Purpose & Overall Relevance for the Organization:

The design and communication of high-level structures to enable and guide the design and development of integrated solutions that meet current and future business needs. In addition to technology components, solution architecture encompasses changes to service, process, organisation, and operating models. The provision of comprehensive guidance on the development of, and modifications to, solution components to ensure that they take account of relevant architectures, strategies, policies, standards and practices (including security) and that existing and planned solution components remain compatible. Overall solution architecture and IT governance in R2R area with focus on Finance Consolidation, IFRS and Local GAAP Reporting and SAP S4HANA Finance solutions implementation, including SAP S4HANA for Group reporting.

Key Responsibilities:

Specialist advice
• Actively maintains recognised expert level knowledge in one or more identifiable specialisms.
• Provides definitive and expert advice in their specialist area(s).
• Oversees the provision of specialist advice by others, consolidates expertise from multiple sources, including third party experts, to provide coherent advice to further organisational objectives.
• Supports and promotes the development and sharing of specialist knowledge within the organisation.

Research
• Within given research goals, builds on and refines appropriate outline ideas for research, including evaluation, development, demonstration and implementation.
• Applies standard methods to collect and analyse quantitative and qualitative data.
• Creates research reports to communicate research methodology and findings and conclusions. Contributes sections of material of publication quality.
• Uses available resources to update knowledge of any relevant field and curates a personal collection of relevant material.
• Participates in research communities.

Emerging technology monitoring
• Supports monitoring of the external environment and assessment of emerging technologies to evaluate the potential impacts, threats and opportunities to the organisation.
• Contributes to the creation of reports, technology roadmapping and the sharing of knowledge and insights.

Solution architecture
• Contributes to the development of solution architectures in specific business, infrastructure or functional areas.
• Identifies and evaluates alternative architectures and the trade-offs in cost, performance and scalability.
• Produces specifications of cloud-based or on-premises components, tiers and interfaces, for translation into detailed designs using selected services and products.
• Supports a change programme or project through the preparation of technical plans and application of design principles that comply with enterprise and solution architecture standards (including security).

Business analysis
• Investigates operational needs and problems, and opportunities, contributing to the recommendation of improvements in automated and non-automated components of new or changed processes and organisation.
• Assists in defining acceptance tests for these recommendations.

Requirements definition and management
• Contributes to selection of the requirements approach for projects, selecting appropriately from predictive (plan-driven) approaches or adaptive (iterative/agile) approaches.
• Defines and manages scoping, requirements definition and prioritisation activities for initiatives of medium size and complexity.
• Facilitates input from stakeholders, provides constructive challenge and enables effective prioritisation of requirements.
• Reviews requirements for errors and omissions. Establishes the requirements base-lines, obtains formal agreement to requirements, and ensures traceability to source.
• Investigates, manages, and applies authorised requests for changes to base-lined requirements, in line with change management policy.

Systems design
• Designs components using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed architectures, design standards, patterns and methodology.
• Identifies and evaluates alternative design options and trade-offs. Creates multiple design views to address the concerns of the different stakeholders of the architecture and to handle both functional and non-functional requirements.
• Models, simulates or prototypes the behaviour of proposed systems components to enable approval by stakeholders.
• Produces detailed design specification to form the basis for construction of systems.

Reviews, verifies and improves own designs against specifications.

Software design
• Designs software components and modules using appropriate modelling techniques following agreed software design standards, patterns and methodology.
• Creates and communicates multiple design views to identify and balance the concerns of all stakeholders of the software design and to allow for both functional and non-functional requirements.
• Identifies and evaluates alternative design options and trade-offs. Recommends designs which take into account target environment, performance security requirements and existing systems.
• Reviews, verifies and improves own designs against specifications. Leads reviews of others’
designs.
• Models, simulates or prototypes the behaviour of proposed software to enable approval by stakeholders, and effective construction of the software.
• Verifies software design by constructing and applying appropriate methods.

Programming/software development
• Designs, codes, verifies, tests, documents, amends and refactors complex programs/scripts and integration software services.
• Contributes to selection of the software development approach for projects, selecting appropriately from predictive (plan-driven) approaches or adaptive (iterative/agile) approaches.
• Applies agreed standards and tools, to achieve well-engineered outcomes.
• Participates in reviews of own work and leads reviews of colleagues' work.

Data modelling and design
• Investigates corporate data requirements, and applies data analysis, design, modelling, and quality assurance techniques, to establish, modify or maintain data structures and their associated components (entity descriptions, relationship descriptions, attribute definitions).
• Provides advice and guidance to database designers and others using the data structures and associated components.

Database design
• Develops and maintains specialist knowledge of database and data warehouse concepts, design principles, architectures, software and facilities.
• Assesses proposed changes to object/data structures, in order to evaluate alternative options.
• Implements physical database designs to support transactional data requirements for performance and availability.
• Implements data warehouse designs that support demands for business intelligence and data analytics.

Systems integration and build
• Provides technical expertise to enable the configuration of software, other system components and equipment for systems testing.
• Collaborates with technical teams to develop and agree system integration plans and report on progress. Defines complex/new integration builds.
• Ensures that integration test environments are correctly configured.
• Designs, performs and reports results of tests of the integration build.
• Identifies and documents system integration components for recording in the configuration management system.
• Recommends and implements improvements to processes and tools.

Relationship management
• Implements stakeholder engagement/communications plan.
• Deals with problems and issues, managing resolutions, corrective actions, lessons learned and the collection and dissemination of relevant information.
• Collects and uses feedback from customers and stakeholders to help measure effectiveness of stakeholder management.
• Helps develop and enhance customer and stakeholder relationships.

If required: People Management / Resource Management:

• Is involved in recruiting process and proposes support for hiring decision and pre-selection of candidates
• Allocate the different work to the respective employees considering experience, complexity, workload and organizational efficiency
• Continuously monitors and evaluates team workload and organizational efficiency with the support of IT systems, data and analysis and team feedback and makes appropriate changes to meet business needs.
• Provides team members/direct reports with clear direction and targets that are aligned with business needs and GIT objectives

Key Relationships:

• Global IT
• Respective business function (GOPS, Finance, HR, Brand Marketing, Wholesale/Retail)
• HR Management
• Controlling

Requisite Education and Experience / Minimum Qualifications:

• Four-year college or university degree with focus on Business Administration or IT or related areas, or equivalent combination of education and experience
• Proficient spoken and written command of English
• In-depth understanding of Finance business processes in R2R area (IFRS, Local GAAP), including Finance consolidation and Reporting. Finance background/ previous working experience in Group accounting/Corporate accounting/Consolidation is a plus.
• Expert knowledge of SAP S4HANA FICO capabilities with the focus on R2R, Consolidation. 1-2 full cycle implementation projects in the role of the SAP S4HANA Finance solution architect/ principal consultant.
• Implementation of SAP S4HANA for Group Reporting in the role of senior solution architect/principal consultant – minimum 1 full cycle implementation project, 3+ years of experience with SAP S4HANA for Group Reporting overall. Strong hands-on experience and expert knowledge of SAP S4HANA for Group Reporting capabilities and limitations.
• 1-2 full cycle implementation projects of any other SAP solutions for Finance consolidation, i.e. one of following: SAP BPC, EC-CS, SEM BCS in the role of senior solution architect/senior consultant, 7+ years of experience overall.
• Ability to gather requirements and convert them into SAP standard solutions with strong focus on business satisfaction.
• Ability to challenge status quo.
• Very strong communication skills.
• Ready to lead solution architecture in R2R, Consolidation areas.
• At least 10-years experience in IT
• 2 years of experience in team management

Good to have:
• Experience in implementation of one of the SAP/non-SAP Financial closing solutions i.e. SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Advanced Financial Closing, Blackline Smart close etc.
• Experience in implementation of SAP S/4HANA Document and reporting compliance (SAP Advanced compliance reporting – ACR)
• Experience with SAP Central Finance