Role Summary 

We are seeking an accomplished SAP Service Delivery Manager with 15–18 years of experience to lead an SAP AMS engagement for a defense customer in the UAE. The role requires strong service delivery leadership and deep functional expertise in either Record to Report (RTR) or Procure to Pay (PTP). The incumbent will own end-to-end service performance, customer governance, operational stability, security compliance, team leadership, financial management, and continuous improvement across the SAP landscape. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Own end-to-end SAP AMS delivery across L2/L3 functional, technical, Basis, security, integration, and reporting workstreams. 

• Act as the primary customer-facing delivery leader and escalation point, ensuring service quality, business continuity, stakeholder confidence, and contractual compliance. 

• Manage SLAs, KPIs, OLAs, service credits, backlog, ticket aging, resolution quality, system availability, and customer satisfaction. 

• Lead ITIL-aligned Incident, Major Incident, Problem, Change, Release, Service Request, Knowledge, and Configuration Management processes. 

• Establish daily operational reviews, weekly governance, monthly service reviews, quarterly executive reviews, and transparent reporting of risks, issues, actions, and dependencies. 

• Coordinate critical incident response, business communications, root-cause analysis, corrective actions, and prevention of recurring defects. 

• Provide functional leadership for RTR or PTP, review solution designs and changes, and ensure support outcomes align with finance, procurement, and control objectives. 

• Manage demand, minor enhancements, releases, testing, cutover, hypercare, and transition-to-support activities. 

• Lead capacity planning, staffing, utilization, shift coverage, succession planning, training, cross-skilling, and performance enablement for distributed teams. 

• Own delivery financials, including budgeting, forecasting, effort consumption, productivity, profitability, change requests, and margin improvement. 

• Drive automation, self-service, shift-left, knowledge reuse, monitoring, problem elimination, and measurable continual service improvement. 

• Ensure adherence to customer security policies, UAE regulatory expectations, segregation of duties, access controls, data handling requirements, audit evidence, and approved operating procedures. 

• Work with customer leadership, business process owners, SAP CoEs, vendors, and infrastructure teams to maintain a secure and resilient service. 

Required Functional Expertise 

Record to Report (RTR): Strong expertise in SAP FI/CO processes, including general ledger, accounts payable/receivable integration, asset accounting, bank accounting, cost center and profit center accounting, intercompany processing, allocations, period-end and year-end close, financial reporting, reconciliation, controls, and integration with MM, SD, PS, and other relevant modules. 

Defense-Customer and Security Expectations 

• Demonstrated ability to operate in a highly controlled, mission-critical, and audit-intensive environment. 

• Strict adherence to confidentiality, need-to-know access, customer site protocols, secure communication channels, and data residency requirements. 

• Experience coordinating privileged access, segregation-of-duties controls, vulnerability remediation, emergency changes, audit requests, and security incident escalation. 

• Ability to satisfy customer-mandated background screening, access authorization, and onsite working requirements, where applicable. 

• Strong discipline in maintaining complete operational records, approvals, evidence, and traceability for production activities. 

Qualifications and Experience 

• 15–18 years of overall SAP experience, including substantial experience leading SAP AMS or production support engagements. 

• At least 5 years in Service Delivery, Engagement Management, Program Management, or an equivalent customer-facing leadership role. 

• Deep functional expertise in either SAP RTR (FI/CO) or PTP (MM with FI integration); working knowledge of the complementary value stream is preferred. 

• Strong experience with SAP ECC and/or SAP S/4HANA support, enhancements, integrations, upgrades, and service transitions. 

• Proven management of large, multi-vendor, multi-location teams supporting business-critical operations and, preferably, 24×7 services. 

• Strong understanding of ITSM tools such as ServiceNow or Solution Manager, operational dashboards, service reporting, and knowledge management. 

• Experience in regulated, government, aerospace, defense, security-sensitive, or similarly controlled environments is highly desirable. 

• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, Finance, Supply Chain, or a related discipline. 

• ITIL certification is strongly preferred; PMP, PRINCE2, Scrum, SAP Activate, or relevant SAP certification is advantageous. 

• Excellent English communication, executive presentation, negotiation, conflict-resolution, and stakeholder-management skills; Arabic capability is an advantage. 

Core Competencies 

• Customer-centric service leadership and executive stakeholder management 

• Operational governance, risk management, and decisive escalation leadership 

• Commercial acumen, contract interpretation, budgeting, and profitability management 

• Structured problem solving, root-cause analysis, and data-driven decision-making 

• Team leadership, coaching, collaboration, and accountability 

• Continuous improvement, automation, and transformation mindset 

Key Success Measures 

• Consistent achievement of agreed SLAs, KPIs, availability, resolution, and customer-satisfaction targets. 

• Reduction in critical incidents, ticket backlog, aging, repeat defects, and mean time to restore service. 

• Successful completion of audits with timely closure of security, compliance, and control observations. 

• Improved productivity, automation adoption, knowledge coverage, service stability, and cost efficiency. 

• Predictable delivery of enhancements, releases, transitions, and business-critical period-end activities. 

• Strong team retention, capability development, stakeholder confidence, and delivery profitability.