GIS Group Head of Business Solutions in Manchester

If you are ambitious, self-motivated, hardworking and a team player and interested in growing your career with an International FMCG business, please read through our job opportunity.

The Group Head of Business Solutions has overall ownership of the delivery of projects, major changes and L3/L4 support of business applications. All functional domains report into this senior management role:

• HR, Finance and Procurement Domain Manager
• Commercial and Customer Process Domain Manager
• Planning, Manufacturing and Logistics Domain Manager
• Master Data Governance Domain Manager

The role manages our key application delivery partners (System Implementors) and has the overall objective of getting the balance of the right capabilities on all projects and meeting the overall objective of maximum internal resource utilisation. The role in partnership with the Group Director of IT oversees the project pipeline to ensure we are ready for future programmes and projects.

The Group Head of Business Solutions:

• As part of the GIS leadership team and a senior manager within McBride, contribute to the development of the overall GIS strategy.
• Working with GIS senior managers, GIS domain managers, business process owners to help assess the needs of the McBride business and make the best technical decisions to support those needs.
• Owns the processes by which we govern what changes we make to our enterprise systems and how we make them. Documents these processes, with the supporting templates to our system lifecycle methodology and defines the workflows by which documents are approved on a project-by-project basis.
• Manages the staffing and resourcing of projects in consultation with the Domain Managers.
• Works in partnership with the Group Enterprise Architect to manage the Enterprise Application Reference Architecture and uses this to support project solutioning decisions.
• Owns and manages the capabilities and resources within the Enterprise Solutions team with the objective to ensure we staffed appropriately for support and future projects whilst balancing resource utilisation and capitalisation. Also considers where to source additional resources based on technical requirements and availability.
• Owns application supplier and contract management for both licensing and implementation services.
• Effectively communicate vision, strategy, and project plans to key stakeholders to ensure clear understanding and maximise cooperation, support and engagement.
• Ensure appropriate business continuity and disaster recovery strategies and execution plans are in place for all critical internal and external applications and application services.
• Leads the Domain Managers and their teams in delivering projects following GIS Quality Management Policies and Procedures.

• Development, maintenance and communication of a clear application reference architecture and operating model.
• Build the capabilities and supplier partnerships within the Business Solutions domain to achieve our GIS strategy.
• Availability of key services at agreed SLA levels for both support and project delivery.
• Promotion of strong and productive GIS and business partnerships.
• Conformance to Internal / external audit points on IT Governance.

• Leadership of 4 direct reports and approximately 19 indirect reports.
• Focal point for IT applications management for Asia Pacific region working in conjunction with local IT Service providers.
• Budget responsibility of circa £4M.
• Capex utilisation rate circa £1M (Excluding current transformation programmes).
• 3800 + end user’s base.
• 50+ IT colleagues.
• 20+ critical technology suppliers.
• Geographies include: - UK, France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Poland, Denmark and Asia.

• Strong influencing skills and ability to provide thought leadership and technical expertise.
• Ability to promote team working and collaboration, facilitating the measurement of performance by KPI’s is highly desired.
• Communication – communicates at all levels clearly, listens and involves others in direction and goal setting. Ability to bring complex technology concepts and solutions to all audiences of all levels.
• Analytical rigor and solid process management approach to work is essential, with a high level of detail.
• A customer focused approach, positive attitude in working with all business functions.
• Strong programme leadership skills.
• Ability to think and act strategically.
• Ability to bring gravitas and professionalism.
• Ability to retain a sense of humour and level of composure under all circumstances.
• Significant senior leadership level experience ideally gained in a Manufacturing/FMCG environment.
• Previous successful contribution to Group IT enterprise applications focused roles in credible large scale, international businesses and responsible for plan, build and run functions.
• Global applications portfolio management experience essential.
• Experience of running large and complex programmes simultaneously with multiple smaller programmes and providing portfolio updates to business leadership.
• Experience of working with large, complex and hybrid on-prem, cloud, SaaS based applications ecosystems.

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