Senior Solution Architect - D365 Business Central
Full Time Permanent Role
Citywest office, Dublin Ireland /Stockley Park office, London, England
The Role
Uniphar are embarking on an ambitious, multi-year transformation program and are seeking a Senior Solution Architect to own the architecture of Dynamics 365 Business Central, the ERP platform underpinning our Medtech division. Business Central is live and running the division's core finance, supply chain and distribution operations; this senior role holds accountability for the end-to-end technical design of the platform as it scales to support growth, new entities and acquisitions across multiple geographies. The ideal candidate combines deep, hands-on Business Central and AL extension expertise with the architectural judgement to design for resiliency, performance, integration and security in a regulated, medical device environment. This is a role for someone who is equally comfortable holding an implementation partner to account on a solution design, sitting with the business to uncover the next opportunity, and getting into the detail to make a change themselves. Working within an Agile, product-based delivery model, the Architect will set the technical direction, own the key design decisions, drive down technical debt, and lead a high-performing development team - ensuring we build the right things, in the right way.
Key Responsibilities:
ERP Solution Architecture (Ownership)
- Own the end-to-end architecture of Dynamics 365 Business Central as the ERP platform for Uniphar's Medtech division, from target state through to delivered design.
- Define and maintain the target architecture, design principles and standards that govern how Business Central is configured, extended and integrated.
- Act as the design authority for the ERP platform, making the key design decisions and reviewing and approving solution designs to ensure architectural integrity.
- Own the technical debt agenda, moving the platform away from customisation-heavy patterns towards supportable, upgrade-safe design.
- Balance business need, cost, time-to-value and long-term maintainability in every architectural decision.
- Operate comfortably at both altitudes: setting enterprise-level direction one day and getting into the detail of a posting routine, page extension or permission set the next.
Vendor & Partner Design Assurance
- Review, robustly challenge and approve solution designs produced by implementation partners, ISVs and third-party developers, rather than accepting them at face value.
- Hold vendors to account on design quality, cost, effort estimates and supportability, ensuring proposed solutions are proportionate, upgrade-safe and genuinely fit for Uniphar's needs.
- Ensure partner-delivered work meets Uniphar architecture, security, ALM and coding standards before it is accepted into the estate.
- Build open, constructive relationships with partners while retaining design authority and architectural ownership in-house.
Business Partnering & Opportunity Identification
- Get close to how the business actually operates, spending time with finance, supply chain, warehouse and commercial teams to understand their processes and pain points.
- Proactively uncover opportunities where Business Central and the wider Microsoft stack can remove manual effort, reduce cost, improve control or unlock new capability.
- Translate those opportunities into practical, well-sized proposals with a clear articulation of the value, effort and risk involved.
- Challenge stated requirements to get to the underlying business need, and steer the business away from solutions that create long-term cost or complexity.
Core ERP Process Architecture
- Own the solution design across the core ERP process areas: finance, purchasing, inventory and warehouse management, distribution and order-to-cash.
- Ensure the design supports medical device distribution, including lot and serial traceability, expiry control, UDI and consignment / field inventory models.
- Work with process owners to standardise ways of working across legal entities and geographies, minimising divergence and one-off design.
- Design for master data integrity across items, customers, suppliers and the chart of accounts, and define how master data is governed across the estate.
Designing for Resiliency & Non-Functional Requirements
- Design for resiliency, scalability, performance, availability and disaster recovery, ensuring non-functional requirements are captured and baked into every design.
- Ensure the platform performs at scale under high transaction volumes across order capture, picking, invoicing and period-end processing.
- Embed security, data protection and governance by design, implementing appropriate access controls, segregation of duties and governance policies across the platform.
- Conduct architectural assessments of the existing solution and proactively drive improvements to performance, reliability and efficiency.
- Own the approach to Microsoft's continuous release cycle, keeping the platform current and upgrade-ready with minimal disruption to the business.
Integration Architecture
- Design robust, secure and scalable integrations between Business Central and the wider enterprise estate (e.g. Dynamics 365 CE, Azure, SAP, EDI, 3PL / warehouse systems, Microsoft 365 and third-party SaaS).
- Select the right integration patterns and technologies (e.g. Azure Integration Services, Logic Apps, APIs, Dataverse) for each scenario.
- Ensure integrations are resilient, observable and maintainable, with clear contracts, idempotency and robust error handling.
- Define how transactional and master data flows to the group data platform to support reporting and analytics.
Quality, Compliance & Validation
- Ensure the architecture supports the regulatory obligations of a medical device business, including data integrity, audit trail, traceability and data retention.
- Design changes so they can be validated efficiently, working with Quality to ensure documentation, testing and change control meet GxP and medical device requirements.
- Ensure the platform meets financial control requirements, including segregation of duties and full auditability of financial transactions.
Stakeholder Management
- Engage senior stakeholders across the Medtech division and group functions (finance, supply chain, quality and technology) to understand needs and priorities and ensure the ERP architecture aligns to strategic outcomes.
- Communicate architecture, options and trade-offs clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Evangelise the art of the possible with Business Central and the Power Platform.
Key Skills, Experiences & Competencies
- Deep, demonstrable experience architecting Dynamics 365 Business Central (or Dynamics NAV, with the upgrade path to Business Central) solutions at enterprise scale, ideally multi-entity and multi-country.
- Strong functional grounding across the core ERP process areas: finance, purchasing, inventory and warehouse management, distribution and order-to-cash.
- Comfortable working at every altitude, from enterprise architecture and design authority through to making straightforward configuration and code changes personally.
- Hands-on AL extension development background (extensions, events / interfaces, custom APIs), underpinning credible, hands-on design leadership.
- Sound judgement on when to configure, when to extend and when to buy, with a track record of keeping the core clean and upgrade-safe.
- Strong knowledge of the Power Platform (Power Apps, Power Automate, Dataverse) and sound judgement on where to apply low-code versus coded solutions.
- Proven experience designing for resiliency, scalability, performance and disaster recovery (non-functional requirements), including high-volume transactional workloads.
- Strong integration architecture experience across Azure (e.g. Logic Apps, Azure Integration Services, APIs); experience with EDI, 3PL / warehouse and SAP integration an advantage.
- Experience with ALM / CI-CD and source control for Business Central (e.g. Azure DevOps, Git for Enterprise); manual deployment to test and production environments is not permitted.
- In-depth understanding of security best practices, access controls, segregation of duties and governance for cloud and ERP environments.
- Experience working in an Agile, product-based delivery environment, supporting a Product Owner and roadmap.
- Proven experience managing, mentoring and leading developers and setting the technical quality bar for a high-performing team.
- Ability to design innovative, re-usable solutions and components.
- Proven ability to analyse complex technical issues and provide effective solutions.
- Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, able to influence, challenge and build trust at all levels, internally and with third parties.
- Experience in a regulated / GxP environment, ideally medical device or pharmaceutical distribution, including validation and change control.
Uniphar Background
Uniphar Group is a rapidly expanding diversified healthcare services business with a global footprint and a proud heritage in Ireland. Since Uniphar became a publicly listed company in 2019, the Group has grown organically and through a series of strategic acquisitions, which continue to strengthen Uniphar’s international reach. With a workforce of more than 3,000 spread across Ireland, United Kingdom, Mainland Europe, MENA and the USA, Uniphar is a trusted global partner to pharma and medtech manufacturers, working to improve patient access to medicines and treatments around the world.
Uniphar provides outsourced and specialised services to its clients, leveraging the strong relationships with 200+ of the world’s best known pharmaco-medical manufacturers across multiple geographies, enabled by our cutting-edge digital technology and our expert teams. Uniphar is organised into three key divisions: Uniphar Supply Chain & Retail, Uniphar Medtech and Uniphar Pharma
Please note that Uniphar is an equal-opportunity employer; we do not discriminate and welcome all responses.
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