SAP SD Lead

Job Summary

Experience: 15–18 years
Location: United Arab Emirates
Engagement: SAP Application Management Services (AMS)
Industry: Defense

Role Summary

We are seeking a senior SAP Lead with deep functional expertise in SAP Sales and Distribution (SD) and the end-to-end Order-to-Cash (OTC) lifecycle to lead application support and continuous improvement for a defense customer in the UAE. The role will own functional service delivery, solution governance, production stability, stakeholder engagement, and the leadership of an onsite/offshore AMS team operating in a secure, business-critical environment.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the SAP SD/OTC workstream for the AMS engagement and act as the primary functional point of contact for customer business and IT stakeholders.

• Provide governance for incidents, service requests, problems, enhancements, and minor releases in accordance with agreed service levels and delivery priorities.

• Own end-to-end troubleshooting across inquiry, quotation, sales contracts, sales orders, availability checks, delivery, transportation interfaces, post-goods issue, billing, returns, credit/debit processing, and financial closure.

• Conduct root-cause analysis for recurring or high-severity production issues and drive permanent corrective and preventive actions.

• Review business requirements, perform impact assessments, recommend fit-to-standard solutions, and approve functional designs and specifications.

• Control SAP SD configuration involving enterprise structure, sales document types, item and schedule-line categories, copy controls, pricing, output, partner determination, incompletion procedures, delivery, billing, account determination, and credit management.

• Coordinate cross-functional resolution with SAP FI/CO, MM, EWM/WM, PP, PS, PM/CS, GTS, Basis, Security, ABAP, integration, data, and infrastructure teams.

• Plan and govern unit testing, system integration testing, regression testing, user acceptance testing, release readiness, cutover, deployment, and post-release validation.

• Monitor support backlog, aging, service-level performance, change success, recurring defects, and operational risks; present clear status and recovery plans to customer leadership.

• Lead, mentor, and quality-assure the work of onsite and offshore consultants, ensuring effective workload allocation, documentation, knowledge transfer, and succession coverage.

• Maintain operating procedures, configuration and solution documents, functional specifications, test evidence, known-error records, and knowledge articles.

• Support internal and customer audits through traceable approvals, test evidence, access-compliant execution, and complete change records.

• Identify automation, standardization, performance, and user-experience improvements that strengthen service reliability and business outcomes.

• Participate in major-incident bridges and provide planned on-call or out-of-hours support for critical operations and releases when required.

Key Responsibilities

Required Functional and Technical Expertise

• 15–18 years of SAP experience, with substantial hands-on delivery and leadership responsibility in SAP SD and OTC.

• Strong experience supporting large, complex SAP ECC and/or SAP S/4HANA production landscapes under an AMS or managed-services model.

• Expert knowledge of sales order management, contracts and scheduling agreements, pricing and condition technique, ATP, delivery processing, billing, returns, rebates or settlement processes, credit management, output, and revenue-account determination.

• Deep understanding of SD integration with Finance, Materials Management, warehouse and logistics execution, production, projects, customer service, and external systems.

• Ability to analyze custom developments, interfaces, reports, conversions, enhancements, forms, and workflows and translate business needs into clear functional specifications.

• Working knowledge of Fiori applications, IDoc/EDI, APIs and middleware integrations, batch jobs, monitoring, authorizations, and transport and release controls.

• Strong command of ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change, release, knowledge, service-level, and continual-improvement practices.

• Experience with ticketing and application-lifecycle tools such as ServiceNow, SAP Solution Manager, or SAP Cloud ALM.

Defense and Secure-Environment Expectations

• Demonstrated ability to operate in a controlled, high-availability environment with strict confidentiality, data-protection, access-control, segregation-of-duties, audit, and change-governance requirements.

• Ability to follow customer-specific security procedures for communication, documentation, remote access, issue escalation, and handling of sensitive operational information.

• Experience in defense, aerospace, government, public sector, or another highly regulated industry is strongly preferred.

• Eligibility to work in the UAE and ability to satisfy customer-mandated background screening or security-clearance requirements.

Qualifications and Leadership Competencies

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Business, or a related discipline.

• SAP certification in SAP SD, S/4HANA Sales, or a related area is preferred; ITIL certification is an advantage.

• Proven leadership of geographically distributed teams and multiple business and technology stakeholders.

• Excellent analytical, problem-solving, facilitation, negotiation, and decision-making capability.

• Strong customer-facing communication and the ability to present technical issues, service risks, and improvement proposals to senior leadership.

• Professional fluency in English; Arabic language capability is an advantage.

• Willingness to work onsite or in a hybrid model in the UAE, subject to customer and security requirements.