Engagement Manager
Tata Consultancy Services
Total years of experience :15 years, 6 Months
In my current role, I work in a practice called Next Gen Enterprise Transformation Services Europe that is part of Consulting & Services Integration (C&SI).
Main responsibilities:
- Planning and scoping deals with customers and define business strategic plans.
- Build and manage relationships with customers and other (internal) stakeholders.
- Manage human resources and oversee fulfilment of key positions, scale up and down as appropriate.
- Manage risk, revenue, profitability, growth, and customer satisfaction in every project.
- Monitor milestones delivery, project deliverables, track performance of our engagement, quality of project deliverables and compile reports on the effectiveness of projects against initial project plans.
Results:
- Project for a leading ICT company: process lead on a brown field implementation project. During this project SAP-ECC is migrated to S/4HANA. Project was a joint effort between TCS, EY and SAP.
- Project for a JV between two global energy companies: contribute to bid management (specifically solution definition and preparation of oral presentations) for a business transformation project to become a customer-centric organization and migration (greenfield implementation) to a SAP S/4HANA environment.
- Project for a major player in the refractory industry: business process assessment and RFP preparation for a greenfield implementation of a hybrid SAP implementation (private en public cloud as a two-tier model).
In this position I operated at the intersection of Business, Finance and Technology. Currently, PVH uses SAP ECC, SAP BW, SAP BPC, Blackline, and Coupa.
I managed a team of 3 direct reports (offshore team of 7 in Chennai, India, for Tier1 support and an Amsterdam based team of business/subject matter experts for key finance initiatives and projects). Record to report (R2R) and Order to cash (O2C) were important processes that we focused on.
Main responsibilities
- Lead and participate in process improvement projects within Europe.
- Identify and lead finance optimization projects within the finance hub.
- Define strategy and set priorities together with (sub) team members and monitor progress towards goals and project deadlines.
- Train and coach team members to support their professional development and ensure job satisfaction.
- Lead the project Blackline Cloud Solutions (journals, marching and reconciliation modules), and support the LES project (Legal Entity Simplification) as finance lead focusing on standardized, simple and flexible local legal entity setup in European countries.
- Develop a Finance System Testing Strategy for automation and outsourcing.
- Coordinate and monitor project implementations and organize timely handing over of support to other PVH teams.
Results:
- Delivered the Blackline Smart Close project for PVH Europe.
- Outsourced and centralized (Lift & Shift) Blackline Smart Close & Cloud Tier1 support and ITL tax determination support to Chennai.
Assignment: For client H&M Sweden, I worked on a project as Project Manager/Business Expert Online Sales Accounting and was responsible for deployment of (new) online payment acquirers in Europe. FI-CA, FI-CO, Hybris, ICC, BW and Active Control were the relevant SAP solutions in this project.
Main responsibilities:
- Coordinate planning and roll-out of new payment acquirers.
- Liaise with system engineers, local accounting teams, product owners, payments team, treasury & cash management, sales accounting online, card payments online and other stakeholders and (external) business partners to facilitate implementation and roll-out of this payment solution.
- Resolve identified issues and impediments to make sure that the e-commerce payment solutions will be available, up and running as scheduled.
- Monitor configurations and alignment with FI-CA (sub-ledger) including correct compliance, legal and other regulatory requirements as they apply in each individual country.
- Organize regular online meetings with stakeholders in each country to discuss progress, share information and best practices across the region.
- Coordinate activation of order orchestration in several markets across Europe.
Results:
- Successfully deployed new payment acquirers (Adyen, AMEX, Maestro) across 24 geographical areas in Europe.
- Function as single point of contact for Capgemini in the Netherlands for BlackLine (SAP Platinum Partner) in supporting clients.
In my current position, I am responsible for SAP AFS implementations as FICO business lead.
Main responsibilities:
- Analyse local (per country) regulatory and legal requirements and compliance to generate specific input prior to SAP implementations.
- Arrange coordination with global finance resources and business partners to provide and support on-site and remote training, testing, and go-live support from implementation phase to project completion.
- Build and maintain contacts and relationships with all local stakeholders including IT and finance departments, business managers etc.
- Review, adapt and customize all local processes and working procedures maintaining process harmonization and compliance with the adidas global policy framework.
- Ensure that implementation of global template processes for SAP implementation projects does not deviate from fixed company standards and policies.
- Organize and monitor training sessions with SAP users, global finance resources and business partners within the local operations.
- Oversee local user acceptance testing and information exchange with the (global) SAP specialists.
- Support global improvement projects to continuously improve finance template processes for the OneERP program making them more robust.
Results:
- Successfully completed SAP implementations in Colombia, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.
- Delivered the implementation of SAP-ML as part of a migration project to change the purchasing model for adidas South Africa.
- Successfully implemented SAP enhancements as part of a process improvement to the purchasing model for adidas Colombia, Peru, and Chile.
In this position I was responsible for leading the inter-company and 3rd parties revenue accounting and receivable function for the international trade business with a value of US$ 5 billion.
Main responsibilities:
- Monitor financial operations compliant with adidas Group policies and regulations.
- Supervise, manage, and coach a team of 9 finance & accounting professionals.
- Facilitate and stimulate self-sufficiency and professional development among team members.
- Review and improve internal controls, financial management procedures and (statutory) reporting guidelines.
- Deliver service and support to inter-company customers addressing their specific market requirements, dealing with complaints, and maintaining high customer satisfaction levels.
- Analyse and review existing systems and processes to identify opportunities for improvement in productivity, cost containment and mitigation of (operational) inefficiencies.
- Oversee budgeting and spend and perform variance analysis to provide explanations for difference in budgets vs actuals.
- Compile and submit all required (quarterly, year-end, etc.) financial reports.
Results:
- Improved financial control effectiveness and operational efficiency.
- Ensured strict compliance to group finance policies and GOPS supply chain model.
- Improved and streamlined the consumer return payment process to reimburse Group customers.
In this short-term assignment, I was engaged in improving the standard costing processes for each market/region by creating accurate data blueprints for every article that adidas makes.
Main responsibilities:
- Oversee extraction of relevant (pricing) data per article from several systems.
- Support allocation and processing of price load related topics (incoterms, import duties, costing, sourcing, master data, markets, and many more variables).
- Take appropriate measures to make sure that purchase price variances are understandable and remain as minimal as possible.
- Maintain contacts and get feedback and input from key partners around the globe in response to proposed changes to pricing data.
- Liaise with SAP specialist to ensure correct set up and data processing within SAP.
Results:
- Improved the efficiency of the price determination process by implementing a new data analytics database (Exasol).
Main responsibilities:
- Manage the operations of several departments (51 FTEs) within this outsourced unit for accounts payable for client company Edcon.
- Manage monthly payments (US$260 million) related to domestic and overseas transactions.
- Manage vendor master data in order to set up and maintain vendor consolidation, product information, standard contracts, and agreements and pro-actively prevent errors (vendor duplicate records, taxation inaccuracies).
- Supervise vendor reconciliation, bank and general ledger reconciliation maintaining full compliance to (client) accounting policies, procedures, and regulations.
- Analyse and monitor processes and procedure, in order to target opportunities for (technological) improvement and enhancing process efficiency.
- Stimulate the performance of the various teams (and individual team leads and team members) by facilitating training and, together with HR, personal development programs.
- Organize, in cooperation with HR, annual staff appraisal, employee performance, employee engagement etc.
- Liaise and work together with application/business process architects and other professionals to collect user and system requirements that translate into design specifications.
- Implement identified and approved improvements in the AP system.
- Resolve issues and provide application/technical support to users in cooperation with technical specialist.
Results:
- Successfully managed an offshore project in Mauritius that resulted in a headcount reduction from 15 to 2 employees.
- Led several system integration projects across different business functions during a 3 years timespan.