Project Manager

Experience: 15–18 years
Project Type: SAP Application Management Services (AMS)
Customer Industry: Defense
Location: United Arab Emirates
Role Type: Senior Functional Lead / Source-to-Pay Service Lead
Primary Skills: SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, SAP S/4HANA or ECC Procurement Integration

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior SAP Ariba Lead with 15–18 years of overall SAP experience to provide functional leadership, service ownership, and hands‑on L2/L3 support for a mission‑critical SAP AMS engagement serving a defense customer in the UAE. The role will own the stability, governance, enhancement, and continuous improvement of source‑to‑pay processes across SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and integrated SAP S/4HANA or ECC procurement functions. The successful candidate must combine deep Ariba expertise with strong AMS delivery discipline, stakeholder leadership, integration troubleshooting, and secure operations in a highly controlled and confidential environment.

Key Responsibilities

Lead end-to-end functional support and service delivery for SAP Ariba solutions, including Strategic Sourcing, Contracts, Buying and Invoicing, Guided Buying, Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, Supplier Risk, Catalogs, and SAP Business Network.

Act as the primary functional and service‑level point of contact for procurement leadership, business process owners, customer IT, security teams, and delivery partners.

Own L2/L3 incident, problem, service request, and change management; drive timely restoration, structured root‑cause analysis, permanent fixes, and recurring‑ticket reduction.

Manage SLA and KPI performance, ticket prioritization, backlog ageing, major incidents, service reviews, escalations, risks, dependencies, and executive reporting.

Lead requirement workshops, fit‑gap analysis, impact assessment, solution design, configuration, functional specifications, estimation, testing, deployment, and post‑release stabilization.

Ensure robust integration between SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA or ECC for master data, sourcing, contracts, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, goods receipts, service entry, invoices, accounting documents, and supplier collaboration.

Coordinate with SAP MM, Finance, ABAP, Basis, security, integration, infrastructure, and third‑party teams to resolve complex cross‑functional and interface issues.

Oversee supplier onboarding, qualification, enablement, catalogs, account administration, transaction collaboration, and supplier support processes.

Plan and govern Ariba release assessments, regression testing, adoption decisions, change communication, and production‑readiness activities.

Maintain functional designs, configuration records, interface mappings, SOPs, runbooks, knowledge articles, known‑error records, test evidence, release documentation, and audit artifacts.

Identify opportunities for automation, standardisation, user‑experience improvement, clean‑core alignment, service optimisation, and measurable business value.

Lead and mentor functional consultants, conduct quality reviews, allocate work, provide knowledge transfer, and maintain skill and succession coverage for critical services.

Participate in on‑call support for priority incidents, critical procurement events, major releases, and planned business activities as required by the AMS model.

Key Responsibilities

Required Experience and Skills

15–18 years of overall SAP consulting experience, with extensive hands‑on delivery and leadership in SAP Ariba.

Proven experience leading SAP Ariba AMS or large production‑support engagements in complex, multi‑entity enterprise environments.

Deep functional expertise in at least four of the following: SAP Ariba Sourcing, Contracts, Buying and Invoicing, Guided Buying, Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, Supplier Risk, Catalog Management, and SAP Business Network.

Strong knowledge of source‑to‑contract, procure‑to‑pay, supplier management, contract compliance, catalog buying, invoicing, and supplier collaboration processes.

Hands‑on understanding of Ariba integration with SAP S/4HANA or ECC using SAP Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network, APIs, web services, IDocs, and middleware.

Strong understanding of procurement master and transactional data, workflow, approval matrices, tolerances, taxation, account assignment, invoice controls, and reconciliation.

Demonstrated capability in complex incident resolution, root‑cause analysis, interface monitoring, data correction, performance improvement, and production stabilization.

Strong ITIL‑based experience across incident, problem, change, release, knowledge, service‑level, and continual‑service‑improvement management.

Experience managing onsite and offshore teams, vendors, SAP product support, and multicultural stakeholders in an SLA‑driven environment.

Excellent communication, workshop facilitation, negotiation, documentation, presentation, and customer‑facing leadership skills.

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