Business Application Specialist

Ensure that the systems supporting existing business processes work correctly and efficiently, and applications maintenance and support is delivered within SLA.

Provide expertise and knowledge to everyday support and change, delivering a first-class service to our business users.

Support and provide consultation to the operations management team whenever required to gain efficiencies or address challenges. 

Build and maintain a strong relationship with Logistics key stakeholders.

Work closely with IT developers, cross functional teams, and the business to identify, communicate and coordinate activities related to Logistics projects and changes.

Work in collaboration with the cross functional teams to scope, design, develop and implement new or enhanced business requirements.

Demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of key Logistics operational and system best practices, processes, and methodologies.

To ensure essential IT hardware used to deliver operations within the DC’s are maintained, swap outs available and spare parts where necessary are available, ensuring high availability and minimal downtime.

A member of the wider Clarks logistics team running the day-to-day distribution centre.

Financial:  No financial responsibility

People:  Manage a team of 0 – 5 people

Key Relationships:

• Functional teams and Managers, DC Process Owners, DC Operation Managers, DC Shop Floor FTE and super users.
• Technology: Application Leaders, Project Managers, BA’s Service Teams, Business Integration Team, Infrastructure & Network and Core Application teams
• External software providers – e.g. HighJump/Knapp.
• External service providers – e.g. Maersk/Ensign/Avalon
• External consulting partners.

Impact the job has on the business:

This is a business-critical role. The support and service provided on logistics applications drives an uptime that results in hitting fulfilment and SLA for consumers across all channels. Every hour of downtime cost money, and failure of SLA can result in lost sales and consumers. There will be times when the logistics senior analyst will be making key decisions, either on their own or for supporting Logistics Analysts, to solve issues and put systems back online and their day-to-day actions need to ensure they do not cause unwanted negative effects.

• Provide support on 2 levels. The first is system level and hardware support maintaining a fully functional and well-tuned solution. The second is delivering support to the business team’s day-to-day, transferring knowledge to individuals, and advising/consulting them on the best approach to their everyday issues.

• Ensuring we have value for money 3^rd party support for hardware and software in place where required.

• Maintain our software solutions, ensuring they are fully up to date with security patching, they are running efficiently, data is tidy, and all integration messages are processed and archived accordingly.

• Manage and deliver enhancements/changes, ensuring processes are followed. Ensure changes are valid for the business and for the solution. Develop in accordance with the standards in place, prepare test data, quality assure the change, where applicable work with the appropriate functional areas through to sign off. Communicate and agree on a promotion date and follow all promotion processes. Where changes are produced by 3^rd party suppliers ensure specifications are accurate and manage the change in the same manner as above through to delivery.

• Providing accurate data from our systems to answer, business day-to-day questions and queries, support change ideas, project feasibilities, or tender challenges.

• Prioritising workloads within yourself and where applicable within the team to ensure time scales are met and support is delivered.

• Collaborative working with the wider team, and supporting them during incidents, change, projects, or cross-training.

• Developing excellent, collaborative challenging relationships with all the relevant Business Stakeholders

• Developing strong, collaborative, challenging relationships with all our 3^rd party partners.

• Managing and delivering out-of-hours response and support to our applications when participating in standby.

• Identifying improvements in our solutions and within business processes.

• Mentoring and training team members to meets the needs to deliver a successful team.
• Contentment and well-being of your members.
• Support calls are well managed with minimal impact to the business.
• Down time of all core IT systems running the DC is kept at a minimum and where issue driven it’s recovered as a priority.
• Change/Enhancement are delivered to the agreed timeline, tested to a level that has no negative impact when delivered to production.
• Business stakeholders view your support and consultation as a real benefit to the success of the DC and its delivery of the plan. To be measured by 360-degree feedback.
• Documentation is maintained and accurate.

Skills 

• Expert understanding of incident priority and escalation in delivering quality support with the capability of making key decisions.
• Expert understanding of the overall WMS/WCS solution and how it’s used within the flow of the DC
• Very Strong SQL skills relevant to the solution.
• Highly knowledgeable and skilled in the use of IT methodology, tools, and techniques.
• Excellent communication skills with ability to adapt from shop floor worker to management.
• Fully capable of understanding all business requirements and how they translate into technology needs.
• High degree of understanding of incident logging and process procedures
• Strong analytical and reporting skills
• Expert in how all the warehouse systems interact with each other.
• Very Strong understanding of barcodes, scanners and printers in a DC environment. This includes development of labelling/RFID requirements.
• Excellent testing skills and understanding of the implementation of application solutions.
• Fully competent and strong understanding of change control processes.
• Excellent stakeholder relationships
• Strong understanding in the DC’s infrastructure (Networks, VlAN’s, switches, patching and cabling)
• Ability to work in a complex, time critical and in a constantly evolving environment
• Ability to work well in a team and alone.
• Ability to organise and lead a group of individuals.

Additional UK only Skills

• High degree of understanding within the design, configuration or development of the WMS System used at the DC

Additional US Only Skills

• Lead a small team, setting goals and providing good feedback.
• OSHA Certified to allow use of the scissor life and forklifts
• Good skills in SCCM – Software patching and Production Machine Builds.
• Capability to remove, install and build switches, routers, and servers
• Good understanding and skills in Virtualization

Knowledge

• Understanding of complex IT environments, knowledge of the application within the logistics space
• Skilled in the design of robust application solutions to support business requirements.
• Knowledge of Clarks applications, infrastructure & systems

Experience

• 2 -5 years working with logistics systems primarily WMS.
• Understanding of the Clarks organisation

This position is based physically at the DC and due to the nature of the physical support required and the people that it supports.