SAP MM & Vendor Portal (Ariba)

SAP MM & Vendor Portal (Ariba)

Work Location: ABu DHabi

Experience: 15+ years

Role Summary

We are seeking a Senior SAP Lead with 15–18 years of experience to provide functional leadership, service ownership, and hands-on L2/L3 support for a mission-critical SAP AMS engagement supporting a customer in the UAE. The role will own the stability, integration, enhancement, and continual improvement of source-to-pay and procure-to-pay processes spanning SAP Ariba, SAP MM, SAP Business Network or a customer vendor portal, and SAP S/4HANA or ECC. The successful candidate must combine deep procurement-domain expertise, strong integration troubleshooting, disciplined IT service management, and the ability to operate within stringent security, confidentiality, audit, and access-control requirements.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide end-to-end service ownership and functional leadership for SAP Ariba, SAP MM, SAP Business Network, and vendor portal processes within the AMS scope.
• Lead and coordinate L2/L3 support for incidents, service requests, problems, and integration failures, ensuring SLA achievement, timely escalation, clear stakeholder communication, and permanent corrective actions.
• Support source-to-pay and procure-to-pay processes covering supplier onboarding and qualification, sourcing and contracts touchpoints, guided buying, catalogs, requisitions, purchase orders, order confirmations, advance ship notices, goods receipts, service entry sheets, invoices, and payment-status communication.
• Own SAP MM design and support across enterprise structure, material and supplier master data, purchasing, contracts, scheduling agreements, release strategies or flexible workflows, pricing conditions, inventory management, account determination, invoice verification, and FI/CO integration.
• Lead integration between SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA or ECC using SAP Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network, APIs, cXML, IDocs, web services, or approved middleware.
• Monitor interfaces and transactional documents; diagnose mapping, master-data, certificate, authentication, workflow, and connectivity issues; coordinate reprocessing; and drive root-cause elimination.
• Manage the vendor portal lifecycle, including supplier registration, qualification, account setup, profile maintenance, document collaboration, catalog enablement, user access, supplier communication, and issue resolution.
• Lead requirements workshops, fit-gap and impact assessments, solution design, configuration, functional specifications, estimation, testing, deployment, post-release stabilization, and approved minor enhancements.
• Plan and govern unit, system-integration, regression, and user-acceptance testing, maintaining traceable evidence and obtaining business sign-off.
• Apply ITIL-aligned incident, problem, change, release, knowledge, and continual-service-improvement practices using the customer's ITSM platform.
• Lead major-incident analysis and service-restoration efforts, coordinating procurement, finance, warehouse, Basis, security, ABAP, integration, infrastructure, and external vendor teams.
• Maintain solution documents, interface mappings, configuration records, standard operating procedures, runbooks, known-error records, support knowledge articles, test evidence, and audit artifacts.
• Review ticket trends, ageing, backlog, recurring defects, and service performance; identify automation, monitoring, and process-improvement opportunities.
• Mentor functional consultants, perform solution and documentation quality reviews, and provide structured knowledge transfer to customer and support teams.
• Participate in on-call support for priority incidents, major releases, month-end activities, and planned business events as required.

Required Skills and Experience

• 15–18 years of overall SAP experience, with substantial hands-on delivery and leadership across SAP Ariba, SAP MM, supplier collaboration, and integrated procurement solutions.
• Proven experience leading SAP AMS or application-support engagements involving complex production support, minor enhancements, upgrades, releases, and SLA/KPI governance.
• Strong expertise in SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing, Guided Buying, Catalog Management, Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, Sourcing, Contracts, and SAP Business Network; depth in relevant deployed modules is essential.
• Advanced SAP MM configuration and troubleshooting skills across procurement, inventory management, service procurement, logistics invoice verification, account determination, supplier and material master data, and cross-module integration.
• Strong knowledge of SAP Ariba integration with SAP S/4HANA or ECC, including integration architecture, master and transactional data flows, mappings, message monitoring, error handling, and reconciliation.
• Hands-on exposure to SAP Integration Suite, managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network, APIs, cXML, IDocs, web services, and enterprise middleware.
• Demonstrated experience integrating and supporting vendor or supplier portals, including identity and access, supplier onboarding, document exchange, catalogs, transactional collaboration, and portal-to-ERP synchronization.
• Solid understanding of SAP application security, segregation of duties, least-privilege access, certificates, secure connectivity, data protection, auditability, and controlled transport management.
• Experience preparing functional specifications and working effectively with ABAP, BTP, integration, Basis, security, infrastructure, testing, and business teams.
• Strong command of root-cause analysis, problem management, operational reporting, service reviews, backlog governance, and continual service improvement.
• Excellent English communication, stakeholder-management, presentation, documentation, and customer-facing leadership skills; Arabic capability is an advantage.
• Ability to work independently in a multi-vendor, multicultural, onsite-offshore delivery model and provide clear handovers across support shifts.

AMS Service Management Expectations

• Own response, resolution, backlog, change-success, availability, and customer-satisfaction targets for the assigned service area.
• Prioritize business continuity, rapid service restoration, accurate status reporting, and disciplined escalation during critical incidents.
• Drive problem records, known-error documentation, preventive actions, automation, monitoring improvements, and ticket-volume reduction.
• Lead operational reviews and contribute to monthly service reviews, change advisory boards, risk reviews, and improvement planning.
• Ensure production changes follow approved design, testing, security, transport, deployment, rollback, and post-implementation validation controls.

Customer and UAE Requirements

• Prior experience supporting, aerospace, government, critical infrastructure, or another highly regulated environment is strongly preferred.
• Operate in accordance with customer security policies, UAE regulatory and contractual requirements, data-classification rules, need-to-know principles, least-privilege access, segregation of duties, and approved support procedures.
• Maintain strict confidentiality for customer systems, supplier data, contracts, procurement activity, incidents, architecture, documentation, and operational information.
• Use only authorized environments, devices, repositories, tools, communication channels, remote-access methods, and data-transfer processes.
• Maintain complete audit trails for approvals, privileged access, configuration changes, testing, transports, deployments, incident handling, and supplier-data updates.
• Support access reviews, audit requests, vulnerability remediation, control testing, and security evidence collection.
• Be willing and eligible to undergo customer-mandated background verification, security screening, and access approvals, where applicable.
• Work from approved UAE customer or delivery locations and support UAE business hours, shifts, and critical out-of-hours coverage as required.

Qualifications and Certifications

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science, Supply Chain, Business Administration, or a related discipline.
• SAP certification in SAP Ariba Procurement, SAP Ariba Supplier Management, SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement, or SAP MM is strongly preferred.
• Certification or practical expertise in SAP Integration Suite or managed gateway for spend management and SAP Business Network is desirable.
• ITIL certification and experience with SAP Activate, Agile delivery, and mature service-management controls are advantageous.
• Experience across at least three end-to-end SAP implementations, rollouts, transformations, or major enhancement programs, combined with significant AMS leadership experience.

Key Competencies

• End-to-end procurement and supplier-collaboration leadership.
• Strong production-support ownership and customer-service orientation.
• Structured problem-solving and evidence-based root-cause analysis.
• Security-conscious execution in a mission-critical environment.
• Sound judgement in balancing stability, compliance, user experience, and continuous improvement.
• Strong team leadership, mentoring, negotiation, and cross-functional coordination.

Key Deliverables

• Stable, secure, and SLA-compliant support for SAP Ariba, SAP MM, SAP Business Network, and vendor portal services.
• Timely resolution of incidents and service requests, with robust root-cause analyses and preventive-action plans for recurring issues.
• Reliable supplier onboarding and transactional collaboration across requisition, sourcing, ordering, receipt, service, invoicing, and status processes.
• Approved enhancements delivered with complete design, security, testing, deployment, rollback, and audit documentation.
• Current configuration records, interface mappings, support procedures, runbooks, knowledge articles, test evidence, and operational dashboards.
• Measurable improvements in availability, backlog, integration reliability, supplier experience, automation, knowledge maturity, and ticket reduction.