Commercial Applications Architect at Coca-Cola Beverages South Africa

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) presents an exciting opportunity for an experienced Commercial Applications Architect, to join the Digital Platforms team in the Information Technology department in CCBA. This is a senior position in the business, and they play an important role in ensuring that their assigned business function is optimally enabled and productive using best-in-class software applications and solutions.

The successful applicant will be reporting into the Digital Solution Manager: Commercial.

Incumbents in this position should preferably be based in South Africa, but the service they provide will cover the CCBA enterprise in its broadest definition including all locations in Africa.

Coca-Cola Beverages Africa (CCBA) is the largest African Coca-Cola bottler, accounting for 40% of all Coca-Cola volumes on the continent. CCBA has an extensive footprint in Africa, employing over 17 000 employees, serving a combined population of over 300 million people across the continent.

The CCBA vision is to refresh Africa every day and make the continent a better place for all, growing successfully as a business and creating a better-shared future for our people, customers, consumers, communities, planet and shareholders. We conduct ourselves with the utmost integrity for shared value and the greater good. We are a world class, customer-orientated, socially and environmentally conscious fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) company that is driven by engaged, motivated and inspired employees.

The Commercial Applications Architect is responsible for planning and designing the applications landscape for a specific Commercial business function in CCBA by determining how the applications used will work together to achieve the goals of the function. They ensure that the suite of applications in use in the business function will be reliable, efficient, and scalable as the company and its network grow.

Their objective is to continuously achieve more benefits for the function and the CCBA organisation from the use of an integrated applications environment. They achieve this aim by assessing the Commercial use of software and its business needs, and then they devise a blueprint that contains information about which applications to use, who will use them and how, and the way these various applications will interact throughout the function and the organisation.

They are the foremost experts on the field of applications for their assigned functional area and they act as internal consultants and advisors to business and IT colleagues on matters pertaining to the selection and use of applications.

They work closely with other IT architects to ensure that the application architecture aligns closely with the data needs and technical (infrastructure) environments to ensure an integrated and functional Information Technology environment for CCBA.

Key Duties & Responsibilities

• Continuously improving their knowledge through tracking and understanding emerging software technologies, development practices and management tools and standards; participating in educational opportunities; reading professional publications; maintaining personal networks; participating in professional communities of practice.
• Taking on the role of internal consultant in application architecture for their assigned function and advising IT colleagues and business leaders on matters relating to the holistic management, designing, selection or development and implantation of software solutions.
• Acting as coach and mentor to Digital Analysts in the organisation and IT colleagues on software solutions, trends and approaches.
• Providing inputs and participating in the annual process of analysing business needs, planning, and compiling a strategy to move the agenda of establishing a digital platform consisting of integrated and reusable components forward.
• Representing their assigned business functions on application architecture forums for CCBA locally and for Coca Cola globally and for the beverage bottling industry.
• Reviewing and understanding the current functional strategy and how it is reflected in the IT strategy.
• Defining the current and future functional application requirements that the application architecture must address.
• Identifying and documenting the current group of applications, data sets utilised and integrations with other systems used to automate functional business processes and activities.
• Creating and recording a visual blueprint of the reference functional application architecture and making it available to relevant stakeholders.
• Determining and mapping the best state future functional application architecture to identify gaps that need to be addressed through software solutions.

• Developing a deep and thorough understanding of the different business processes, policies, and work activities in the function.
• Analysing and identifying business function automation requirements for the present and into the future by collaborating with business process owners.
• Briefing Digital Analysts and guiding and coaching them through the process of requirements identification and specification.
• Researching, sourcing, or designing software solutions that will address the business requirements.
• Proposing software solutions and contributing to technical specifications for functional software solutions.
• Prioritising functional application solutions for deployment, preparing the business cases and other supporting material and logging the priorities in the demand management process.
• Researching solutions, obtaining quotes and preparing cost estimates.
• Making recommendations for investment decisions where new software solutions and software capabilities are required.
• Planning for required integrations and collaborating with the Enterprise and Integration Architect to design integration strategies and solutions.
• If required, participating in the development or configuration of new application solutions by acting as advisor.
• Contributing to testing efforts in an advisory capacity.
• Compiling and maintaining all relevant technical documentation.
• Developing a precise understanding of relevant laws and acts that may have an impact on the business processes of the functional area.
• Contributing to and enforcing a governance framework for application architectures including standards, policies, procedures, and rules.
• Contributing to the process of drafting and sharing of application development and deployment processes, policies, and guidelines.
• Complying with laws, regulations, and governance directives.
• Contributing to the process and the standards for the selection of services software providers and vendors that deliver core applications solution services and products.
• Contributing to the RFP process for selecting service providers and vendors by forming part of an evaluation team and partnering with the Procurement department.
• Contributing to the requirements specification for the RFP, participating in evaluating and shortlisting service providers and managing the final negotiations and contracting.
• Contributing to the establishment and monitoring of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and penalties.
• Ensuring the management of the service provider and vendor.
• Maintaining a good relationship with key service providers through regular meetings and information update sessions.
• Preparing regular reports and analytics and identifying trends and developing insights from the analytics.
• Assuring quality, security and compliance requirement are met.
• Participating in the Architectural Review Board (ARB), Technical Design Authority (TDA) and Technical Review Board (TRB) meetings and forums.

Skills, Experience & Education

Qualifications:

The minimum qualification required for this position is a first degree in Computer Science or Information Systems, but a further degree would be an advantage.

Certifications:

• ERP-specific certifications such as SAP, Microsoft CE, Microsoft D365FO
• Relevant 3rd party application certification/s

Experience:

• 5 - 10 years’ experience in an Information Technology environment with at least
• 3 years focused on work in the IT Application development and configuration domains.