Ram Ranganathan

• Working closely with the SAP Solutioning team in Design, Configuration, Prioritization, System Integration Testing and User Acceptance Testing , and Deployment of system Requirements and change requests and/or providing support.
• Assisting in greenfield and brownfield SAP implementations in SAP APO, SAP MM, SAP P2P and SAP WM) for Manufacturing, Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences and Telcom clients.
• Facilitating the gathering of requirements, designing, and delivery of components involved in implementing demand planning and forecasting solution for a telecom giant to monitor distribution requirements planning (DRP) - Demand Planning, Forecast Allocation, Purchase Planning and Store Replenishments.

• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to identify cost-saving opportunities and ensure alignment of customer's supply chain objectives by commissioning semi-automated processes using SAP solutions that identified inefficiencies in customer's supply chain and provided calculated recommendations to enhance performance
• Developing ERP systems process flows, requirements, designing, prototyping, training & defining SLA's in implementing large-scale digital transformations.
• Responsible for managing and providing technology consulting services for the delivery of the ERP cloud projects to customer(s) that includes defining business strategy, analyzing existing processes, P/L management of project resources, understanding client's business, architectural landscape, interpreting business requirements and enhancing solution adoption.
• Serve as Trusted Solution Advisor & SME within Deloitte's SAP practice by continually supporting deployment activities like demand generation, SOW executions, project planning, data governance, product and solution briefings , proof-of-concept work and enterprise architectural recommendations.
• Frequently engaging with customers in performing business case analysis, solution road mapping to drive sales generation for ensuring target delivery & sustainable YOY revenue growth using industry cloud solutions.
• Continuously collaborating with customer business teams to enhance productivity outputs to meet demand and supply requirements for their suppliers, customers, business stakeholders to deliver on inventory integrity targets.
• Analyzed customer data to identify trends and opportunities to improve the customer's supply chain through ERP solutions.

Key Projects:

Industry: Information technology and consumer electronics (HP)

Service Line: SAP Package Technologies, Role: SME for SAP S4 HANA cloud, MDG Integration, Ariba SCC Integration, Duration: 12 months

A global American technology company that believes one thoughtful idea has the power to change the world. Its product and service portfolio of personal systems, printers, and 3D printing solutions helps bring these ideas to life. The recent merger comes as businesses and their employees are focused on finding better ways to work and collaborate in the hybrid world. Approximately 75% of office workers are investing to improve their home setups.

Project scope: ERP Transformation Program To accelerate company’s overall strategy to create a more growth-oriented portfolio and further strengthen its industry opportunity in hybrid work solutions, the acquisition with poly was positioned to combine the different entities of their merger orgs systems together for long-term sustainable growth and value creation. This project was to integrate the systems on all layers of the operational business processes within these 2 entities (Supply Chain, Software and Services, Procure to Pay, Order Management, Distribution Sales, Returns, Replenishment, Rebalancing, ODM manufacturing and bundling)

• Driving accountability, solution architecture, system integration set-up and business requirements across the different waves of deployment. (Wave 1 through wave3) within SAP S/4 HANA landscape.
• Assisted in establishing a central data governance for handling master data across for all SAP applications (including SAP Ariba, S/4 HANA and Commerce cloud).
• Specifically for Lines of business (LoB) using Ariba applications, worked in integrating Buyer ERP (SAP S/4 HANA) to HP's trading partners in a supply network to share capabilities and supply chain information (to facilitate PO collaboration, Vendor Consignment, SubContract Manufacturing and Supplier Managed Inventor Information). This is for the Integrated list of suppliers base across Poly and HP.
• Hands-on experience in capturing new business requirements, configuration, helping internal team development, addressing production issues as part of sprints, data quality needs and with overall system design and architecture)
• Design and development of business requirements and coordinating with business leads on design specs and development process for Order Management, Procure to Pay Business Processes, Goods Receipts and Invoicing processes.
• Managing FUT, SIT and UAT scripts development, execution and sign-off

Industry: Medical Devices (Abbott)

Service Line: SAP Package Technologies, Role: SME for Ariba SLP & integration with MDG, SAP S4 HANA, Contracts, Sourcing, Compliance, B&I and Ariba SCC roadmap, Duration: 14 months

An American multinational medical devices and healthcare company creating breakthrough products in diagnostics, medical devices, nutrition and branded generic pharmaceuticals helping families and greater community lead healthier lives, full of unlimited possibilities.

Project scope: An enterprise-wide initiative to improve buying across indirect spend through more effective category management, right sizing the supply base, tightening controls on engagement with suppliers and sustaining compliance through technology with a Source to Pay Tool (initially planned for 2 SAP ERP instances with an opportunity to scale in the future)

• Worked closely with the core stakeholder team to capture Ariba business requirements and all other constraints that span across supplier management, internal sourcing, contracting and contract terms process at the enterprise spend management level.
• Acted as a trusted advisor in driving configurational discussions in integrating Ariba SLP with MDG to manage and assist supplier qualification information and transactional PO flow from B&I to SAP S4 HANA.
• Conducted knowledge transfer sessions for all the client’s business users, onsite project manager and key stakeholders about Ariba application’s capabilities and functionalities.
• Implemented the Ariba Contract Management Professional SLP and Sourcing in the client’s dedicated realm. This allowed the Enterprise spend management team to fulfill the contract life cycle management and contract compliance via integration with their existing Ariba P2P downstream solution.
• Collaborated with it solutio architects in defining a solution architecture roadmap for SCC implementation - on how the supplier information would flow from client's SAP ERP to SCC. (Mainly enabling portal user interaction for users to search and identify forecast in Ariba for selected material , Editing forecast, Defining create job and upload function for forecast commit operations ). The customer forecast data search criteria enabled included - Customer / Supplier Part Number, Planner Code, Part Category, Program code, Part status,Min Order Quantity etc)

Industry: Oil and Gas, Service Area: Technology (Marathon Petroleum Corporation) , Service Line: SAP Package Technologies,

Role: SAP S4 Hana Lead / SME , Duration: 12 months

A leading, integrated, downstream energy company in the US. They operate the nation's largest refining system. They also own the general partner and majority limited partner interest, a midstream company that owns and operates gathering, processing, and fractionation assets, as well as crude oil and light product transportation and logistics infrastructure.

Project Scope: Client was embarking on a unification effort to consolidate their internal systems as part of ‘Project Unify’. They were keenly following a progressive-phased approach across all their business verticals (systems spanning the following areas: refining, marketing, midstream and retail). I was the SME for SAP S/4HANA 1909 integrating with Ariba (sourcing, contracts, and PO’s). Led the assessment phase for Ariba catalogs, proposed organization’s ERP strategy and roadmap and assisted the client hands on in successfully accomplishing the business transformation process.

• Conducted Ariba demonstrations to illustrate Ariba OOTB capabilities across the product suite (Source to Contract, Procure to Pay and SCC)
• Conducted Ariba P2P workshops to solicit the Requirements, Functional specifications and related configuration, Defining test cases, and Test scenarios for the overall sprint cycles.
• Assisted in configuring, deploying and managing customer's SAP ERP with experience in Ariba SCC.
• Hands-on assistance in the technical aspects of Process Integration (& Cloud Integration Gateway) and customs field mapping for massive and preferred integrated suppliers. Also, provided SME and testing support for non-integrated suppliers.

• Negotiated and implemented a new supply chain system(s) to reduce turnaround time(s), managing maverick spends and streamlining category spend and purchasing decision across various buying channels for various customer landscapes across different verticals
• Developing, implementing and executing strategic best practices for SAP cloud solutions and techniques for fortune 500 companies spanning broad processes: S2C, OTC & P2P cycles
• Frequently collaborate with internal product management, engineering development team(s), technical support and solution consultants to provide insight into SDLC and Agile components for SAP solutions based on frequent process improvements suggested by SAP’s customer base
• Partnering with Contracting & Sourcing Managers, Legal & Compliance Team, Category & Commodity Managers to successfully establish customer satisfactions program and effectively evaluating the customer’s KPI’s and SLAs to drive measurable performance principles
• Lead and drive discussions and presentations in software development areas: preparing RFx, solution blueprinting, proof of concept (POC) sessions, software prototype demonstrations, business requirements workshops, feasibility assessment, integration testing and troubleshooting efforts in SAP cloud-based solutions
• Participated in team projects, demonstrating an ability to work collaboratively and effectively tracking and reporting PPI's, KPI's , supplier performance to customer's senior management as part of As-Is and Future-state processes.

• Developing overall strategic project plan and create data transformation recommendations for legacy migration projects. Further, assisted the customer and their Integration team in configuring and testing integrations between SAP and other 3rd party in-house solutions
• Actively working with internal and external stakeholders to convert legacy data and assist process owners in testing solutions
• Worked on large and challenging contracts scope; partnered with UHG IT to delivering contracts solution that supports over 50 Contract Managers drafting 6000 contracts per year
• Achieved 80% reduction in time for supplier on-boarding and approving them for sourcing activities by leveraging SAP supplier management modules
• Consolidated UHG’s contracts across organization to reside in one single repository to enable quicker reporting on key contract attributes like consultant name,third party clients,method of payment,contract type, privacy BAA information details etc. This effort reduced contract cycle time to from 32 days to 7 days
• Generated reports and provided analytics on accounts payable to senior management, resulting in improved budget forecasting.

• Led procurement transformation initiatives that connects commercial, technical and functional capabilities to drive optimal customer outcomes and recognize sustainable savings across customer organization
• Also, managed procurement requests and acted as point-person for customers on logistics, hardware and software needs
• Constantly interfaced with e-Commerce and e-Business team to monitor project metrics and assisting client relationship team to perform root cause analysis for strategic business processes in improving their overall efficiency
• Closely worked with e-business team and B2B procurement side of HD Supply in gathering and interpreting business and functional requirements for various customer facing projects in SAP
• Was part of projects that typically spanned creation and maintenance of requisitions, processing sales orders with or without catalogs, approval and rejection of sales orders, desktop receiving and service entry support, status and tracking, invoicing, and developing reporting functionalities
• Identified new and more cost-effective suppliers through participation in industry networking events, purchasing advantageous packages, and cutting costs
• Resolved daily issues by handling invoice discrepancies, replacements for rejected materials and missed and late deliveries while maintaining effective and lasting vendor relationships through dynamic communication, collaboration, and intelligent questioning skills
• Streamlined Bill of Materials (BOMs) for customer product's assemblies that facilitates efficient procurement and manufacturing
• Assisted customer stakeholders in standardizing negotiation contracts with their tiered suppliers and vendors, resulting in a 32% reduction in overall costs across direct and indirect procurement buying channels.

• Managing customer service group to achieve outstanding customer satisfaction through performance on key metrics
• Conducted regular spend analysis and track all commodity cost savings or cost avoidance initiatives and further help in successful contract negotiations and strategies with suppliers
• Develop and lead RFI and RFP processes to drive competitive bidding processes based on specific procurement business requirements.Responsible for managing Inventory of upto $5M,and management of 10000-part numbers Demand Planning and data management
• Prepared regular budget and spend reports for major distribution channels (Costco, Techdata, Ingram Micro, Dell, PC Mall, Synnex & Sony Style) of Sony and coordinated with business planning managers to interpret the demand allocation and order fulfillment data using BI.
• Monitored and published reports using Tableau tied to various Supply Chain Performance KPI's (Weeks of Supply, Distribution Sell through Forecast Accuracy, and Point of Sale reports) to C-level Executives.
• Identified potential risks and opportunities for the software portfolio of contracts worth $9.8Million encompassing 138 software titles and representing 64 vendors
• Devised an engagement process timeline to drive accountability for the usage of software licenses among the various business units across the US region
• Proposed insightful recommendations in effectively consolidating and managing the existing software licenses to the PMO by partnering with functional teams across Supply Chain, Security, Finance, Accounting, Marketing and HR to incorporate them in IT Asset Management program
• Guided the software vendor management team in developing a service-based cost budget program by researching the Statement of Work (SoW) and End User License Agreement (EULA) for various software license contracts to reduce software and maintenance costs by rightsizing contract agreements based on the number of licenses used / seats purchased, license types, expiration dates, software spend and the different types of vendors
• Developed a forecasting model across distribution channels that accurately predicted customer demand with 75% acceptable accuracy.

• Designed analyzed and summarized monthly, quarterly and yearly data from professional financial and modeling and investment research tools to help the Department Head of the Executive MBA program in reporting an organization’s financial performance
• Researched industry trends, company earnings, stocks, income statements and financial ratios (liquidity, asset management, and profitability & market value ratios) specific to the pharmaceutical and utility industries
• Assisted the Department head in making educated predictions about a company’s prospects
• Analyzed and monitored cash flow to identify areas of improvement and reduced liquidity risk
• Evaluated potential acquisitions and investments and provided recommendations to senior finance faculty and professors.

• Developed intelligence-sharing dashboards, providing company-wide access to collected data and Optimized BI reporting capabilities for secure server environment
• Created data analysis tools to allow teams to query acquired information for unique details
• Methodical in producing ETL design guidelines ensuring an efficient ETL infrastructure for BI. Also, extensively involved in Unit Testing and System Testing of ETL processes
• Involved in creating maintenance tasks and schedules using both the SQL server agent & SSIS
• Facilitated in developing necessary reports and helped in designing, coding and testing the Business Intelligence module connecting the buyers and suppliers on-line using Power BI
• Experienced in Data modeling, Multi-dimensional Modeling and involved in creation of Star Schema dimensional schema using Erwin Tool
• Demonstrated proficiency in sorting the data, defining subtotals for reports and designing report layout and worked with a Share Point Server as the deployment and browsing solutions
• Managed package configurations in XML files to efficiently promote unit tested packages to live environment from development environment.

• Partnered with the UK and Canadian counterparts in defining business & functional requirements including data flows and standard procedures for implementing the various processes and maintenance related enhancements spanning the SDLC
• Liaised with customer and client management teams during risk engineering and high-level review sessions to derive and execute action plans, meeting deadlines and adhering to compliance standards.