About the Business
Finch Restorations is Australia's oldest car restoration business and is still growing. We have four workshop sites in Mount Barker where we carry out restorations. In Woodside we have a fifth site where we undertake automotive repairs and servicing. Mount Barker and Woodside are both in the Adelaide Hills just 20 minutes up the South-Eastern Freeway from the Old Tollgate.
Finch Restorations is a vertically integrated business at the pinnacle of what is fundamentally a cottage industry. In this industry, many old-school skills are disappearing and parts suppliers span from OEMs to hobbyists and deceased estates. We specialise in ground-up restorations where fully dismantled vehicles can involve 2,000 to 4,000 components needing assessment, potential refurbishment, storage and control. Times those statistics by 40-50 vehicle projects, each taking nominally three months to three years, and a high level of diligence and strong methodologies are required in a data driven environment.
We use an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system which we have been progressively customising for vehicle restorations over the last six or so years.
Being vertically integrated, our highly experienced and mature technician workforce encompasses diverse trades and skills: coachbuilding, panel-beating, timberwork, spray-painting, mechanics, engine-building, auto-electrical, blacksmithing, whitesmithing, motor-trimming, veneering, lacquering, and fabrication. Our technicians are supported by our dedicated Project Management Office that performs planning and monitoring, manages client and stakeholder communications, and commercial functions.
Due to the unique nature of our business at the pinnacle of a cottage industry, we are continually learning, growing and improving. Enthusiatic, well-organised, and diverse-skilled staff with a 'can do' attitude are very important to us.
In our Project Management Office we often need to find 'Unicorns': people with skills-sets not normally found in the automotive industry. Thus we often adopt an approach of modifying roles to accommodate skills.
Why work for Finch?
- Opportunities: With over two dozen personnel, we can offer great opportunities for people with the right experience, skills, and attitude to make their marks in the professional restoration and remanufacturing of classic and historical vehicles.
- Multi-skilled team: Our team is multi-skilled and has a passion for preserving and restoring classic and historic vehicles and knowledge sharing allows you to grow your own skill set.
- Crafts-based environment: We work on a broad range of vehicles in a diverse, skilled, crafts-based environment.
- Work-life balance: we offer a good work-life balance and flexible work arrangements.
Projects Coordinator Role
Tasks and Responsibilities
- Coordinate the full portfolio of current and prospective projects.
- Control and monitor PMO functions.
- As a servant leader, coordinate project managers, purchasing officer, data administrator, bookkeeping, and workshop supervisors.
- Manage and integrate portfolio timelines in both Agile and waterfall frameworks.
- Incorporate project product backlogs into the central portfolio product backlog, and ensure that workshop product backlogs are continually full with work for several sprints.
- With the workshop supervisors, allocate workorders to technicians for fortnightly sprints.
- Ensure that the PMO team follows scrum framework values and practices.
- Coordinate sprints, retrospective meetings and daily stand-ups.
- Mentor and motivate the team to improve processes.
- Produce and maintain KPI reports.
- Facilitate meetings and decision-making processes.
- Eliminate team impediments.
- Act as back-up administrator for projects during peak periods, or absence of team members.
Project Manager Role
Tasks and Responsibilities
- Manage and lead a portfolio of assigned projects from project initiation through to final vehicle delivery and project closure.
- Communicate with customers, suppliers, team members and other stakeholders.
- Act as the 'product owner', together with workshop supervisors, to handle project product backlogs, emergent issues and new requests.
- Produce periodic project reports and manage project commercial matters.
- Facilitate project meetings and project decision-making processes.
- Produce timely work-orders, in concert with workshop supervisors, to ensure that project backlogs are full with three to four sprints of workorders for each project.
- Manage each project’s scope and timeline.
- Eliminate project impediments.
About you
Your skills and experience will include:
- Experience in project planning and management in the manufacturing, engineering, or automotive sectors.
- Strong critical thinking and organisational skills, and able to plan and lead a vehicle restoration project.
- Strong verbal and written communications skills, able to engage and negotiate with customers, team members.
- Experience in scoping, defining tasks and the generation and issuing of workorders.
- Able to identify procurement needs for a project and implement the timely identification and procurement of parts (typically with assistance of other team members).
- Experience in preparation of project reports and invoices.
- Have a good computer literacy with the MS Office suite and able to use an ERP system.
Personal Attributes
- Enthusiastic and organised with a positive outlook, 'can do' attitude and ability to work effectively as a confident team member.
- Good interpersonal skills.
- Tech savvy.
- Have patience and a good sense of humour.
- Takes pride in their work.
- Good time management skills.
- Aptitude for recognising change needs and implementing change.
To Apply
Please submit your Resume via email to
Applications close Monday, 12 September 2022.
