Senior SAP Fulfilment Lead

Description:

Job Description: Senior SAP Fulfilment Lead

Functional Scope: SAP SD | FI/CO Integration | Material Master Data | Business Partner Management

1. Role Purpose

The Senior SAP Fulfilment Lead is accountable for the end-to-end functional strategy, solution design, governance, and delivery of SAP fulfilment capabilities across Sales and Distribution (SD), Finance and Controlling (FI/CO) integration, Material Master Data, and Business Partner Management within an SAP S/4HANA landscape.

The role drives harmonized business processes across the order-to-cash lifecycle, ensures master data integrity, and enables seamless integration between commercial operations, logistics, and finance. The individual will provide functional leadership across business and IT stakeholders, establish architectural alignment, and drive continuous improvement, operational excellence, and digital transformation.

The successful candidate will combine deep SAP functional expertise with strong leadership capabilities, a strategic mindset, and a proven ability to deliver complex, cross-functional SAP programs.

2. Key Accountabilities

A. End-to-End SAP Fulfilment Strategy and Ownership

Define and drive the functional roadmap for SAP fulfilment capabilities aligned with business strategy and enterprise architecture.
Own the end-to-end order-to-cash process, from customer and material readiness through sales order processing, delivery, billing, and financial posting.
Establish standardized, scalable, and reusable fulfilment solutions across business units, markets, and geographies.
Lead fit-to-standard assessments, process harmonization, and solution simplification across the SAP landscape.
Identify functional dependencies, architectural risks, and opportunities to optimize the fulfilment value chain.
Drive alignment between business requirements, SAP standard capabilities, and long-term platform strategy.

B. SAP SD Functional Leadership

Provide functional ownership for sales order management, pricing, availability checks, delivery processing, billing, returns, and intercompany sales.
Govern solution design for complex fulfilment scenarios, including third-party sales, stock transfers, and aftermarket business processes, where applicable.
Ensure appropriate design of sales document types, partner determination, pricing procedures, output management, and billing controls.
Drive integration with MM, PP, EWM, TM, and other relevant SAP capabilities.
Ensure fulfilment processes are scalable, resilient, and aligned with business and regulatory requirements.

C. FI/CO Integration and Financial Integrity

Own the functional integration between fulfilment transactions and SAP Finance.
Ensure accurate accounting outcomes across billing, revenue recognition or revenue accounting, taxation, receivables, and account determination.
Drive resolution of cross-functional issues involving pricing, billing, revenue postings, account determination, and financial reconciliation.
Partner with Finance leadership to maintain financial controls, traceability, and compliance.
Ensure appropriate integration with profitability analysis and management reporting.
Coordinate with Finance solution owners on complex accounting requirements without duplicating ownership of the wider FI/CO domain.

D. Material Master Data Governance

Establish the functional governance framework for material master creation, extension, change, and retirement.
Define data ownership, quality standards, validation rules, and lifecycle controls across relevant business functions.
Ensure consistency of material attributes across sales, procurement, manufacturing, logistics, and finance.
Drive material data standardization, cleansing, migration, and harmonization initiatives.
Establish clear accountability for master data quality issues and their resolution.
Align with SAP MDG or equivalent master data governance capabilities where applicable.

E. Business Partner Management

Own the functional design and governance of Business Partner processes for customers and suppliers, as applicable.
Govern BP roles, groupings, number ranges, customer/vendor integration, and synchronization requirements in SAP S/4HANA.
Ensure robust business partner lifecycle processes, including onboarding, extension, changes, blocking, and deactivation.
Establish duplicate prevention, data validation, approval workflows, and data quality controls.
Drive integration with CRM, MDG, and connected enterprise systems.
Ensure master data governance supports reliable order processing, delivery execution, billing, and financial transactions.

F. Solution Architecture and Integration Governance

Provide functional architecture leadership across the fulfilment domain.
Ensure integration design consistency across SAP modules and connected applications.
Lead solution design reviews and challenge unnecessary customization in favor of SAP standard capabilities.
Define functional design principles, integration patterns, interface requirements, and non-functional expectations in collaboration with enterprise and technical architects.
Govern the impact of releases, enhancements, migrations, and process changes across dependent SAP capabilities.
Drive functional risk management, design decisions, and resolution of cross-workstream dependencies.

G. Program Delivery and Stakeholder Leadership

Lead a distributed team of SAP functional consultants, solution architects, delivery partners, and business process owners.
Translate business strategy into an executable roadmap with clear milestones, dependencies, resource plans, and measurable outcomes.
Own delivery quality across requirements, solution design, build, testing, deployment, and hypercare.
Drive executive stakeholder alignment and communicate risks, decisions, and progress clearly.
Govern scope, change requests, delivery commitments, and vendor performance.
Build functional capability through coaching, knowledge sharing, succession planning, and continuous professional development.

H. Service Excellence and Continuous Improvement

Own functional service quality, application stability, and continual improvement across the fulfilment domain.
Establish effective incident, problem, root-cause analysis, and defect-prevention practices.
Drive reduction in recurring production issues, fulfilment failures, billing blocks, and master data errors.
Improve release quality, regression testing, deployment readiness, and operational handover.
Identify opportunities for workflow automation, AI-assisted SAP delivery, and productivity improvements.
Establish meaningful KPIs and service-level measures to track process performance and business value.

3. Required Experience and Competencies

Significant experience in SAP functional delivery, with strong expertise in SAP SD and end-to-end order-to-cash processes.
Proven experience leading SAP S/4HANA implementations, transformations, or complex global rollouts.
Strong understanding of SAP FI/CO integration, including billing-related accounting, account determination, taxation, and receivables.
Experience governing Material Master Data and Business Partner processes, including customer/vendor integration in S/4HANA.
Strong understanding of cross-functional integration with MM, PP, EWM, TM, and related enterprise applications.
Demonstrated experience in solution architecture, functional governance, and fit-to-standard decision-making.
Proven ability to lead multi-functional teams, manage senior stakeholders, and deliver complex initiatives.
Experience with SAP Activate, Agile delivery, release management, testing strategy, and production operations.
Strong analytical, decision-making, communication, and problem-solving capabilities.

4. Preferred Experience

Automotive, manufacturing, aftermarket, or other complex global supply-chain environments.
SAP MDG, data migration, master data quality, and governance frameworks.
SAP Fiori, APIs, IDocs, integration monitoring, and modern SAP extensibility approaches.
Global template development, deployment, and application lifecycle management.
AI-enabled software development, process automation, and operational productivity initiatives.
Experience managing strategic systems integrators and geographically distributed delivery teams.

5. Key Performance Indicators

Success in the role will be measured through:

End-to-end fulfilment process reliability and business continuity.
Reduction in order-processing failures, delivery blocks, billing errors, and financial posting exceptions.
Material and business partner master data quality and compliance.
Delivery predictability, release quality, and reduction in production defects.
Reuse of global template capabilities and reduction in unnecessary custom developments.
Improved incident resolution, service stability, and operational efficiency.
Stakeholder satisfaction, team capability development, and realization of transformation benefits.

6. Leadership Expectations

The Senior SAP Fulfilment Lead is expected to act as the functional owner and strategic partner to the business, not merely as an SAP module lead.

The individual will be accountable for:

Business outcomes: Translating business priorities into reliable SAP fulfilment capabilities.
End-to-end ownership: Connecting sales, master data, logistics, and finance processes.
Architectural integrity: Ensuring consistent, scalable, and maintainable solution decisions.
Delivery excellence: Driving quality, predictability, and continuous improvement.
People leadership: Developing a high-performing, collaborative, and accountable team.
Transformation leadership: Leveraging standardization, automation, and AI to improve business and IT productivity.

7. Qualifications

Bachelors or master’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline.
SAP S/4HANA certification in relevant functional areas is desirable.
Demonstrated experience in senior SAP functional leadership or solution ownership roles.

Role outcome: Establish a robust, integrated, and scalable SAP fulfilment capability that enables reliable order-to-cash execution, trusted master data, financial integrity, and continuous business improvement.