Group Head of IT Business Systems (Dynamics 365 F&O, CE/CRM)

Description

Akindra Talents is a Romania-based IT workforce company providing flexible IT staffing solutions and support to global customers. Based in the heart of Transylvania, we focus on connecting talented individuals with our clients across Europe. We build and manage remote operational support and development teams, while also supporting our freelance collaborators during their journey.

Our client is a global trading, logistics, and distribution company headquartered in Belgium, with over 180 locations worldwide (including Bucharest, Romania). Our client specializes in the distribution of chemicals across emerging markets worldwide, focusing on industries such as home care, nutrition, and mining. The company has its own local logistics assets and provides services including storage, value-added logistics, and just-in-time deliveries. With over 3000 employees, the annual revenues exceed 2.5 billion USD, reflecting its significant presence in the chemical distribution sector.

Our client is currently looking for a Group Head of IT Business Systems, who will be accountable for ensuring that business systems are stable and effectively supported, continuously improved in response to business needs, and strategically evolved to support the client's future operating model. The Group Head of IT Business Systems will have end-to-end accountability for the client's core enterprise business applications, with a strong strategic focus on the Microsoft Dynamics 365 ecosystem, particularly Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (F&O) and Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement (CE/CRM).

A major priority of the role is to build and mature a strong internal Microsoft Dynamics 365 Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Romania, creating sustainable internal capabilities across F&O and CE and reducing excessive dependency on external implementation and support partners.

This role combines technology leadership, people leadership, application ownership, service delivery, architecture and governance, vendor management and transformation.

Responsibilities:

1. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Leadership

• Own the strategic direction and evolution of the Dynamics 365 F&O and CE landscape ;
• Establish Dynamics 365 as a well-governed enterprise platform rather than a collection of individual implementations;
• Drive standardisation and reuse across countries and business units;
• Limit unnecessary customisation and promote adoption of standard Microsoft capabilities;
• Ensure strong alignment between Finance and Operations (F&O) and CE, and their surrounding data, integration and reporting capabilities;
• Own the application roadmap and lifecycle for the Dynamics ecosystem;
• Ensure business requirements are translated into scalable and sustainable solutions.

2. Build the Dynamics 365 Centre of Excellence in Romania

• Build and lead an internal Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O) and CE Centre of Excellence in Romania (Bucharest);
• Establish the appropriate internal capability mix across functional analysis, solution architecture, development, application support, testing and platform expertise.
• Create a scalable delivery model capable of supporting both Run and Change ;
• Build internal knowledge of critical business processes and Dynamics configurations;
• Establish clear technical and functional ownership of the Dynamics platforms;
• Develop standards, reusable components and delivery practices across F&O and CE;
• Ensure effective knowledge transfer from external implementation and support partners into the CoE;
• Develop the CoE into the central source of Dynamics expertise supporting the wider organisation;
• Create an attractive capability environment that can recruit and retain strong Microsoft Dynamics talent.

3. People & Capability Leadership

The role is responsible for building a strong and sustainable business-systems organisation, combining internal employees, delivery-centre capabilities and strategic external partners.

Key responsibilities include:

• Build and develop a high-performing international Business Systems organisation;
• Create accountabilities across leadership, architecture, functional, development and service-delivery roles;
• Develop internal Dynamics 365 F&O and CE expertise;
• Build leadership depth below the Head of Business Systems;
• Drive succession planning and reduce key-person dependencies;
• Establish development and career paths for technical and functional specialists;
• Build a culture of ownership, accountability, customer focus and continuous improvement;
• Create an effective balance between internal capability, Romania CoE resources and specialist partners.

4. Application Service Delivery: Run

• Ensure reliable operation and support of critical business applications;
• Own application-related service performance;
• Manage incident, problem and application-support backlogs;
• Ensure critical incidents are escalated and resolved appropriately;
• Drive root-cause resolution and reduce recurring incidents;
• Ensure operational responsibilities are clearly allocated between internal teams and partners;
• Improve the experience of users interacting with IT Business Systems.

5. Continuous Improvement: Improve

• Build a structured pipeline of improvements across F&O, CE and other business systems;
• Govern change requests and prioritisation;
• Balance regulatory, business-critical, operational and discretionary demand;
• Establish transparent sprint and release planning;
• Ensure delivery capacity is used against agreed business priorities;
• Develop greater self-service and user empowerment where appropriate.

6. Transformation: Transform

• Lead major evolution of the enterprise application landscape;
• Translate the ERP strategy into executable technology roadmaps;
• Support future Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O) deployments and evolution;
• Guide the evolution of Dynamics 365 CE/CRM as a strategic commercial platform;
• Ensure major transformation programmes create sustainable solutions that can subsequently be operated by the internal organisation and Romania CoE;
• Build transition-to-support and knowledge-transfer requirements into transformation programmes.

7. Architecture & Platform Governance

• Ensure F&O, CE and other business applications follow enterprise architecture standards;
• Maintain appropriate solution architecture governance;
• Challenge excessive customisation and solution complexity;
• Ensure interoperability between business apps, integration platforms, Data One and reporting solutions;
• Manage application technical debt;
• Promote common templates, components and patterns.

8. Business Partnership & Adoption

• Act as the senior IT counterpart to business leaders for enterprise business applications;
• Ensure technology investment translates into tangible business adoption;
• Strengthen relationships between IT application teams, process owners and affiliates;
• Establish strong key-user and super-user communities;
• Drive effective training, documentation and knowledge management;
• Ensure business ownership is embedded in change prioritisation and solution decisions.

9. Vendor & Partner Management

• Own relationships with major business-systems technology and delivery partners;
• Hold external partners accountable for quality, cost and delivery;
• Establish clear boundaries between internal accountability and external execution;
• Reduce structural dependency on individual consultants and suppliers;
• Ensure systematic transfer of knowledge to the Romania CoE;
• Optimise the sourcing model as internal Dynamics capabilities mature.

10. Financial & Capacity Accountability

• Own business-systems resource and capacity planning;
• Balance expenditure between support, continuous improvement and transformation;
• Increase transparency of application total cost of ownership;
• Optimise internal versus external resource allocation;
• Ensure investment is directed towards agreed business priorities.

Additional Information

• Permanent (only CIM - direct with client)
• Start: As soon as possible
• Location: Required presence in Bucharest, Hybrid
• Language: English