Lead – Transformation Release and Cutover Management

INSPIRE | EXHILARATE | DELIGHT

For over six decades, Chalhoub Group has been a partner and creator of luxury experiences in the Middle East. The Group, in its endeavour to excel as a hybrid retailer, has reinforced its distribution and marketing services with a portfolio of eight owned brands and over 300 international brands in the luxury, beauty, fashion, and art de vivre categories. More recently, the Group expanded its expertise into new categories of luxury watches, jewellery, and eyewear.

Every step at Chalhoub Group is taken with the customer at heart. Be it constantly reinventing itself or focusing on innovation to provide luxury experiences at over 750+ experiential retail stores, online and through mobile apps, each touch point leads to delighting the customer.

Today, Chalhoub Group stands for 14,000 skilled and talented professionals across seven countries, whose cohesive efforts have resulted in the Group being ranked third in the Middle East and first in Saudi Arabia as a Great Place to Work®.

To keep the innovation journey going, the Group has set up “The Greenhouse”, which is not just an innovation hub, but also an incubator space and accelerator for start-ups and small businesses in the region and internationally. This is just one of the several initiatives taken by the Group to reinvent itself, catalysed by forward thinking and future-proofing. The Group has also been embedding sustainability at the core of its business strategy with a clear commitment towards people, partners and the planet, and by being a member of the United Nations Global Compact Community and signatory of the Women’s Empowerment Principles.

What you’ll be doing  

This role is responsible for providing technical leadership and ensuring the successful implementation of the Release Management, Cutover and Environment Management horizontal stream of the Transformation program.

Job Summary 

• This position will take the lead on planning, execution, and governance of all ERP system releases, ensuring smooth deployment across SAP environments and minimizing business disruption. In this role, the Lead will work with our System Integrator to develop and execute a detailed cutover plan, managing the transition from legacy systems to SAP ERP, including dry runs, mock cutovers, and go-live activities.
• A critical element of this role is to oversee environment management, ensuring the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of development, test, and production environments, including external systems outside of the Program scope
• This role requires strong experience in SAP S/4 HANA transport processes, SAP basis and SAP environment management to ensure best practices and strong governance and control is applied throughout
• The Release Management, Cutover and Environment Management Lead will work closely with other functional business and tech leads, stakeholders, and end-users to ensure effective and controlled management of releases, with proper governance and control as well as ensuring that any legacy or external systems are considered in both Cutover and Environment Management
• This role will align with functional technology streams in the program to ensure that the requirements of each functional area are effectively captured in this streams’ scope, and to ensure that dependencies required of functional streams are well managed into Release Management, Cutover and Environment Management
• This role requires knowledge of ERP and enterprise systems, strong leadership capabilities, and excellent communication skills to work with cross-functional teams, stakeholders, and vendors.

All of the below are assumed to be in collaboration/cooperation with the System Integrator:

Release Planning & Strategy:

• Develop and manage a comprehensive release strategy and schedule for the ERP transformation, ensuring alignment with project timelines and business objectives.
• Coordinate with horizontal streams teams (e.g., integration, testing) as well as functional streams to plan, scope, and prioritize releases effectively.
• Develop and manage a strategy for handling SAP transports across different system layers (Development, Quality Assurance, Production) to ensure smooth migration of configuration changes, code updates, and other objects.

Release & Transport Planning & Governance:

• Establish and maintain governance processes for managing releases, ensuring that all changes, updates, and deployments follow approved procedures and meet quality standards.
• Ensure that release risks are identified, documented, and mitigated, including potential impacts on business operations.
• Define clear processes for transport requests, approvals, and tracking to ensure that all transports are controlled and properly documented.
• Coordinate with SAP functional and technical teams to ensure the timely and accurate movement of transports between the various SAP environments (e.g., Development, Test, Production).
• Work closely with SAP Basis teams to schedule and manage transport imports, ensuring minimal disruption to ongoing operations or testing activities.

Release Execution & Coordination:

• Oversee the execution of all ERP system releases, from development to production, ensuring smooth and timely delivery.
• Ensure all transport requests are properly tested in non-production environments (e.g., Quality Assurance) before being promoted to production, minimizing risks of errors or system disruptions.
• Collaborate with functional leads to validate that the content of each transport aligns with business requirements and does not negatively impact other system components.
• Collaborate with business and IT stakeholders to coordinate the release of new functionality, system upgrades, and patches.

Post-Release Support & Monitoring:

• Ensure effective post-release monitoring and support, identifying and resolving any issues that arise post-deployment.
• Maintain oversight of transport logs and system alerts to proactively identify and address any issues that arise during transport movements.
• Provide regular reporting on transport activities, including success rates, errors, and potential risks, to project leadership and stakeholders.
• Work with technical teams to implement roll-back strategies if needed, minimizing disruption to the business.

Cutover Strategy Development:

• Lead the development of a detailed cutover plan to transition from legacy systems to the new SAP ERP system.
• Define clear roles, responsibilities, and timelines for all stakeholders involved in the cutover process.

Cross-System Coordination:

• Collaborate with functional leads, IT teams, and external vendors to ensure that all systems and data are properly aligned during the cutover.
• Ensure that key integration points between legacy and SAP systems are identified and effectively managed.

Testing & Simulation:

• Manage dry runs and mock cutovers to validate the cutover plan, ensuring the team is prepared for the live cutover.
• Identify potential risks or issues during testing and work with relevant teams to implement solutions ahead of the actual cutover.

Go-Live Cutover Execution:

• Oversee the live cutover process, ensuring that all systems are transitioned smoothly with minimal disruption to business operations.
• Coordinate with data migration teams, technical teams, and business units to ensure data integrity and system functionality during and after the cutover.

Environment Strategy & Planning:

• Develop and maintain an environment management strategy, ensuring that all system environments (e.g., development, testing, staging, production) are properly managed and aligned with the project timeline.
• Plan and manage the provisioning, configuration, and maintenance of environments required for the ERP system.

Environment Setup & Configuration:

• Oversee the setup, configuration, and management of test environments, ensuring they mirror production systems and are connected to external testing systems as required.
• Ensure environments are updated with the correct data and configurations in preparation for testing, integration, and release.

Environment Monitoring & Maintenance:

• Monitor the usage and performance of all ERP environments to ensure they are functioning as expected and are available for testing and development activities.
• Troubleshoot any environment-related issues, ensuring minimal disruption to testing and release schedules.

Environment Access Management:

• Manage user access to the various ERP environments, ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to development, testing, and production environments.
• Ensure proper audit trails and controls are in place to manage access, changes, and usage across environments.

Stakeholder Communication:

• Act as the central point of communication between technical teams, business stakeholders, and external vendors regarding releases, cutover activities, and environment management.
• Provide regular status updates and reports on release readiness, cutover progress, and environment status to project leadership and stakeholders.
• Identify and manage risks and issues related to releases, cutover, and environment management, ensuring timely resolution or escalation as needed.
• Develop and implement mitigation plans to minimize the impact of any delays or disruptions.

What you’ll need to succeed  

• Strong understanding of business processes and how they are supported by ERP systems.
• Experience working with ERP and enterprise systems is mandatory, in design, deployment, Release Management, Cutover and Environment Management and support
• Experience working with SAP is MANDATORY, and ideally with S/4 HANA versions
• Prior demonstrated experience of working with SAP Basis / Transports and Environment Management
• Experience managing large hybrid teams comprised of internal and external resources
• Experience managing external vendors to a budget / target and ensuring close scope management

• Minimum of 8-10 years of experience in technology implementation and management.
• Proven experience as a technical lead or similar role in large-scale transformation programs

Behavioural skills and certification:

• Strong leadership and team management abilities
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills
• Problem-solving and analytical skills
• Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
• Detail-oriented with a strong focus on quality.
• Proactive and self-motivated with a strong sense of ownership.
• Adaptable and able to thrive in a fast-paced, dynamic environment.
• Committed to continuous learning and professional development.

Education and Professional Certification:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Business Administration, or a related field.
• Relevant certifications (e.g., PMP, ITIL, ERP certifications) is a plus

What we can offer you  

With us, you will turn your aspirations into reality.  We will help shape your journey through enriching experiences, learning and development opportunities and exposure to different assignments within your role or through internal mobility. Our Group offers diverse career paths for those who are extraordinary, every day.  

We recognise the value that you bring, and we strive to provide a competitive benefits package which includes health care, child education contribution, remote and flexible working policies as well as exclusive employee discounts.  

We Invite All Applicants to Apply

It Takes Diversity Of Thought, Culture, Background, Differing Abilities and Perspectives to truly Inspire, Exhilarate and Delight our customers. At Chalhoub Group, we are committed to inclusion and diversity.

We welcome all applicants to apply and be part of our exciting future. We ensure equal opportunity for all our applicants without regard to gender, age, race, religion, national origin or disability status.