General Description of the Role

The role is focused on managing a portfolio of technology capabilities to support the business objectives for commercial & marketing function, ensuring that this portfolio drives business value, is delivered in through project excellence and brings innovative best practices and new technologies.

• Business partnership with key regional and market sales and marketing stakeholders to deliver technology solutions supporting the commercial objectives.
• Management of the regional sales and marketing technology product portfolio and roadmap.
• Supports the business value realisation from technology implementation and adoption.
• Supports process design and promotes best-practice adoption
• Identities opportunities for technology investment through the adoption of existing global solutions or the piloting of local innovative solutions in new areas.
• Defines, develops, owns and executes a local innovation framework to elevate Group market position with technology, entrepreneurs, consumers, customers, and non-compete peers.
• Represents and communicates the world of innovation as it relates to technology across the sales and marketing organisations.

Key Responsibilities and Activities

• Acts as IT Business Partner for the Commercial & Marketing area in the region, contributing, prioritizing and supporting in the definition of functional and technical solutions coming from new requirements
• Proactively engages key stakeholders at market and regional level to gather business and functional needs and to provide support and new ideas on business process design and enhancements; works with Global/Regional/Local IT to involve and engage Regional/Local stakeholders
• Represents the single point of contact for any questions concerning the regional Sales & Marketing Global technical solutions, maintaining effective communication channels and positive working relationships
• Contributes in business cases definition, in collaboration with Business Stakeholders, identifying new solutions to support the business capabilities and - once approved - builds a regional deployable platform.
• Contributes in business cases definition, in collaboration with Global IT and regional business stakeholders, building the regional deployable platform for Global solutions & Innovations.
• Leads fit-gap analysis between application global framework and business capabilities to evaluate solutions improvements or platforms
• Proactively brings external innovation into Group on a regular basis.

Innovation & Project Management

• Develops a pipeline of vendors/technology/agency providing innovation that could apply locally/regionally
• Identifies opportunities aligned to local and regional needs in key competitive edge focus areas
• Accelerates the reduction of time to market with trial innovation
• Advocates local innovation globally with IT COEs

Application Roadmap Management

• Contribute in the definition of the application roadmap for Sales & Marketing, application portfolio standardization and simplification across all regional plants, with the support of Enterprise Architect team and in line with EAT procedures and guidelines.
• Support and monitor the adoption of the application portfolio (cloud and on premise), constantly delivering new capabilities and keep actual the Sales & Marketing application portfolio asset.
• Aligns application portfolio, in accordance with global standards set forward by the Global Sales and Marketing COE, to determine localization standards for global solutions.
• Owns and maps local process to global process to encourage adoption of global templates within global solutions where available.

Key Relationships

Internal:

• Key Business Stakeholders (Country Commercial and Trade/Customer Marketing Teams):

• Global IT (Functional IT Teams, Business Intelligence and Advanced Analytics Team, Enterprise Architecture & Technology Team, Global Service Delivery Team):

• Regional IT (Business Partners, Business Analysts):

External:

• External vendors (consultancy firms, IT system integrators) in terms of:
  • Regional/Local projects selection and roadmap
  • Regional/Local tenders and innovation opportunities

Experience & Education

• 8 + years of experience in similar roles working in IT in consultancy or multinational complex organization (preferable FMCG industry), working across multiple countries
• International experience and mind-set are a must
• Proven experience in working cross-functionally
• Deep knowledge of Sales and Trade/Customer & Marketing processes and systems/tools is a must: Sales Force Automation, Customer Business Management, Trade Promotion and Optimization, Distributors management, Digital Asset management, Enterprise Content management, Social Channel management, and Consumer Journey Mapping and Engagement. Media Management knowledge is useful.
• SAP SD background and knowledge of integration flows with other SAP ECC modules and systems is beneficial
• Ecommerce experience, transactional and brand management
• Project management/coordination experience is a must
• Experience performing root cause analysis on internal and external data and processes
• Bachelor's degree in relevant disciplines (Business Administration, Management Engineering, Information Technology, Computer Science)
• Relevant technologies qualifications a plus - ITIL v4, Agile, Six Sigma,
• Fluent English is a must; Italian and French are a strong plus

Required Skills & Traits

• 3-5 years of Agile based project delivery supported by Marketing and Sales project implementation examples. Certification not required.
• Proven change management attitude and ability to positively influence the stakeholders
• Strategic thinking (support to business decision making and long-term view)
• Willingness and ability to work with multifunctional teams both in country and across the world
• Proven track record of project delivery
• Ability to work in a fast-paced environment and in a matrix organization