SAP S/4HANA Experts in Cologne

Project: Introduction of statutory-compliant electronic invoicing (outbound, Germany) in SAP for an international technology group.

• Project management: Planning, steering and reporting of the E-Invoicing outbound rollout across all affected business areas, including budget and resource coordination.
• UAT: Structured user acceptance test with key users per business area, test cases per invoice scenario, and consolidated test results for decision making.
• Defect management: Handover and tracking of defects in Jira, including validation of the generated invoices against the statutory schemas.
• Cutover, go-live and hypercare: Readiness checks and cutover planning aligned with the statutory deadlines, coordination of go-live and stabilization during hypercare.
• Stakeholder management and reporting: Alignment with Finance, Tax, business departments and IT, preparation of status reports and decision papers, and consistent follow-up of open items.
• Change management and documentation: Communicated process changes to the business departments, enabled key users, and created process and compliance documentation to ensure traceability and audit readiness.

• Project plan creation and monitoring
• Coordination of necessary activities
• Regular status meetings
• Personnel planning for cutover
• Completion and handover of all trades to the end customer with documentation

Responsible for the IT operations of a medium-sized mechanical engineering company (approximately 2 000 employees, annual revenue of approximately 400 million euros worldwide). Direct responsibility for 13 employees. At the same time, project manager for an internal carve-out (commercial and technical separation of the two business units worldwide).

Industry: Mechanical and plant engineering

Function: Director IT

• Responsibility for outsourced IT operations; provider management and service management.
• Responsibility for the complete separation of the two business units (applications, SAP R//3, Active Directory, IT infrastructure, ...); project planning and management; selection and management of service providers.
• TiSAX certification for one business unit; budget planning 2025 ff.
• Establishment and structuring of application operations, including the definition of operating models, SLAs/KPIs, and provider management in the SAP environment.
• Preparation of the operating organization for application operations of S/4 Hana (private cloud).

With project PRIZMA, DB will modernize its infrastructure on the one hand, and develop a fail-safe IT landscape on the other hand, which can be restored quickly and securely in case of a disaster.

• Capture current architectures of existing systems as well as methodical consulting and development of target architectures
• Deepen and maintain the building plan / target IT landscape
• Implement technical architecture concepts & architecture descriptions
• Implement migration concepts for updating and further developing the platform and information systems
• Assess submitted improvement suggestions as part of the project
• Capability management: identify capability gaps, develop target visions, and support transformation planning within the enterprise architecture.
• Create a compatibility matrix of the components in use and compare dependencies of specific versions
• Create an IT concept for extending the platform with the following topics: hardware and software requirements, security, licensing, high availability, load balancing, backup & recovery, update strategy, monitoring integration, etc.
• Coordinate with business architects as well as technical architects from the cross-functional architecture area of the PRISMA program for the topics (backup, Active Directory, monitoring, Citrix, and business applications ...)
• Status meetings and alignment of project planning with the Release Train Engineer / Project Manager
• Advise the Release Train Engineer / Project Manager in identifying project risks
• Advise the System Architect Engineers in steering the implementation of the concept
• Implement the IT concept
• Document the infrastructure

Label: MS Project, LINUX, Windows, ORACLE, Java, REST, SharePoint, Microsoft Exchange, UML, Enterprise Architect, BPMN, AZURE, AWS, V-MODEL, Micro Service, VisualStudio, SAP S/4HANA, SCRUM(SAFE), ESB (TIBCO), Python, Innovator, LeanIX (TOGAF), Ansible, Ansible Tower, Ansible Automation, ROBOT, SpringBoot

• Planning and implementation of a migration strategy for master and transaction data for the continuous loading of a cloud-independent database
• Creation and pilot implementation of a company-wide Business Data Model for customers, suppliers, contracts, products, prices, consumption, invoices, and dunning
• Concept and consulting for a Data Governance Framework incl. definition of committees, roles, processes, and metadata model
• Operationalization of the Data Governance Framework with definition of data standards
• Sub-project management in two pilot projects (PoCs) for Data Governance systems (ErwinDIS and Atlan)
• Training and coaching the data team in migration, data quality, and data modeling

• Supporting the DevOps team in Terraform-managed, multi-region AWS infrastructure to achieve environment parity.
• Developed end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using AWS CodePipeline, CodeBuild, and CodeDeploy, automating the build and deployment.
• Maintained pre- and post-deployment scripts to automate critical tasks such as database schema migrations and environment sanity checks.
• Implemented CI/CD flow specifically for hotfixes via separate Git branches, managing back-merge activities from feature branches to release branches to ensure code integrity through automated conflict resolution.
• Deployed a dedicated, lightweight sanity check application hosted cost-effectively on Azure Container Apps to run automated health and basic functional checks as a post-deployment activity triggered via pipeline.
• Investigated production incidents through code changes and AWS CloudWatch logs.
• Coordinated integration of Dynatrace APM and its APIs for monitoring purposes.
• Full stack QA strategist for a high-traffic e-commerce platform built on a layered architecture for the back-end testing of core platform services, especially the order management system in Zed and Glue layers.
• Managed automation activities, testing process, and refactoring practices.
• Responsible for framework migrations, setup, and training for new automation frameworks.
• Promoted a shift-left approach within the QA team and created the test concept.
• Participated in meetings with IT managers, business owners, product owners, and team members.
• Designed and implemented contract testing to validate API schema compatibility between the order management system and the Zed and Glue layers, reducing production-relevant breaking changes by approximately 3%.
• Led the migration to a multi-environment framework that enabled test execution across 4 country configurations from a single codebase.
• Integrated automated unit and functional tests directly into the GitLab CI/CD pipeline, reducing pipeline runtime by 32%.
• Coached and trained 5 QA engineers across Germany and Hungary in test automation, framework architecture, and best practices.
• Architected a layered backend test automation framework separating business logic, API request builders, and the database layer.
• Piloted AI-assisted testing with Playwright Agents, the Playwright MCP Server, and GitHub Copilot for automated test generation, execution, and self-healing Playwright scripts.

• Development of the overall architecture
• Support for the respective workstreams in developing architectures in the areas of infrastructure, data centers, security, and network topology
• Management of the architect pool
• Support for program management in setting up the transformation project based on agile methods
• Consideration of regulatory requirements for IT projects in the federal administration

• SAP ERP/ECC, SAP S/4 Hana
• Analysis and documentation of SAP FI/CO, PSM, PSCD customizing
• Analysis, consulting and documentation of S/4 Hana apps for defining and executing statutory reports
• Clarification of the prerequisites for using S/4 Hana apps to define and execute statutory reports
• Analysis and documentation of customizing for in-house developments
• Consulting on the integration of SAP FI/CO as well as PSM, PSM-FM (Funds Management), Contract Accounts Receivable and Payable (PSCD)
• Consulting and documentation of customizing adjustments in SAP FI/CO, PSM, PSM-FM, PSCD when introducing new company codes and other organizational structures
• Consulting and documentation of necessary process adjustments

• Create the blue prints
• Customizing Asset Management
• Support the EAM data migration
• Create the TSD for developments
• Modules: SAP S/4 HANA Asset Management

• Support in fit-gap analysis for three RM-CA systems focusing on sub-ledger reconciliation, dunning, and collections processes.
• Stakeholder management in international teams (business colleagues, IT colleagues, and external partners).
• Escalation and risk management (PM).
• Cost and budget calculation (PM).
• Support in shaping the strategic direction of the global collections system.
• Resolving technical challenges for the central collections system (multi-company operation).
• High-level design of the central AR system with focus on scalability and process harmonization.

• Led the global HRIS transformation program (16 country units): program setup, PMO, phase planning, status reporting, and steering up to partner/SteerCo level
• Built an HR readiness assessment framework (6 dimensions, weighted scoring) as a decision basis for implementation and AI maturity — mandated by the board as the project outcome
• HR process architecture: analysis of 80+ level-3 processes and 87 ISO process documentations across 13 country clusters; gap analysis and harmonization roadmap
• Designed agentic AI HR processes (hiring, onboarding, probation period management) on SAP S/4HANA Private Cloud and ServiceNow — human-in-the-loop design, process screening for agentic potential, decision paper at partner level
• HRIS market analysis: vendor screening, criteria framework, and evaluation logic for system selection
• HR target operating model: organizational analysis, archetype framework (9 dimensions), governance design for a global HR function
• Self-assessment tools and workshop formats for 16 country HR teams incl. nomination and stakeholder management; SharePoint project hub and communication architecture
• AI-supported consulting delivery: my own Claude-based working model for analysis, document creation, and project management — one consultant delivering program output

• Agile transformation of the entire executive board division for battery development using SAFe.
• Set up 5 Agile Release Trains and an agile portfolio.
• Prepared the shift from a functional to a process-based organization.
• Managed a scope of 400+ people across Germany, Europe and China.
• Applied tailored SAFe methods.
• Stakeholder management as well as consulting, training and coaching of leadership (product management, release train engineers, system architects).
• Built a portfolio with budgets from around €150 million up to over €1 billion.
• Trained junior colleagues at Big4 consulting firms.
• Introduced PI plannings, quality metrics and team training.

• Support for the SAP rollout for sales companies in Germany: creation of training materials, key user training, tests, go-live and hypercare phases, and support activities
• Industry: building components
• Software: SAP ERP 6.0

• CFO of the company
• Consulting in processes and process management
• Consulting in information security ISO 27001
• Consulting Scrum / Agile Management
• Project management for IT projects, especially doctors' practices
• Digitalization projects
• Data protection / data security training