SAP ARIBA Lead
Location: ABu Dhabi, UAE
Experience: 15+ Years
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 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, standardization, user-experience improvement, clean-core alignment, service optimization, 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.
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
