Lead, Supply Chain Digital Enablement

Job Summary

Provides senior-level technical leadership and hands-on expertise for the digital enablement of Supply Chain, driving adoption and optimization of digital procurement platforms, including Coupa, SAP S/4HANA, and Ariba, across the procure-to-pay (P2P) lifecycle. As an individual contributor, serves as a functional lead, solution owner, and trusted advisor for system administration, process enablement, automation, data governance, analytics, and Agentic AI. Contributes to CenterPoint Energy’s Velocity S/4HANA transformation by helping design, configure, test, and deploy scalable digital solutions that support efficient, compliant, and data-driven buying behavior. Accountable for assigned enablement outcomes, solution performance, process standardization, adoption, and continuous improvement across Supply Chain.

Essential Functions

•    Provides functional leadership, configuration expertise, and continuous-improvement support for digital procurement systems, including Coupa, SAP S/4HANA, and Ariba, to enable efficient and compliant end-to-end P2P processes.
•    Serves as a Supply Chain functional lead and platform subject-matter expert for procurement technologies, supporting solution design, system administration, master data integrity, user access, integrations, and platform governance.
•    Partners with the Velocity S/4HANA transformation program to design, test, and deploy future-state Supply Chain processes using clean-core and fit-to-standard principles, while supporting business readiness and adoption.
•    Identifies, designs, and implements process automation and digitization opportunities that reduce manual effort, strengthen compliance, improve the user experience, and embed preventive or detective controls into buying processes.
•    Leads the evaluation and responsible application of Agentic AI within Supply Chain, including identifying use cases, defining human-in-the-loop controls, establishing guardrails, coordinating pilots, monitoring performance, and supporting scalable deployment.
•    Designs and improves AI-enabled workflows and autonomous or semi-autonomous agents that can support activities such as intake, guided buying, supplier and contract information retrieval, exception triage, analytics, and workflow orchestration, subject to approved governance and security requirements.
•    Partners with IT, Cybersecurity, Legal, Risk, Internal Controls, Data Governance, and business stakeholders to ensure AI and automation solutions comply with enterprise architecture, privacy, data protection, model-risk, records-management, and responsible-AI expectations.
•    Develops Supply Chain analytics, dashboards, KPIs, scorecards, adoption metrics, and process-performance models that support sourcing, spend management, compliance, and operational decision-making.
•    Establishes and maintains procurement data-governance standards to improve data accuracy, consistency, ownership, lineage, quality, and appropriate use across systems, reporting, automation, and AI solutions.

Essential Functions Continued

•    Bridges the gap between future-state P2P design and day-to-day execution by standardizing processes, resolving root causes, reducing rework, and supporting remediation of control or audit observations.
•    Maintains digital enablement policies, procedures, standard work instructions, training materials, knowledge content, Supply Chain intranet content, and supplier-portal content within assigned areas.
•    Partners with IT, Finance, internal stakeholders, and external vendors or contractors to gather requirements, define priorities, manage product backlogs, coordinate releases, conduct testing, and support organizational change management.
•    Ensures digital procurement processes and configurations align with purchasing policies, delegated authorities, internal controls, and SOX requirements.
•    Provides technical guidance, coaching, and knowledge transfer to employees, contractors, process owners, and system users without direct people-management accountability.

Education Description

•    Bachelor’s degree in supply chain, business, information systems, computer science, engineering, data science, or a related discipline required.
•    Advanced degree in a relevant discipline preferred.

Experience

•    6+ years of relevant experience in supply chain, procurement, digital procurement enablement, enterprise systems, process automation, or a related field.
•    Demonstrated hands-on experience administering, configuring, implementing, or supporting digital procurement platforms such as Coupa, SAP S/4HANA, and/or SAP Ariba.
•    Strong knowledge of ERP and P2P system functionality, solution design, integration, testing, release management, adoption, and             operational support.

•    Demonstrated experience with procurement analytics, reporting, data governance, process design, controls, and continuous                     improvement.
•    Experience supporting a large-scale ERP, digital, or operating-model transformation, preferably involving SAP S/4HANA.
•    Practical experience evaluating, designing, piloting, implementing, or governing Agentic AI solutions, AI agents, copilots, or intelligent         workflow automation in an enterprise environment.
•    Experience translating business problems into AI or automation use cases, requirements, process designs, acceptance criteria, control requirements, and measurable outcomes.
•    Experience with prompt design, agent instructions, tools or connectors, retrieval-augmented generation, workflow orchestration, model evaluation, monitoring, and human-in-the-loop exception handling preferred.
•    Experience applying responsible-AI, cybersecurity, privacy, data-governance, and change-management principles to enterprise AI solutions preferred.
•    Supply chain or procurement-specific AI experience strongly preferred.

Preferred Certifications:

•    Coupa and/or SAP certification (S/4HANA or Ariba).
•    Recognized AI, generative AI, machine learning, data, automation, cloud, or responsible-AI certification.
•    Project Management Professional (PMP), Agile, Scrum, or product-management certification.
•    Certified Professional in Supply Management (CPSM) and/or APICS CPIM/CSCP certification.
•    Lean Six Sigma or business-process-management certification.

Required Skills & Competencies

Preferred Certifications