SAP Lead

About the Opportunity - This role is for a senior SAP professional to own and lead the organization’s SAP S/4HANA landscape, with hands-on ownership of Materials Management (MM) and Sales & Distribution (SD), and leadership of the SAP team across all modules. The role ensures SAP runs reliably, business requirements are delivered with the right solution, cost, and timeline, and that SAP processes, master data, and access controls continuously improve. The SAP Lead is the single point of accountability for SAP delivery, working closely with business stakeholders, internal consultants, external partners, and senior management. Role & Responsibilities - Independently own SAP MM and SD, including configuration, business process design, issue resolution, enhancements, testing, and deployment. - Demonstrate detailed understanding of end-to-end Procure-to-Pay (P2P) and Order-to-Cash (O2C) processes, including pricing procedures, output types, document types, deliveries, billing, and customer and material master data. - Understand import procurement and export sales (EXIM) processes in SAP, such as landed cost, customs and duties, export billing and foreign currency, and resolve related issues with business and finance teams. - Analyse business requirements, identify root causes, recommend standard SAP solutions first, and limit custom development to what is justified. - Troubleshoot complex production issues hands-on, rather than relying entirely on external consultants. - Review existing configurations, custom developments, interfaces and workflows to identify improvement opportunities. - Challenge proposed solutions from business users, internal consultants and implementation partners to ensure accuracy, scalability and maintainability. - Bring credible working knowledge of FI, CO, PP, ABAP and SAP reporting, including business processes, integration points and dependencies across modules. - Investigate any issue independently, identify the responsible module or integration point, and define the resolution approach. - Assign module-specific configuration and development work to the appropriate consultant while retaining overall ownership; review solutions and drive closure. - Ensure seamless integration between MM, SD, FI, CO, PP and ABAP developments. - Own SAP’s integration with third-party applications, such as order management, CRM, sales and dealer applications, and statutory platforms (GST e-Invoice and e-Way Bill). - Monitor and resolve integration issues to minimise operational disruption. - Validate data accuracy across SAP and integrated applications, including customer, material, pricing, sales, billing and reporting data. - Support management reporting and analytics needs from SAP, including data extraction for enterprise reporting platforms. - Lead requirements gathering, fit-gap analysis, solution design, configuration, functional specifications, testing, data migration, cutover and deployment for projects, rollouts and enhancements. - Manage change requests from requirement analysis through production deployment, assessing business impact, technical dependencies, effort, cost, risk and timelines before approval. - Coordinate system integration testing, user acceptance testing, regression testing, business sign-off, user training and post-go-live support. - Ensure every solution is tested, documented, approved and deployed through proper change control. - Develop process automation and system enhancements that reduce manual work and improve operational efficiency. - Lead or substantially contribute to SAP S/4HANA version upgrades and system or infrastructure migrations. - Coordinate with SAP Basis, the hosting / cloud service provider, and database, network and security teams. - Ensure migration readiness, backup and recovery validation, integration checks, cutover planning, rollback readiness and post-migration business validation. - Minimise business disruption and communicate clearly with users and management during critical system changes. - Drive governance of material master, business partner (customer and vendor) master and related organisational data. - Identify duplicate, incomplete, inconsistent and incorrectly maintained master data; establish data ownership, approval workflows, validation controls and ongoing data-quality monitoring with business owners. - Review SAP user roles and authorisations for segregation-of-duties (SoD) risks; design and maintain role-based access through a practical, documented review process. - Work with Basis, functional consultants and process owners to remediate conflicting access and excessive privileges and maintain approval and remediation evidence for audits. - Lead a team of SAP consultants across functional, technical (ABAP), reporting and support areas. - Define ownership, priorities, work allocation, service expectations, escalation rules and performance review mechanisms. - Monitor consultant productivity, pending issues, overdue commitments, vendor deliverables and recurring incidents. - Own the SAP budget: lead negotiations with partners, review estimates, resource utilisation and commercial commitments, and recommend the best-value solution. - Build internal capability and reduce excessive dependency on individual consultants or external vendors. - Take ownership of existing SAP processes, configurations, custom developments, integrations and the team. - Assess the completeness of existing documentation; identify undocumented processes, single-person dependencies, open defects, workarounds and operational risks; maintain a prioritised action tracker with owners and dates. - Ensure standardised documentation across all modules and delivery stages, including business requirements, functional specifications, fit-gap and solution design documents, configuration records, process-flow diagrams, technical specifications and ABAP development requirements, test scenarios, results, defects and business sign-offs, change requests, root-cause analyses and deployment approvals, data migration, cutover, rollback and reconciliation plans, user roles, access approvals, standard operating procedures and support guides. - Establish a central documentation repository with ownership, version control and appropriate access. - Ensure critical business processes and custom developments never depend on undocumented individual knowledge. - Maintain a consolidated tracker of incidents, problems, change requests, projects, risks and dependencies across all SAP modules. - Prioritise items by business impact, production risk, compliance, effort, cost and expected benefit. - Ensure every item has a business owner, technical owner, target date, next action and agreed closure criteria. - Provide proactive updates to management on completed items, delays, critical risks, decisions required and recovery plans, raising issues early rather than waiting for escalation. - Track root-cause resolution and preventive actions to reduce recurring issues. - Work from the Head Office and visit manufacturing units regularly to engage SAP users, understand requirements and resolve issues on the ground. - Represent SAP in business discussions with department heads and stakeholders, and translate business needs into practical system solutions. Skills & Qualifications Must-Have - Education: B.E. / B.Tech is mandatory. An MBA in Operations or Supply Chain is an advantage. - Certification: SAP S/4HANA certification in Sourcing & Procurement (MM) is required. SD certification is an advantage. - 14–20 years of total experience, including at least 10 years hands-on in SAP MM/SD and at least 3 years in SAP S/4HANA. - Deep SAP MM expertise: hands-on configuration, troubleshooting, process design and implementation. - Strong SAP SD expertise: ability to independently analyse and resolve complex sales, pricing, delivery, billing and integration issues. An MM-primary profile with strong SD is