IT Business Solutions Manager

Job Description

The incumbent is responsible for maintaining and supporting all or a proportion of the geographically distributed (virtual) team portfolio of applications, working with colleagues to standardize and drive efficiency. The incumbent should broaden their technical and delivery skills using tools at their disposal, including but not limited to freedom within a framework, data management, ERP, and sales solutions. The role is responsible for ensuring that 3rd-party solution providers and external resources fulfill agreed-upon commitments and contractual obligations within budgeted costs. This role may lead projects to localize and roll out centralized systems, including the detailed planning and execution of the project/changes, data migration, external resources, and go-live. The role actively engages with business stakeholders and D&IT partners to explore capability improvements or to ensure a clear understanding of new capabilities requirements. Work with the virtual team lead to understand existing tools that can deliver needs and plan in the roadmap. Drive demand process to deliver new solutions as planned in the roadmaps.
The Incumbent will actively review technology successes in JTI and the external environment, bringing to the attention of business partners the opportunity to explore innovation within the virtual team’s remit. While ensuring adherence to JTI D&IT and corporate governance standards, the incumbent leads and manages identified changes & projects, and on occasion related teams, to ensure they are executed successfully. The incumbent will at all times work in accordance with JTI’s Project management framework and established D&IT standards, policies and procedures, J-Sox controls, and industry best practices.

Areas of Responsibility:

Capability Management Identification and Enhancement:

• Collaborate with businesses to identify improvements for existing solutions
• Work to find existing solutions in JTI that have the required capabilities
• Help develop capabilities delivered by global teams and within regional/local solutions.
• Explore with other regions' capabilities teams what exists so that synergies and technology re-use can be maximized and deployed quickly and adopted

Rollout of Central Systems and Market Mile:

• Under the direction of the RPD embrace and learn the steps and effort required to rollout a system to more than one market in the region.
• Work with other regions who are rolling out systems ahead of your region to gain knowledge and to help deliver the solution faster in your region.
• Support other regional teams by engaging them and helping them understand what you and the team learned for a successful deployment.

Freedom Within a Framework:

• Use low code tools provided in the JTI environment to augment and deliver simple and short-term capabilities.
• Make sure you are aware of the tool's ever-increasing functionality, how these tools work, and leverage and communicate through APIs in JTI key systems to deliver data transfer or a better UX experience.

Solution Design, Delivery, and Project Management:

• This role ensures the company's business community is provided with appropriate support and training/development in business systems, software, and hardware to make effective and efficient use of systems and resources and enable users to achieve business goals. These solutions may be internally or externally provided.
• This role is responsible for ensuring that all shared D&IT applications/D&IT solutions under the incumbent portfolio are stable, reliable, and compliant with the legislation (e.g. payroll, data sources, and data integrity, etc.) in the region.
• This role is responsible for incident management, problem management, and all aspects related to the application within the responsibility of the function assigned to the incumbent.
• Ensure strategic alignment with Internal (e.g. BTS, I&O, GDC, Security) and external D&IT service providers.

Innovation:

• Work with market teams to foster ideas and understand new trends and how they could challenge or provide an opportunity to change the business model or drive efficiencies into operations.
• geographically distributed teamwork, and operations.
• This role will be part of a geographically distributed team that will be responsible for a function within the region (M&S, finance, data, etc.). This role manages the application portfolio (or part of it) of that function including the operational excellence (incident management, maintenance, enhancement and change request, problems, etc.) as well as managing demands and accountable for the execution of projects of that specific function.
• You may at times and as decided by the regional digital and IT lead be seconded to the RPD to assist or run the project on behalf of the region.
• This role may lead projects to localize and roll out centralized systems, including the detailed planning and execution of the project/changes, data migration, external resources, and go-live.
• During a crisis in one of the applications of the function portfolio, the role needs to keep close communication with the market/cluster D&IT Lead to ensure the right business impact and prioritization is given to the incident.
• This role will also play an important role as an expert in the technology stack of the function (sales apps, power apps, data, digital, etc.) looking for upskilling within that area of expertise and delivering via self-development or consultants’ solutions to the business demands.

D&IT Governance:

• Responsible for respective D&IT budgets for managed applications and services in the region. responsible for planning of the AP/SP and LE processes and delivering financial commitments with clarity on how the budget is used to run existing services, the cost of transformation/change, and efficiency gained by the changes. Optimize, control, and reduce costs, when possible, to improve regional budget efficiency and profitability.
• Drive cost avoidance through the alignment as much as possible to corporate application standards (e.g. SAP for ERP, TME for the sales force, SAP HR for personnel master data), also seeking to reuse existing business application solutions across the group and leverage the D&IT application portfolio.
• Govern system change control through compliance with D&IT policies, procedures, and standards decrease technology risk, and reduce cost through following D&IT technology standards and guidelines.

Candidate Profile:

Education:

• A university degree in Software Computer, or Technical Science and a strong D&IT background.

Work Experience and Competencies:

• 8+ years of experience in the IT discipline with 5+ of those years in IT management of business solutions/application teams (including people management where relevant).
• Preferred background of employment experience in multinational companies.
• PSM, BABOK or PMP certificate is an asset.
• Good working knowledge of business and related processes in the FMCG industry.

Languages and Computer Skills:

• Fluent in oral and written English.

Functional:

• Experience in at least 5 of the following new technology trends:

1. Microsoft Power Platform (PowerApps, PowerBI, Power Automate).
2. Microsoft data lake and data warehouse technologies.
3. Field sales solutions.
4. Online sales, loyalty, and payment systems.
5. Business requirements analysis and process documentation.
6. Solutions design proposal and architecture (business applications and D&IT infrastructure), including but not limited to application design methodology (including Agile methodology), interface design, capacity planning, and scalability.
7. Good financial and budgetary understanding.
8. Project management (medium to large scale projects).
9. Business analysis.
10. Supplier management.

Soft Skills:

• People management (where relevant).
• Leads by example; works effectively in a fast-paced environment and is able to diffuse project-related conflict.
• Able to think clearly and act decisively in crisis situations; thinks and acts with a sense of urgency and clear understanding of priorities and strategic importance; highly organized.
• Creative, innovative, enterprising; thinks outside the box, challenges status quo.
• Able to work with ambiguity and “connect the dots”.
• Team-oriented, collaborative; able to network and establish good connections.
• Proactive; driven to learn and keep pace with business and technology trends.
• Thinks outside the box.
• Able to network and establish good connections.
• Works seamlessly between macro and micro views.
• Communicates effectively at all levels of the organization.
• Goal-oriented, high level of commitment.
• Customer service oriented.