Manager - IT Business Partnering

Job Description

The IT Business Partner acts as the link between the assigned business unit and the IT Centers of Excellence (COEs), representing the voice of the business within IT. The role is responsible for understanding business needs, translating them into COE demand, and ensuring COE delivery creates measurable value aligned with the strategic objectives of the Al Ghurair Foods and Resources businesses.

Al Ghurair Foods is a strategic business within Al Ghurair Investment Group. The Group’s big hairy audacious goal is - to be a Top Ten Great Place to Work in the UAE, to generate 50% profitability from new businesses by 2033, and to be a Top Five diversified business group in the region. These goals are supported by Al Ghurair Foods’ growth priorities for 2028 and beyond: to be a Foods value chain player with leadership in grains. Together, these ambitions are expected to make Al Ghurair Foods two times bigger by 2028 and three times bigger by 2033. That value chain runs from origination and commodity trading, through ocean freight, chartering and vessel operations, into crushing, refining and milling, and out through processing, distribution and route-to-market - which means the technology estate must serve the trading desk, the chartering room, the plant and the finance and risk functions with equal credibility.

This is a mid-management level role. The incumbent is responsible for executing and delivering the strategic digitisation, automation and AI roadmap that makes that growth trajectory achievable - building a technology platform capable of absorbing two to three times the volume, complexity, geographies and product portfolio without a proportional increase in cost, headcount or risk. Scale is the design constraint, not an afterthought.

Specifically, this role is the technology anchor for the Group’s strategic transformation through process standardisation, automation and technology enablement. The incumbent is expected to convert each of these ambitions into an executable technology roadmap, sequence it against business readiness, and hold business and IT jointly responsible for benefit realisation.

Deep, hands-on knowledge of commodity trading, shipping and food manufacturing - together with the finance and risk processes that sit beneath them - is critical to this role: physical and paper trading in grains and oilseeds; the 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; poultry farming, cage-free, hatching, rendering and meat processing operations; and the distribution supply chain. Equally critical is fluency in the supporting technology estate - CTRM/ETRM platforms (Aspect CTRM or equivalent), maritime and chartering systems (Veson IMOS or equivalent), freight-market intelligence and cargo/tonnage sourcing tools (for example Shipfix), ERP finance, and 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.

This role is responsible for delivering the Right Work (business requirements perspective), at the Right Time, with the Right Outcome (value and ROI realisation); for the overall Business IT budget; and for managing stakeholder relationships, timely communication, demand prioritisation, co-creation, collaboration and innovation - ensuring services are delivered that exceed business expectations and add value to the business.

Responsibilities

• Analyzing business operations and solutions to improve efficiency
• Act as the day-to-day IT counterpart to the trading, trade execution, chartering, shipping operations, crushing and finance desks - ensuring deal capture, position, voyage, settlement and invoicing processes run without interruption, and that month-end, mark-to-market and position reporting cycles are supported to deadlineOwn the integrity of interfaces between the CTRM, maritime/chartering, plant and ERP finance systems - monitoring reconciliation breaks, exception queues and failed postings, and driving root-cause resolution with the COEs and platform principals
• Drive solution assessments and drive evaluation across both business and IT teams – This includes creation and management of RFP processes
• Drive the overall BU-specific solution architecture also taking into consideration any group applications and the broader solution ecosystem
• Monitoring the roll-out of new software applications to ensure adequate business controls and limited or no issues
• Manage incident resolution and associated SLA metrics, in line with what is defined with the business
• Creating and overseeing protocols and procedures for the use of any new software applications
• Driving operational efficiencies and service improvement initiatives across internal teams and service partners
• Advise the Senior Leadership Team on emerging Applications technologies as appropriate. Manage and drive PoC’s as appropriate Drive adoption of solutions with the broader user community. Measure and own adoption plan for solutions that have already gone live
• Manage prioritization and report progress to the business executive and IT management teams
• Participate in the design of Applications solutions working alongside specialist teams to ensure that initial and anticipated future business requirements are represented.
• To be the main point of reference for day-to-day eventualities and to manage the response system to deal with Applications queries and problems to limit user frustration by ensuring that queries are dealt with promptly
• Ensure compliance with IT policies, standards and strengthen internal controls