SAP Global Program Director Strategic Customer Engagements 

United States, Illinois, Chicago 

79627524

As Global Customer Engagement & Services (GCE&S) organization under the Customer Services & Delivery (CS&D) Board Area

She/he is expected to be able to:

• Manage Strategic Customer Engagements directly
• Sponsor of Strategic Customer Strategy
• Defining a Framework on best practices and the Cloud Transformation which supports worldwide to deliver customer outcome and to satisfy the important customers
• Liaise and coordinate with regional/global Stakeholders
• Pro-active, problem solving, "can-do" attitude and “customer first” mindset
• Ability to de-escalate customers by ordering, structuring, and bringing in the management's attention to a major incident or a problem

Sales cycle

• Build credibility / trust with customers.
• Assist the SAP license sales and service sales teams in closing of software or services deals by providing oversight on implementation planning & estimating and coordinating multiple SAP Lines of Businesses and partners as required (Bid Management).

Delivery

• Set-up and lead all phases of the project lifecycle, including planning, design, development, testing, implementation, documentation, training, and closure.
• Work with Customer Stakeholders, Partners and SAP Management to effectively manage and lead projects to ensure successful completion and significant impact on customer business KPI.
• During implementations, manage overall services relationship, steering committee and project office, between customer, partner and SAP to ensure that projects are delivered on-time, within budget and with the highest levels of customer satisfaction through billable consulting.
• Manage expectations on the development of solid project plans, with milestones and clear deliverables (in IT and business terms), handling risks, issues and objections.
• Select, direct and develop your team members in accordance with the project goals.
• Oversees the customer engagement journey and ensures effective governance and alignment across multiple internal and external stakeholders such as SAP Services, SAP Product support, Partners and customer’s System Integrators or other Hosting Partners.
• Actively oversees and drives cloud transformation agenda with key client stakeholders.
• Maximize the customer success by helping to manage complexity, ensure stable operations, mitigate risk and lowering total cost of operation, support customers on their journey to the intelligent enterprise.
• Actively participate in the governance meetings with customers and other SAP stakeholders (extended account team) and provides direction to the teams on delivery.
• Ensures effective end-to-end customer engagement and governance is applied across including commercial arrangements (costs and profitability), customer expectations, delivery team success, customer reporting.
• Enable SAP delivery teams to protect and grow engagement scope, leverage and cross-sell opportunities and manage commercial change requests.
• Provide consultative expertise to the client, including guiding clients through key decisions and tradeoffs to maintain project scope and timeline.

Value creation

• Analyze and execute on strategic projects, build consensus among project stakeholders, ensure alignment of project tactics with corporate strategy and communicate project goals at a strategic level as well as actively identifying and developing more business opportunities.
• Oversees the customer engagement journey and ensures effective governance and alignment across multiple internal and external stakeholders such as SAP Services, SAP Product support, Partners and customer’s System Integrators or other Hosting Partners.
• Maximize the customer success by helping to manage complexity, ensure stable operations, mitigate risk and lowering total cost of operation, support customers on their journey to the intelligent enterprise.

Experience & Language Requirements:

• Master's degree, preferably in finance, commerce, engineering, information technologies, computer science, MBA or equivalent
• Excellent knowledge of project management methodologies. SAP methodologies (including SAP Activate and SAP Solution Manager).
• Demonstrated ability to command the attention and respect of senior level leaders and confidently make presentations to large and executive audiences
• The candidate must possess experience managing a number of internal and external stakeholders, so interpersonal skills and abilities will be vital to succeed in this role
• Team oriented: ability to build strong relationships at every level of the organization. Being a strong motivator who knows how to influence others to deliver consistently their best work
• Excellent written and verbal communication and presentation skills – fluent in English
• PMP certification or other project management certifications are desirable

Work Experience & Key Competencies:

• Excellent proven program/project management experience at a consulting / system integration company
• Minimum 15-20 years project management experience (SAP software) with numerous large-scale implementations (at least 4-5 with a total value of > $10M)
• Demonstrated ability to scope, structure and manage medium - to large scale, medium to high complex projects with modern delivery mixes on time, on budget and within quality criteria that maximized business benefits for customers
• Demonstrated experience in managing, aligning and working with various levels within a customer organization (project, business, executive) as well as different parts of large global organizations
• Excellent customer focus / Networking / Relationship Building
• Knowledge of one or more functional business processes (Logistic, Finance, etc.)
• Knowledge about SAP Private/Public Cloud offerings
• RISE Methodology knowledge

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