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.
CenterPoint Energy
1111 Louisiana St
Houston
Texas United States
www.centerpointenergy.com
