Senior Application Manager (Functional O9 Lead)

Key Responsibilities

1. o9 Postponement Go-Live and Hypercare

• Lead functional support for the o9 Postponement production rollout.
• Manage hypercare activities through September 30, 2026, and beyond where required.
• Support the full SKU ramp and ensure stable platform performance as transaction and planning volumes increase.
• Coordinate GTK testing beginning September 6 and manage issue resolution through production readiness.
• Drive the solution toward a stable OK2USE status by September 30.
• Monitor critical business processes, planning outputs, data quality and system performance during hypercare.
• Establish incident triage, prioritization, escalation and resolution processes.
• Lead root-cause analysis and implement corrective and preventive actions.
• Provide clear status reporting on production stability, open defects, dependencies and operational risks.

1. MEIO Functional Leadership

• Serve as the functional o9 lead for the Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization initiative.
• Partner with the EP Center of Excellence, business stakeholders, product owners, architects and implementation teams.
• Lead requirements gathering, process discovery and functional solution design.
• Translate business requirements into o9 planning capabilities and functional specifications.
• Define inventory optimization objectives, planning policies, service-level assumptions and business rules.
• Support future-state process design across inventory positioning, safety stock and replenishment.
• Facilitate design workshops and drive alignment across business and technology stakeholders.
• Identify scope, dependencies, risks and integration requirements early in the design phase.
• Ensure MEIO design activities progress without disruption from Postponement hypercare demands.

1. Application Management and Production Stability

• Provide end-to-end functional ownership for the assigned o9 application portfolio.
• Manage L2 and L3 functional support for business-critical planning processes.
• Act as the primary escalation point for high-severity incidents and functional defects.
• Coordinate with technical, integration, data engineering and infrastructure teams.
• Manage production changes, releases, configuration updates and regression testing.
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks and knowledge-transfer materials.
• Track application health, service levels, recurring issues and continuous-improvement opportunities.
• Drive automation and process improvements to reduce manual intervention and production risk.

 

1. Functional Solution Design

• Configure and validate o9 planning models based on approved business requirements.
• Review master data, transactional data and planning parameters supporting Postponement and MEIO.
• Validate planning outputs, exception messages, inventory recommendations and scenario results.
• Support integration design across ERP, supply-chain planning and downstream execution systems.
• Ensure functional designs are scalable, supportable and aligned with enterprise architecture standards.
• Assess the impact of solution changes on existing planning processes and production operations.

1. Testing and Deployment

• Define functional testing strategy for Postponement and MEIO capabilities.
• Lead system integration testing, user acceptance testing and regression testing.
• Coordinate GTK and business validation activities.
• Manage defect triage, prioritization and closure.
• Support deployment planning, cutover readiness and go-live decisions.
• Define entry and exit criteria for hypercare and production stabilization.
• Ensure critical defects are resolved or appropriately mitigated before production releases.

 

1. Stakeholder and Program Management

• Partner with Supply Chain, Inventory Planning, Operations, Finance, Product Management and Technology teams.
• Provide transparent reporting on progress, risks, issues, dependencies and key decisions.
• Facilitate governance meetings, design reviews and production-readiness assessments.
• Balance competing priorities across concurrent Postponement and MEIO workstreams.
• Escalate capacity, timeline or production risks before they impact business outcomes.
• Maintain alignment between EP COE leadership, business teams and delivery partners.

Required Qualifications

• 10+ years of experience in supply-chain planning, enterprise applications or Application Management.
• 5+ years of hands-on functional experience with o9 Solutions or a comparable advanced planning platform.
• Strong experience in inventory planning, supply planning and inventory optimization.
• Proven experience leading large-scale supply-chain implementations and production stabilization.
• Experience supporting high-volume SKU ramps and complex global supply-chain environments.
• Strong understanding of Postponement planning concepts and inventory-positioning strategies.
• Experience with MEIO concepts, including:

•        Multi-echelon network design
•        Safety-stock optimization
•        Service-level planning
•        Inventory segmentation
•        Demand and supply variability
•        Lead-time modeling
•        Inventory policy optimization

• Experience managing production hypercare and critical incident resolution.
• Strong functional-design, testing and deployment-management capabilities.
• Excellent stakeholder-management and executive-communication skills.

 

Preferred Qualifications

• Direct implementation experience with o9 Postponement and MEIO solutions.
• Experience working with enterprise supply-chain Centers of Excellence.
• Familiarity with ERP and supply-chain platforms such as Oracle, SAP or equivalent systems.
• Knowledge of supply-chain data models, integration frameworks and planning engines.
• Experience supporting global product portfolios and large-scale SKU environments.
• Knowledge of Agile, SAFe, ITIL or DevOps delivery methodologies.
• o9, APICS, CSCP, CPIM, PMP or ITIL certification is preferred.

Key Competencies

• o9 Functional Leadership
• Postponement Planning
• Multi-Echelon Inventory Optimization
• Inventory and Supply Planning
• Application Management
• Production Hypercare
• Functional Solution Design
• Incident and Problem Management
• Testing and Deployment
• Risk and Dependency Management
• Cross-Functional Stakeholder Management
• Executive Communication