SAP FICO DevOps Manager

Role & responsibilities

Function: Enterprise Applications / Finance Technology Application Maintenance & Support (AMS)
Experience: 8-12 years, with minimum 4 years in SAP FICO AMS/DevOps and 2+ years managing partner delivery teams
Reporting to: SAP Finance Platform Lead / AMS Delivery Head

Role Purpose

Own the day-to-day health, stability and continuous improvement of the SAP FICO landscape supporting a large, multi-country FMCG business. The role is accountable for managing the Accenture FICO delivery pod (onshore + offshore), driving faster resolution of service requests, incidents, problem tickets and minor enhancements, and acting as the single point of accountability to Finance end users and process owners.

Vendor & team management

• Manage the Accenture SAP FICO resource pool across L2/L3 support daily work allocation, ticket triage, capacity planning, shift coverage and follow-the-sun handovers.
• Hold the partner to contractual SLAs and XLAs; run weekly/monthly service review governance, validate effort estimates for minor enhancements, and challenge scope creep and rebadged effort.
• Drive onboarding, knowledge transfer, backup coverage and reduction of key-person dependency; sign off on KT completion and documentation quality before resource rotation.
• Review and approve partner timesheets, T&M vs. fixed-capacity utilisation, and monthly invoicing inputs.

Service delivery & end-user support

• Own incident, service request, problem and change management end-to-end for FICO (GL, AP, AR, Asset Accounting, Banking, Taxation, Product Costing, COPA, Internal Orders, Intercompany, Period-end close).
• Prioritise and expedite P1/P2 incidents, lead bridge calls, drive root cause analysis and permanent fixes through the Problem Management process; ensure RCAs are published within agreed timelines.
• Protect month-end, quarter-end and year-end financial close establish close-period war rooms, freeze windows and pre-emptive monitoring for FI/CO jobs, interfaces and reconciliation reports.
• Act as escalation point for Finance end users, Controllers, Shared Service Centres and Regional Finance teams; translate business impact into technical priority and communicate in business language.
• Govern minor enhancement (CR) pipeline intake, business case sanity check, estimation review, prioritisation with process owners, and release planning.

DevOps, tooling & CI/CD

• Own the FICO change and release pipeline: transport management through SAP Solution Manager ChaRM / Cloud ALM or equivalent, with transport dependency checks, cross-system sequencing and regression control.
• Drive CI/CD and automation maturity transport automation, automated regression suites (Tricentis/Worksoft or equivalent), code quality gates (ATC), and ADO/Jira-based pipelines integrated with ServiceNow.
• Reduce manual toil through shift-left and self-service: knowledge articles, automated health checks, alerting and monitoring (Solution Manager, Focused Run, AIF for interface monitoring), bot/RPA-based repetitive task automation.
• Enforce change governance, CAB participation, segregation of duties, emergency change protocols and audit-ready transport traceability (SOX/internal audit compliance).

SLA, KPI & governance rigour

• Define, track and publish service KPIs: SLA attainment, MTTR, first-time-right, backlog ageing, reopen rate, recurring incident count, change success rate, CSAT/end-user satisfaction and automation-led effort savings.
• Build and present monthly service dashboards and QBR content to Finance and IT leadership; convert trends into a continuous service improvement (CSI) backlog with named owners and target dates.
• Drive year-on-year ticket volume reduction and cost-to-serve improvement through problem elimination, master data quality fixes, user training and automation.
• Maintain risk, dependency and technical-debt registers for the FICO tower; manage compliance, security roles/SoD conflicts and audit evidence requests.

Required Skills & Experience

• 812 years total SAP experience with deep functional configuration knowledge of SAP FICO (ECC and/or S/4HANA), including New GL, parallel ledgers, Asset Accounting, Taxation, CO-PC and CO-PA.
• Proven experience managing a third-party system integrator team (Accenture, TCS, Infosys, Capgemini, IBM or similar) in an AMS/managed-services model — not just working within one.
• Experience supporting a large global FMCG/CPG account of Unilever-type scale and complexity is strongly preferred — multi-country, multi-company-code, multi-currency landscapes, high-volume order-to-cash and procure-to-pay, distributor and third-party manufacturing models, complex trade spend and promotional accounting.
• Strong working knowledge of ITIL service management (Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Knowledge) — ITIL v4 certification an advantage.
• Hands-on with ServiceNow (or Remedy/Jira Service Management) for ticket lifecycle, and Jira/Azure DevOps for enhancement and sprint tracking.
• Solid integration awareness across FICO and MM/SD/PP, plus interfaces to banking, treasury, tax engines (Vertex/OneSource), consolidation and BI/reporting layers; ability to debug IDoc, PI/PO/CPI and AIF errors with technical teams.
• Ability to read functional specs, debug at a functional level, and challenge ABAP/technical root cause analysis credibly.
• Demonstrated stakeholder management with Finance business users, process owners and offshore delivery teams across time zones.

Good to Have

• S/4HANA exposure (conversion, Central Finance, Universal Journal) and knowledge of SAP roadmap implications for AMS.
• Experience with automated regression testing tooling and test-data management.
• Exposure to Agile/SAFe delivery alongside run-and-maintain operations (bi-modal delivery).
• SAP FI/CO certification; Six Sigma/Lean or PMP.