Senior SAP Functional Lead, Manufacturing and Asset Management

Job Summary

Experience: 15–18 years
Engagement: SAP Application Management Services (AMS)
Customer Industry: Defense
Location: United Arab Emirates (UAE)
Role Type: Senior Functional Lead / Manufacturing and Asset Management Track Lead
Primary Skills: SAP PP, PM/EAM, QM and EHS

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior SAP Lead with 15–18 years of experience and deep functional expertise across SAP Production Planning, Plant Maintenance / Enterprise Asset Management, Quality Management, and Environment, Health and Safety. The role will provide end-to-end functional leadership, L2/L3 support, solution governance, and continuous improvement for a mission-critical SAP AMS engagement supporting a defense customer in the UAE. The successful candidate will own integrated manufacturing, maintenance, quality, and safety processes while ensuring production stability, asset readiness, quality compliance, operational safety, security, confidentiality, and auditability.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead the SAP PP, PM/EAM, QM and EHS functional track and serve as the senior escalation point for complex production, maintenance, quality, safety, and cross-functional issues.

• Provide L2/L3 application support for incidents, service requests, problems, and minor enhancements in accordance with agreed SLAs, priorities, escalation procedures, and ITIL-based processes.

• Own issue resolution from triage through root-cause analysis, permanent correction, preventive action, validation, and knowledge capture.

• Protect business continuity and mission readiness during critical incidents, production cycles, maintenance windows, shutdowns, quality events, safety incidents, and planned releases.

• Translate business requirements into fit-to-standard solutions, functional designs, configuration changes, specifications, estimates, test scenarios, deployment plans, and support documentation.

• Govern change requests through impact assessment, solution review, configuration, development coordination, testing, approval, transport, deployment, and post-release stabilization.

• Lead unit, integration, regression, and user acceptance testing; ensure complete test evidence, defect closure, business sign-off, and traceability.

• Monitor ticket trends, recurring failures, ageing backlog, interface exceptions, batch jobs, master-data issues, and process bottlenecks; drive measurable service improvements and automation.

• Coordinate with business process owners, manufacturing, maintenance, quality, HSE, supply chain, engineering, security, Basis, ABAP, integration, data, and infrastructure teams.

• Lead onsite-offshore coordination, work allocation, quality reviews, shift handovers, knowledge transfer, and mentoring of functional consultants.

• Prepare and maintain runbooks, SOPs, functional specifications, configuration records, known-error articles, release notes, support guides, and audit-ready evidence.

• Participate in service reviews, major-incident forums, change advisory boards, problem-management reviews, and continual-service-improvement planning.

• Provide on-call or after-hours support for priority incidents and business-critical activities when required by the AMS operating model.

Module and Process Expertise

SAP Production Planning (PP)

• Production master data including bills of material, work centers, routings, recipes where applicable, production versions, and control parameters.

• Demand management, material requirements planning, capacity planning, production scheduling, shop-floor control, production orders, confirmations, backflushing, and variance analysis.

• Make-to-stock, make-to-order, engineer-to-order, repetitive, discrete, and project-oriented manufacturing scenarios, as applicable.

• Batch and serial-number traceability, engineering-change impacts, subcontracting, rework, scrap, yield, and production reporting.

• Integration with MM, SD, QM, PM, PS, EWM/WM, MES, and FI/CO.

Key Responsibilities

SAP Plant Maintenance / Enterprise Asset Management (PM/EAM) Technical objects, functional locations, equipment, bills of material, measuring points, counters, task lists, maintenance plans, warranties, and permits. Corrective, preventive, predictive, condition-based, breakdown, refurbishment, and shutdown maintenance processes. Notifications, work orders, planning, scheduling, capacity, materials, services, confirmations, costing, settlement, and completion. Asset reliability, maintenance backlog, spares coordination, calibration integration, mobile execution, and maintenance performance reporting. Integration with PP, QM, EHS, MM, FI/CO, PS, warehouse processes, and approved external maintenance or monitoring systems. SAP Quality Management (QM) Quality planning, inspection setup, inspection plans, master inspection characteristics, sampling procedures, dynamic modification, and quality certificates. Incoming, in-process, final, recurring, calibration, and stock-transfer inspections. Results recording, usage decisions, defects, quality notifications, nonconformance, rework, corrective and preventive actions, and audit support. Supplier quality, batch release, traceability, quality analytics, and integration with procurement, production, maintenance, sales, and warehouse processes. SAP Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) Incident management, risk assessment, job hazard analysis, safety observations, corrective actions, workplace inspections, and compliance tracking. Permit-to-work and operational safety integration with maintenance activities and technical objects. Chemical, hazardous-material, dangerous-goods, waste, environmental, and occupational-health processes, as applicable to the customer landscape. Safety instructions, audit evidence, regulatory reporting, and closed-loop integration between EHS actions and PM/EAM maintenance notifications. AMS Service Leadership Manage SLA/KPI performance for response, resolution, backlog, ageing, reopen rate, change success, problem closure, service availability, and customer satisfaction. Lead major-incident diagnosis and communications, including business-impact assessment, technical coordination, restoration planning, and post-incident review. Establish known-error records, problem statements, preventive controls, monitoring improvements, and ticket-deflection opportunities. Plan support readiness for releases, upgrades, maintenance cycles, peak manufacturing periods, shutdowns, audits, and organizational changes. Maintain resource coverage, succession, cross-skilling, and backup arrangements for critical functional areas. Provide concise service reporting, risk visibility, decision support, and improvement roadmaps to customer and delivery leadership. Defense-Sector and UAE Requirements Operate in strict accordance with customer confidentiality, information-classification, need-to-know, least-privilege, segregation-of-duties, secure-access, and controlled-change requirements. Handle production, maintenance, asset, quality, safety, supplier, and operational data only through authorized applications, repositories, devices, communication channels, and locations. Maintain complete and auditable records for incidents, approvals, testing, transports, privileged access, releases, master-data changes, and operational decisions. Support customer security reviews, access recertification, vulnerability remediation, audit requests, evidence collection, and compliance attestations. Be willing and eligible to undergo customer-mandated background verification, security screening, and access-clearance processes. Work from approved UAE customer or delivery locations and support UAE business hours, manufacturing shifts, and on-call coverage as required. Prior experience in defense, aerospace, government, aviation, critical infrastructure, or another highly regulated environment is strongly preferred.

Skill Requirements

Experience and Qualifications

• 15–18 years of overall SAP functional consulting and delivery experience, with substantial hands-on expertise across PP, PM/EAM, QM, and EHS.

• Proven leadership of integrated manufacturing, asset management, quality, and safety workstreams in large enterprise environments.

• Strong SAP AMS experience covering L2/L3 support, incident and problem management, change and release management, minor enhancements, service governance, and continual improvement.

• Experience supporting SAP S/4HANA and/or ECC in complex, highly available, multi-entity or multi-site landscapes.

• Minimum three end-to-end SAP implementation, rollout, conversion, or major enhancement engagements, complemented by sustained production-support experience.

• Strong knowledge of cross-module integration with MM, SD, PS, EWM/WM, MES, FI/CO, procurement, and external operational systems.

• Experience preparing functional designs, specifications, configuration documents, test scripts, SOPs, runbooks, training materials, and audit evidence.

• Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Engineering, Manufacturing, Information Technology, Business, or a related discipline.

• Excellent English communication, workshop facilitation, stakeholder management, analytical thinking, documentation, and decision-making skills.

Preferred Qualifications

• SAP certification in S/4HANA Manufacturing, Asset Management, Quality Management, EHS, or a related solution area.

• ITIL Foundation or higher certification and practical experience in mature IT service-management environments.

• Exposure to SAP Fiori, SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Solution Manager, mobile maintenance, MES integration, analytics, workflow, and automation.

• Knowledge of ISO-aligned quality, environmental, occupational health and safety, asset-management, and information-security management systems.

• Experience working with UAE or GCC customers and multicultural onsite-offshore delivery teams; Arabic language capability is an advantage.

Key Competencies

• Functional leadership and end-to-end process ownership.

• Structured troubleshooting and root-cause analysis under time pressure.

• Strong customer orientation, accountability, and service-delivery discipline.

• Sound judgment in balancing operational urgency, standard SAP capability, security, compliance, and long-term maintainability.

• Clear communication with plant users, engineers, HSE and quality teams, IT teams, service managers, auditors, and customer leadership.

• High attention to confidentiality, safety, traceability, documentation, and quality assurance.

• Ability to mentor teams, manage competing priorities, and drive collaboration across functional and technical domains.

Success Measures

• Consistent achievement of SLA/KPI commitments and effective ownership of critical issues.

• Improved production stability, asset availability, maintenance execution, quality performance, safety compliance, and user experience.

• Reduction in recurring incidents, aged backlog, manual effort, and avoidable business disruption.

• High change success rate with complete testing, approvals, documentation, and minimal regression.

• Timely root-cause analysis, preventive actions, service improvements, and measurable automation benefits.

• Effective knowledge transfer, team capability development, stakeholder confidence, and audit-ready operational evidence.