Experience: 15–18 years 
Project Type: SAP Application Management Services (AMS) 
Customer Industry: Defense 
Location: United Arab Emirates 
Role Type: Senior Functional Lead / Source-to-Pay Service Lead 
Primary Skills: SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, SAP S/4HANA or ECC Procurement Integration 

Role Summary 

We are seeking a Senior SAP Ariba Lead with 15–18 years of overall SAP experience to provide functional leadership, service ownership, and hands-on L2/L3 support for a mission-critical SAP AMS engagement serving a defense customer in the UAE. The role will own the stability, governance, enhancement, and continuous improvement of source-to-pay processes across SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, and integrated SAP S/4HANA or ECC procurement functions. The successful candidate must combine deep Ariba expertise with strong AMS delivery discipline, stakeholder leadership, integration troubleshooting, and secure operations in a highly controlled and confidential environment. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Lead end-to-end functional support and service delivery for SAP Ariba solutions, including Strategic Sourcing, Contracts, Buying and Invoicing, Guided Buying, Supplier Lifecycle and Performance, Supplier Risk, Catalogs, and SAP Business Network. 

• Act as the primary functional and service-level point of contact for procurement leadership, business process owners, customer IT, security teams, and delivery partners. 

• Own L2/L3 incident, problem, service request, and change management; drive timely restoration, structured root-cause analysis, permanent fixes, and recurring-ticket reduction. 

• Manage SLA and KPI performance, ticket prioritization, backlog ageing, major incidents, service reviews, escalations, risks, dependencies, and executive reporting. 

• Lead requirement workshops, fit-gap analysis, impact assessment, solution design, configuration, functional specifications, estimation, testing, deployment, and post-release stabilization. 

• Ensure robust integration between SAP Ariba and SAP S/4HANA or ECC for master data, sourcing, contracts, purchase requisitions, purchase orders, goods receipts, service entry, invoices, accounting documents, and supplier collaboration. 

• Coordinate with SAP MM, Finance, ABAP, Basis, security, integration, infrastructure, and third-party teams to resolve complex cross-functional and interface issues. 

• Oversee supplier onboarding, qualification, enablement, catalogs, account administration, transaction collaboration, and supplier support processes. 

• Plan and govern Ariba release assessments, regression testing, adoption decisions, change communication, and production-readiness activities. 

• Maintain functional designs, configuration records, interface mappings, SOPs, runbooks, knowledge articles, known-error records, test evidence, release documentation, and audit artifacts. 

• Identify opportunities for automation, standardization, user-experience improvement, clean-core alignment, service optimization, and measurable business value. 

• Lead and mentor functional consultants, conduct quality reviews, allocate work, provide knowledge transfer, and maintain skill and succession coverage for critical services. 

• Participate in on-call support for priority incidents, critical procurement events, major releases, and planned business activities as required by the AMS model.