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About this role
Role overview This 12-month, remote contract leads a multi-workstream SAP S/4HANA manufacturing transformation spanning multiple plants and business divisions. The program covers production planning and detailed scheduling, manufacturing execution, quality management, and finished-goods actual costing, with supporting technology across SAP Digital Manufacturing, SAP Business Data Cloud, SAP Analytics Cloud, and SAP BTP. The role reports to the program sponsor and steering committee and carries a quarterly onsite requirement of two to three weeks in Japan.
Responsibilities - Own the integrated program plan, budget, resource model, critical path, and cross-workstream dependencies. - Drive delivery across Explore, Realize, Deploy, plant-wave rollout, cutover, and hypercare phases. - Enforce scope governance, promote standard SAP functionality, and maintain clean-core principles while evaluating custom development. - Manage the WRICEF backlog including requirements, prioritization, sizing, and validation. - Lead steering committee and executive governance meetings and prepare decision requests. - Deliver executive reporting on status, risks, issues, dependencies, and benefits realization. - Govern risks tied to over-customization, lot and batch design, machine and system integration, costing accuracy, key-person dependency, equipment and PLC readiness, and master data. - Plan and oversee finished-goods Actual Costing parallel runs and lead shop-floor cutover, multi-shift hypercare, and transition to operational support. - Drive organizational change management, training, and the shift away from paper and spreadsheet-based processes.
Requirements - 12+ years of IT program and project management experience with 5+ full-lifecycle SAP implementations and at least 2 SAP S/4HANA implementations. - Demonstrated experience leading large-scale SAP manufacturing or supply chain transformation programs across multiple plants. - Strong expertise in scope governance, standard-first delivery, and prevention of unnecessary customization. - Proven skills in integrated planning, critical path management, dependency management, budgeting, RAID management, and executive reporting. - Experience leading distributed delivery teams across multiple time zones and coordinating business, IT, global, and partner resources. - Background in operational cutovers, multi-shift hypercare, organizational change management, training strategy, and adoption measurement. - U.S. work authorization. - Fluent professional English; business-level Japanese strongly preferred.
Nice to have - Familiarity with batch management, lot splitting and merging, cavity-level traceability, and related workstream impacts. - Experience with SAP BTP, clean-core governance, and SAP Analytics Cloud. - Discrete manufacturing exposure in electronics, automotive, or precision components. - Traceability-driven manufacturing or quality environments. - PMI-ACP, SAFe, or SAP Activate certification.