SAP S/4 EAM Lead (Client-Side Advocate Role)
Independent Senior Practitioner | Client-Side Role | Large SAP S/4 Transformation Programs
We are seeking a highly seasoned SAP S/4 Finance practitioner to serve as a Quality Engineer, to serve on behalf of the client. This is a client-side role embedded within program workstreams to provide independent, hands-on experience-driven guidance during planning and design activities. This role will provide independent client-side oversight and challenge across enterprise asset management, maintenance, work management, and cross-functional design activities in a large SAP ECC to S/4HANA transformation.
This role is intentionally designed as a client-side advocate position for a highly skilled independent SAP practitioner who brings quality perspective, delivery judgment, and transformation experience to client planning and design activities.
- Embedded in workstreams.
- Acts as a client advocate and challenger.
- Drives decision integrity, traceability, and quality.
- Brings delivery-tested judgment during planning, fit-to-standard, design, and review activities.
- Provides a perspective rooted in what is best for the client in the short and long term—not solely in what is easiest for the SI to deliver.
The practitioner will be expected to operate effectively in large, complex transformation environments involving SAP ECC to SAP S/4HANA transition, multiple workstreams, cross-functional integration, formal governance forums, and significant utility-sector process complexity.
- Serve as the senior client-side advocate for SAP EAM / PM design, including asset hierarchy, technical objects, preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance, work management, and planning/scheduling integration.
- Review and challenge SI designs, process flows, functional specifications, and configuration decisions to ensure they reflect utility asset-intensive realities and long-term maintainability.
- Validate design choices related to work orders, notifications, task lists, maintenance plans, asset strategies, reliability considerations, and integration to supply chain and finance.
- Help the client team assess whether proposed designs support practical field and maintenance execution across large, geographically distributed utility operations.
- Drive requirements-to-design traceability and facilitate issue resolution where process, integration, data, and work execution decisions intersect.
- Participate in governance forums and Design Authority reviews as an independent practitioner representing the client’s quality, integration, and sustainability interests.
- Provide perspective on how EAM design decisions affect capital planning, asset accounting, inventory support, outage/field execution, and long-term reporting or control requirements.
- Support key design and deliverable review cycles, including challenge sessions focused on process breakdowns, unsustainable workarounds, or over-customization risk.
- Coach client leaders and workstream members on quality disciplines, design rationale, and practical EAM operating model implications.
- Help build client capability by coaching finance leads and reinforcing durable quality disciplines across planning, design, and validation activities.
- 12-15+ years of SAP PM / EAM experience, including substantial delivery experience across SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA transformations.
- Deep expertise in enterprise asset management for large asset-intensive organizations, including maintenance strategy, work management, and EAM integration to supply chain, finance and field service mobilization solutions.
- Strong experience evaluating design outputs, functional documents, integration designs, and process architecture.
- Hands-on experience interpreting and validating design documentation, functional specifications, process architecture, and integration designs.
- Working knowledge of SAP Activate, Fit-to-Standard, and end-to-end process design in major transformation environments.
- Experience implementing large, complex, multi-jurisdiction SAP Transformations is required.
- Experience across both SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA environments is required.
- Experience implementing SAP in Electric and/or Gas IOU’s is strongly preferred.
- Houston, TX based preferred but not required.
- Ability and willingness to co-locate with the client team during critical planning, design, and governance periods. (st least 50% of the time)
- 4 full-lifecycle SAP Transformations, at least 3 preferred
- Experience operating in complex multi-partner programs where the practitioner must independently assess and challenge SI recommendations.
- Experience with transmission, distribution, gas operations, plant maintenance, or other utility asset-intensive operating models.
- Experience across the asset lifecycle, including maintenance, construction/work execution, capitalization implications, and integration to field operations.
- Brings credible field and asset management realism into design discussions.
- Able to identify where a technically valid SAP design may still fail operationally in utility execution environments.
- Comfortable translating detailed EAM design choices into executive-level risk, quality, and decision implications.
- Independent and objective, with the judgment and credibility to challenge SI recommendations and/or challenge client current state perspective constructively.
- Comfortable operating in executive and governance settings while remaining detail-oriented in design and integration reviews.
- Able to connect business intent, finance control requirements, and SAP design implications clearly and succinctly.
- Strong collaborator who can challenge technical choices while maintaining credibility with business, IT, and implementation partners.
- Improves the quality, completeness, and practicality of design decisions before they become build or testing issues.
- Helps the client team make timely, well-supported decisions grounded in business reality, SAP delivery experience, and utility-sector knowledge.
- Elevates traceability across requirements, design decisions, risks, issues, and downstream impacts.
- Constructively challenges SI outputs, accelerates issue resolution, and strengthens governance decision-making.
- Builds confidence and capability within the client team through coaching, clear rationale, and hands-on engagement.
Please submit candidates who are genuinely seasoned, delivery-tested practitioners with strong executive presence and the ability to engage independently in client-side advisory roles. Candidates should be able to challenge design decisions constructively, navigate ambiguity, and work credibly with senior client stakeholders, business process owners, and System Integrators in high-visibility transformation settings.
- SAP ECC and SAP S/4HANA transformation experience.
- Utility sector experience, especially Electric and/or Gas Utilities.
- Examples of planning, fit-to-standard, design authority, governance, or solution quality leadership.
- Cross-functional integration depth and examples of independent challenge to delivery partner designs.
Relevant experience with regulated, asset-intensive, or field-execution-heavy environments
