Unilever - Innovation Subject Matter Expert

About Unilever

About Unilever IT

Role Details

Subject Matter Expert (SME) provides a focus on the delivery into their functional or cross-functional area, which includes owning the application landscape roadmap, design to delivery of solutions, supporting the run of the application, maintainability and lower TCO for the business.

Accountabilities and responsibilities:

Following are the verticals that a SME would be responsible for:

- Driving Innovations - Identify new technologies, innovations which will provide business value. Designing to Deployment of Solutions to meet business need

- Vendor management - Managing and building relationships with vendors

- TCO - Drive reduction of TCO for the application or landscape

- Sustenance & Resilience - Ensure Sustenance and Resilience of capabilities delivered

- Build Talent and Teams - Invest in building talent

Driving Innovations

- Responsible for both smooth project delivery and Business As Usual post capability is live

- Lead delivery of all agreed IT-related projects, from Feasibility phase to completion

In the Ideas phase, provide support to Business Engagement in driving clarity of business requirements, high level design, cost and time estimates

Identify the right design, solution for the business requirements, own the functional specifications and work packages for delivering the solution

Work in close partnership with the vendors to ensure on-time and on-budget execution of application changes for all key projects and programmes

Work with global teams like Business Partners- s, Other SME's to adopt global processes, processes, technologies

Ensure agreed changes are correctly integrated with solutions in other functional areas

- Help ensure Technical and Security standards established are implemented and adhered to during design and implementation

- Ensure smooth transition to support with all knowledge captured.

- Develop strong relationships with other key stakeholders within Unilever IT

- Identify innovations, growth opportunities for exploration

Vendor Management

- Participate in functional and technical design reviews (QA process) with strategic IT suppliers and/or other 3rd parties when/where appropriate

- Hold vendors accountable for quality and timeliness of deliveries through governance mechanisms

- Ensure adequate knowledge sharing and retention through documentation and adherence to GPD

Drive TCO

- Drive simplification to support the lowest possible TCO for each component in the systems landscape.

- Deliver above responsibilities within an agreed financial charging structure and budget

- Adopt methodologies of convergence, build once so that the cost of delivery is reduced

Sustenance & Resilience

- Develop and maintain the roadmap for IT systems architecture change/refresh in line with destination architecture and aligned with business priorities for change projects and programmes

- Work with landscape management teams to ensure system hygiene, performance, KEC objectives are delivered

- Work with the release management teams to ensure gate process and release process is adhered to

- To work with the AM teams not only for transition of new projects, but also support of existing processes to ensure user satisfaction and call reduction

- Plan for infrastructure needs, service introduction and service transition and work with the EC teams for delivering it

- Ensure minimal business disruption. In case of a disruption, resolve the issue and the root cause with less downtime

- Ensure a stable and resilient system - this should be ensured in project delivery & BAU

Build Talent and Teams

- Help build and retain level 1 SME capability

Process and Technology knowledge required:

One or many of the following Business Processes:

- Order to Cash - Customer Service, Billing, Pricing

- Financials - Procure to Pay, Record to Report, General Ledger, Costing, COPA

- Planning - Supply and Demand Planning

- Manufacturing - Production, Quality, Maintenance

- Warehousing and Logistics

- Procurement - MRP, Sourcing

- Mobility

- CRM - Associated business processes like customer interactions, customer management

Main Associated Technologies / Applications (one or more of these applications):

- Enterprise Applications like SAP, Oracle etc