وصف الوظيفة
Role Overview
Manager - IT Business Partnering at Al Ghurair, a mid-management level position responsible for acting as the strategic link between assigned business units and IT Centers of Excellence, translating business needs into technology delivery aligned with corporate strategic objectives.
Company Overview
Al Ghurair Foods is a strategic business within Al Ghurair Investment Group. The Group's strategic objectives include becoming a Top Ten Great Place to Work in the UAE, generating 50% profitability from new businesses by 2033, and becoming a Top Five diversified business group in the region. Al Ghurair Foods' growth priorities for 2028 and beyond focus on becoming a foods value chain player with leadership in grains, with ambitions to make the business two times bigger by 2028 and three times bigger by 2033.
The value chain spans origination and commodity trading, ocean freight, chartering and vessel operations, crushing, refining and milling, and processing, distribution and route-to-market. The technology estate must serve the trading desk, chartering room, plant, and finance and risk functions with equal credibility.
Role Purpose
The incumbent is the technology anchor for the Group's strategic transformation through process standardization, automation and technology enablement. This role converts strategic ambitions into executable technology roadmaps, sequences delivery against business readiness, and holds business and IT jointly responsible for benefit realization. The position is responsible for executing and delivering the strategic digitization, automation and AI roadmap that enables growth trajectories by building a technology platform capable of absorbing two to three times the volume, complexity, geographies and product portfolio without proportional increases in cost, headcount or risk.
Key Responsibilities
Business Partnership & Operations
- Act as the day-to-day IT counterpart to the trading, trade execution, chartering, shipping operations, crushing and finance desks.
- Ensure deal capture, position, voyage, settlement and invoicing processes run without interruption.
- Support month-end, mark-to-market and position reporting cycles to deadline.
- Analyze business operations and solutions to improve efficiency.
- Participate in the design of applications solutions working alongside specialist teams to ensure initial and anticipated future business requirements are represented.
- Be the main point of reference for day-to-day eventualities and manage the response system to deal with applications queries and problems to limit user frustration by ensuring queries are dealt with promptly.
Platform & Systems Integrity
- Own the integrity of interfaces between the CTRM, maritime/chartering, plant and ERP finance systems.
- Monitor reconciliation breaks, exception queues and failed postings.
- Drive root-cause resolution with the Centers of Excellence and platform principals.
Solution Delivery & Architecture
- Drive solution assessments and evaluation across both business and IT teams.
- Create and manage RFP processes.
- Drive the overall business unit-specific solution architecture, taking into consideration group applications and the broader solution ecosystem.
- Monitor the roll-out of new software applications to ensure adequate business controls and limited or no issues.
- Create and oversee protocols and procedures for the use of any new software applications.
- Participate in the design of applications solutions to ensure business requirements are captured.
Adoption & Value Realization
- Advise the Senior Leadership Team on emerging applications technologies as appropriate.
- Manage and drive proofs of concept as appropriate.
- Drive adoption of solutions with the broader user community.
- Measure and own adoption plans for solutions that have already gone live.
- Ensure services are delivered that exceed business expectations and add value to the business.
Stakeholder Management & Governance
- Manage stakeholder relationships, timely communication, demand prioritization, co-creation, collaboration and innovation.
- Manage incident resolution and associated SLA metrics in line with business-defined parameters.
- Manage prioritization and report progress to the business executive and IT management teams.
- Ensure compliance with IT policies, standards and strengthen internal controls.
Operational Excellence
- Drive operational efficiencies and service improvement initiatives across internal teams and service partners.
- Manage the overall Business IT budget.
- Deliver the Right Work from a business requirements perspective, at the Right Time, with the Right Outcome in terms of value and ROI realization.
Qualifications & Experience
Deep, hands-on knowledge of commodity trading, shipping and food manufacturing is critical to this role, including:
- Physical and paper trading in grains and oilseeds.
- Trade lifecycle from deal capture through contract and counterparty management, pricing, basis and premium structures, quality and weight settlement, documentary trade and letters of credit, to trade-to-cash.
- Ocean freight and chartering, including voyage and time charter, fixtures, voyage estimation, bunkers, laytime and demurrage, and port and agency operations.
- Grain origination and handling.
- Oilseed crushing and refining.
- Milling operations.
- Poultry farming, cage-free, hatching, rendering and meat processing operations.
- Distribution supply chain.
Skills & Competencies
Fluency in the supporting technology estate is equally critical
- CTRM/ETRM platforms such as Aspect CTRM or equivalent.
- Maritime and chartering systems such as Veson IMOS or equivalent.
- Freight-market intelligence and cargo/tonnage sourcing tools such as Shipfix.
- ERP finance systems.
- Supply chain planning, execution and visibility layers.
The incumbent must be credible on the trading floor and in the chartering room as much as on the plant floor, warehouse and dispatch locations.
Additional Information
This role carries responsibility for overall Business IT budget management and requires the ability to hold business and IT jointly accountable for benefit realization.