Role :SAP Project Manager — Life Sciences & Pharmaceuticals
Location : India (Remote)
Duration : Full time
About Devfi
Devfi, Inc. is an SAP services partner to life sciences and pharmaceutical companies. We deliver S/4HANA solutions for global pharma manufacturers, CDMOs, biotech and medical device clients] across the Globe.
Our clients operate under FDA, EMA and MHRA oversight. Every system we touch is validated and every change is auditable — that standard is why they choose a specialist partner over a generalist.
The role
We're looking for a project manager who came up through functional work and never lost it. You will run client projects end to end — plan, scope, team, schedule, risk — while staying close enough to the solution to challenge a design, unblock a fit-gap debate, and know when a functional lead is telling you something is fine that isn't.
Your functional depth spans PP/PP-PI, QM, MM, EWM, SD and PLM on S/4HANA. You won't configure day to day, but you will chair design workshops, arbitrate cross-module decisions, and hold the line on standard-versus-custom when schedule pressure argues otherwise.
This is delivery in a GxP environment: validation shapes how we plan, estimate and release, rather than sitting at the end as a checkpoint.
What you'll do
Project leadership
- Own the project end to end — scope, plan, schedule, resourcing, budget, risk and dependency management.
- Lead large blended teams of 35+ resources across Devfi consultants, client staff and offshore delivery centres; set estimation, design review and quality standards, and manage workstream leads rather than every individual.
- Produce the reporting rhythm: weekly status reports to the client project team and monthly reports to steering committee, covering progress against baseline, RAID, budget position and decisions required. Report honestly — surface bad news early and with a recommendation attached.
- Own budget forecasting: build and maintain the resource and cost forecast, track actual against plan, explain variance, and give the client and Devfi leadership enough warning to act.
- Build and deliver the presentations that carry the project — steering decks, design decision papers, go/no-go recommendations and executive readouts — pitched at the audience in the room.
- Run the governance cadence: steering committees, design authority, change control board, release calendar.
- Manage scope with discipline: identify change requests early, quantify the impact, and hold the baseline.
Functional ownership
- Chair requirements and fit-gap workshops across PP/PP-PI, QM, MM, PLM, SD and and adjudicate cross-module design decisions so the solution stays coherent rather than locally optimised.
- Own the quality of functional deliverables — process designs, functional specifications for RICEFW, configuration rationale, authorisation and SoD design.
- Keep the manufacturing and quality thread intact: master recipes and routing, BOMs, batch management, inspection plans and results recording, inventory and warehouse execution, order-to-cash.
- Oversee PLM scope where in play — specification and recipe management, document management, engineering change management — and how those objects flow into the ERP core.
- Govern integration into MES, LIMS, QMS, WMS and serialisation, and own the master data and migration approach.
Validation, testing and go-live
- Deliver to GxP requirements — CSV, GAMP 5, EU Annex 11, 21 CFR Part 11 — with validation strategy and requirements traceability agreed with client QA before build starts.
- Own the test strategy end to end: unit, SIT, UAT, PQ and regression, with defect triage and release criteria you sign off.
- Lead cutover, dress rehearsals, go-live and hypercare, with rollback positions agreed in advance.
- Stand behind the solution in client audits and regulatory inspections.
What we're looking for
Essential
- 13+ years in SAP delivery, with 5+ managing projects or major work streams, following a functional consulting background.
- Deep functional understanding of S/4HANA across PP/PP-PI, QM, MM, EWM, SD and PLM — you can read a configuration decision and see its downstream consequences. Depth in several of these and working literacy in the rest.
- Delivery experience in pharma, biotech, medical devices or another GxP-regulated industry, with a practical grasp of CSV and GAMP 5: you can challenge a validation plan, not just approve one.
- Full-lifecycle ownership — requirements through hypercare — on at least [two] end-to-end implementations.
- Integration and data migration experience across a complex application landscape.
- Fluency in both V-model and Agile delivery, and the judgement to know which the change and the regulator require.
- Track record leading teams of 35+ across functional, technical, client and offshore resources, including managing through workstream leads.
- Disciplined reporting practice — weekly and monthly status reporting against baseline, RAID logs and steering-level updates that executives actually read.
- Budget ownership and forecasting on projects revenue,resource planning, actual tracking, variance analysis and forecast revision.
- Strong presentation skills: you build your own decks, and you can take a steering committee through a difficult decision without losing the room.
- Excellent written and oral communication in English — precise in writing, credible in front of a client executive, and clear with an offshore teams.
- Stakeholder management to executive level, including defending a design decision under pressure.
- Willingness to travel to Devfi offices or client sites.
- Work towards building the Pipeline of resources for the project Needs & Skill Development.
Desirable
- SAP Solution Manager or Cloud ALM; SAP BTP, CPI and integration tooling.
- Serialisation and track-and-trace (EU FMD, DSCSA), batch genealogy or electronic batch records.
- Integration with MES ([PAS-X, Opcenter]), LIMS ([LabWare, STARLIMS]) or QMS ([Veeva, TrackWise]).
- Tech transfer, site-to-site product introduction, brownfield conversion or multi-site template roll out.
- SAP certification in a relevant module; PMP, PRINCE2 or SAFe.
