defining clear roles and responsibilities between the Business Service Center and the local finance organizations.
- Ensuring the continuity of critical financial processes during the transition, particularly for monthly and annual closings.
- Coordinating data migrations, system access, authorization models, and relevant interfaces.
- Supporting the standardization and harmonization of processes across multiple companies and countries. Knowledge Transfer and Operational Readiness
- Development and management of a structured knowledge transfer approach.
- Creation of knowledge transfer plans, training plans, and readiness criteria.
- Ensuring complete documentation of processes, work instructions, controls, schedules, and escalation procedures.
- Coordination of training, shadowing, reverse shadowing, and parallel runs.
- Assessing the knowledge level of the receiving teams and tracking identified gaps.
- Defining and monitoring quality and acceptance criteria for each project phase.
- Conducting formal readiness assessments prior to go-live.
- Managing the hypercare and stabilization phases following the transition.
- Ensuring a structured handoff to the responsible team leaders and process owners. Stakeholder and Change Management
- Building trusting relationships with the tran