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Job Description
Function
Information Technology/Enterprise Business Systems/Ariba
Position Overview
The Business Systems Analyst (BSA) is responsible for supporting, enhancing, and optimizing enterprise applications and business processes within an assigned functional domain. The BSA serves as a trusted partner to business stakeholders, providing functional expertise, solution analysis, process improvement recommendations, and day-to-day operational support to ensure enterprise systems effectively enable business objectives.
The BSA works closely with business users, the Manager Enterprise Systems, Digital Business Partners, technical teams, and third-party service providers to deliver stable, efficient, and scalable technology solutions. This role is responsible for analyzing business requirements, identifying process improvement opportunities, coordinating solution delivery, supporting system enhancements, and ensuring the successful adoption of new capabilities.
In addition to operational support responsibilities, the BSA contributes to continuous improvement initiatives by identifying opportunities to leverage automation, analytics, AI-enabled capabilities, and process standardization to improve efficiency, effectiveness, and user experience.
Domain Responsibility Summary
The Senior Business Systems Analyst, SAP Ariba and Business Network, serves as a senior functional subject matter expert for Albemarle’s Source-to-Pay technology landscape. The role supports SAP Ariba Sourcing, Ariba Contracts, Contract Line Items, Ariba Buying and Invoicing, SAP Business Network, supplier enablement, and the integrations between SAP Ariba and SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA.
This role partners with Procurement, Accounts Payable, Legal, Finance, Supply Chain, Master Data, Compliance, and IT teams to translate business needs into sustainable system and process solutions. The analyst is responsible for requirements definition, process design, functional solution design, testing, deployment, production support, integration monitoring, issue resolution, system governance, and continuous improvement.
Key Responsibilities
SAP Ariba Sourcing
- Serve as a functional subject matter expert for SAP Ariba Sourcing.
- Support RFI, RFP, RFQ, competitive bidding, and auction processes.
- Design and maintain sourcing project templates, event templates, questionnaires, content documents, scoring models, approval flows, and team-member rules.
- Support supplier invitation, registration, participation, bid submission, evaluation, and award processes.
- Partner with category managers and strategic sourcing teams to improve event standardization, adoption, efficiency, and governance.
- Support event monitoring, issue resolution, reporting, and user assistance.
- Advise users on sourcing event structures, bid rules, pricing terms, alternative bids, lots, line items, and award scenarios.
- Support the transition of sourcing awards into contracts, catalogs, purchasing processes, or other downstream activities.
- Identify opportunities to increase spend visibility, competitive sourcing coverage, and compliance with sourcing policies.
SAP Ariba Contracts
- Serve as a functional subject matter expert for SAP Ariba Contracts and contract workspace management.
- Support contract request, authoring, negotiation, review, approval, execution, amendment, renewal, expiration, and closeout processes.
- Design and maintain contract workspace templates, document templates, clause libraries, tasks, phases, approval workflows, team-member rules, and notification requirements.
- Partner with Procurement, Legal, Compliance, Finance, and business stakeholders to define contract process and information requirements.
- Support contract hierarchy, parent-child relationships, amendments, renewals, milestones, obligations, and expiration management.
- Support contract document integration and electronic signature processes where applicable.
- Maintain appropriate contract metadata, access controls, retention requirements, and reporting structures.
- Improve linkage between sourcing events, contract workspaces, contract line items, catalogs, requisitions, purchase orders, and invoices.
- Support reporting related to contract status, renewals, expiration, compliance, and spend under contract.
- Support migration of contract data and documents from legacy repositories or other systems into SAP Ariba.
- Establish and maintain contract data-quality and governance standards.
- Promote SAP Ariba as the governed system of record for applicable procurement contract information.
SAP Ariba Contract Line Items
- Serve as a functional subject matter expert for SAP Ariba Contract Line Item functionality and contract compliance processes.
- Define and maintain appropriate contract line-item structures, material and service information, supplier data, pricing, quantities, units of measure, validity periods, terms, tolerances, accounting attributes, and other relevant fields.
- Partner with Procurement and category managers to structure contract line items for downstream purchasing, catalog enablement, compliance, and reporting.
- Support creation, loading, validation, publication, amendment, renewal, and expiration of contract line items.
- Support mass updates, pricing changes, contract amendments, and renewal activities.
- Define validation rules and governance controls that improve contract data completeness and accuracy.
- Support relationships among contract workspaces, contract line items, catalogs, requisitions, purchase orders, receipts, and invoices.
- Troubleshoot situations in which eligible requisitions or purchase orders fail to reference the correct contract.
- Analyze contract consumption and utilization, including off-contract purchasing and pricing discrepancies.
- Support integration of contract line-item information with SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA purchasing processes.
- Support migration of line-level contract information from spreadsheets, SharePoint, legacy repositories, or other applications into SAP Ariba.
- Develop reconciliation and validation procedures for contract data exchanged between SAP Ariba and downstream systems.
- Identify improvements that increase contract compliance, spend visibility, pricing accuracy, and procurement control.
SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing
- Serve as a functional subject matter expert for SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing.
- Support requisitioning, approval, ordering, receipt, service entry, invoicing, reconciliation, and exception-management processes.
- Support guided buying, forms, policies, landing pages, commodity structures, purchasing channels, and user experience improvements.
- Design and maintain approval workflows, business rules, purchasing controls, tolerances, and exception-handling requirements.
- Support material, service, catalog, non-catalog, limit-order, and other applicable purchasing scenarios.
- Partner with Procurement and Accounts Payable to improve touchless processing, invoice automation, policy compliance, and cycle time.
- Support invoice matching, reconciliation, tax-related requirements, account assignment, exception handling, credit memos, and invoice approvals.
- Troubleshoot functional issues affecting requisitions, purchase orders, receipts, service entry sheets, and invoices.
- Support catalog enablement, including hosted catalogs, punchout catalogs, catalog validation, catalog approvals, and catalog-content governance.
- Analyze user adoption, purchasing compliance, invoice exceptions, transaction failures, and other operational performance indicators.
- Identify opportunities to reduce manual processing and simplify the buying and invoicing experience.
SAP Business Network and Supplier Enablement
- Serve as a functional subject matter expert for SAP Business Network processes.
- Support supplier registration, onboarding, qualification, enablement, connectivity, and transaction adoption.
- Partner with Procurement, Accounts Payable, suppliers, and implementation teams to define supplier enablement strategies.
- Support purchase orders, order confirmations, change orders, ship notices, service entry sheets, invoices, credit memos, status updates, payment-related documents, and other enabled transactions.
- Assist suppliers with transaction requirements, document-routing methods, account relationships, and connection issues.
- Support trading-relationship requests and supplier-account administration processes.
- Coordinate supplier testing, transaction validation, cutover, and post-go-live support.
- Segment supplier enablement approaches based on transaction volume, operational needs, supplier capabilities, and business value.
- Monitor supplier adoption and identify suppliers that continue to submit transactions through non-preferred channels.
- Develop supplier-facing support materials, testing scripts, onboarding procedures, and issue-resolution guidance.
- Work across internal teams and suppliers to resolve document rejection, routing, data, and transaction issues.
Cloud Integration Gateway Monitoring and Failure Handling
- Support Cloud Integration Gateway, or CIG, integrations among SAP Ariba applications, SAP Business Network, SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA, and associated integration components.
- Monitor inbound and outbound transactions for failures, processing delays, mapping issues, data-quality problems, and incomplete business processing.
- Review transaction status and error information across SAP Ariba, SAP Business Network, CIG, middleware, and SAP applications.
- Analyze failed or delayed transactions such as:
- Contract-related transactions
- Determine whether failures originate from business data, master data, configuration, mappings, supplier submissions, connectivity, middleware, or SAP processing.
- Coordinate issue resolution with Procurement, Accounts Payable, Master Data, suppliers, SAP functional teams, integration teams, BASIS, managed service providers, and SAP support.
- Correct eligible business or configuration issues and coordinate transaction reprocessing in accordance with support controls.
- Validate that reprocessed transactions complete successfully in both the sending and receiving systems.
- Perform root-cause analysis for recurring failures and recommend permanent corrective actions.
- Distinguish individual transaction failures from broader integration incidents and escalate based on business impact and operational risk.
- Maintain incident documentation, known-error records, troubleshooting procedures, support runbooks, and escalation paths.
- Establish monitoring expectations, ownership, response priorities, and operational support procedures.
- Develop metrics and dashboards for transaction failures, aging, recurrence, resolution time, affected suppliers, and business impact.
- Identify opportunities to automate monitoring, notification, triage, and recovery while preserving appropriate controls.
- Support CIG and integration regression testing during SAP Ariba releases, SAP upgrades, configuration changes, mapping changes, and enhancement deployments.
- Validate interface mappings and functional outcomes when new fields, document types, suppliers, company codes, plants, purchasing organizations, or business scenarios are introduced.
Business Partnership & Requirements Management
- Develop a strong understanding of assigned business processes, objectives, and operational challenges.
- Serve as a primary point of contact for business users within supported functional areas.
- Gather, document, and analyze business requirements for enhancements, projects, and continuous improvement initiatives.
- Facilitate requirements workshops, process reviews, and solution discussions.
- Translate business requirements into functional specifications and solution requirements.
- Support the evaluation and recommendation of technology solutions that address business needs.
Application Support & Operational Excellence
- Provide functional support for enterprise applications within the assigned domain.
- Investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve application, process, and data-related issues.
- Coordinate issue resolution with technical teams, AMS providers, and vendors.
- Support incident, problem, and service request management processes.
- Monitor application performance and identify recurring issues and improvement opportunities.
- Ensure business continuity through effective support and knowledge management practices.
Process Improvement & Solution Delivery
- Analyze business processes and identify opportunities for simplification, standardization, and optimization.
- Support implementation of approved enhancements and system changes.
- Participate in project activities, including fit-gap analysis, solution design, configuration reviews, testing, deployment, and hypercare support.
- Identify opportunities to improve user experience and operational efficiency.
- Support adoption of automation, workflow, analytics, and AI-enabled solutions.
Testing & Quality Assurance
- Develop and execute test plans and test scripts.
- Coordinate user acceptance testing activities.
- Validate solution quality and ensure requirements are fully addressed.
- Support regression testing for application releases and upgrades.
- Assist with defect management and issue resolution.
Data, Reporting & Analytics
- Support data quality initiatives and process governance activities.
- Assist in development and enhancement of reporting and analytics capabilities.
- Identify opportunities to improve business insight through data utilization.
- Ensure consistency and integrity of process-related data within supported applications.
Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
- Partner closely with business stakeholders to understand evolving business needs.
- Collaborate with Manager Enterprise Systems to prioritize work and support operational objectives.
- Support Digital Business Partners in evaluating business capabilities and improvement opportunities.
- Work effectively with project teams, technical resources, AMS providers, and vendors.
- Participate in governance, planning, and continuous improvement activities.
Qualifications
Required
- Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Business Administration, Engineering, Supply Chain, Finance, Human Resources, or a related discipline.
- Eight or more years of experience in procurement technology, Source-to-Pay, Procure-to-Pay, SAP, enterprise applications, or business systems analysis.
- Five or more years of hands-on functional experience with SAP Ariba.
- Experience with SAP Ariba Sourcing, Contracts, Buying and Invoicing, and SAP Business Network.
- Experience supporting integrations between SAP Ariba and SAP ERP or SAP S/4HANA.
- Experience supporting production transaction monitoring, failure analysis, issue resolution, and reprocessing coordination.
- Participated in at least three full-cycle SAP Ariba implementations or major deployments.
- Served in a lead or senior functional role for at least two SAP Ariba go-lives.
- Completed go-live delivery experience covering multiple capabilities from the following:
- Experience supporting the complete delivery lifecycle, including design, configuration validation, testing, data preparation, cutover, go-live, hypercare, and transition to production support.
- Experience supporting a live SAP Ariba environment after implementation.
- Experience gathering and documenting business requirements.
- Experience supporting system enhancements, projects, or technology implementations.
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills.
- Ability to work effectively with cross-functional teams and stakeholders.
Benefits of Joining Albemarle
We are partners to one another in pioneering new ways to be better for ourselves, our teams, and our communities. When you join Albemarle, you become our most essential element and you can anticipate competitive compensation, a comprehensive benefits package, and resources that foster your well-being and fuel your personal growth. Help us shape the future, build with purpose and grow together.