Senior Application Support Manager

About RS Group

Across the industrial design, manufacturing and maintenance worlds, we’re the digital destination for product and service solutions to help our customers with the maintenance, repair and operation of their businesses. We provide global access to an unrivalled range of over 750,000 stocked industrial products. Each day our team of experts deliver solutions to resolve our customer’s challenges across design, procurement, inventory and maintenance. We consistently strive to deliver the best possible service to all of our customers and challenge ourselves to provide a seamless procurement experience.

We are one team. We deliver brilliantly. We do the right thing. We make every day better. These are our values. They unite our c.9,000 global colleagues and differentiate us from our competition. They are a mix of how we work today and how we must step up for the future. Most importantly, it is one set of values shaped by our people, for our people.

Together, we can make great things happen. Aim for amazing and beyond.

Our vision as an Information Services and Technology function is to equip and modernize our organization with the technology, platforms and services that support and enable our people, and prepare and protect the RS organization to grow and double our revenue in the next five years.

About the Role

Role Purpose

As Senior Application Support Manager you will deputise for the Head of Application and assist in managing the Global Application Support Team. This will facilitate a partial “follow the sun” model where the UK and USA team will handoff inflight issues which need to be tracked outside of local working hours.

The Global Application support team is responsible for the managing the application and data base support for front office and other ancillary systems globally. This role will primarily focus on our US based divisions but also to provide “follow the sun” coverage for EMEA and APAC.  This includes oversight and acceptance into production of application developments, off the shelf and SAAS based application, disaster recovery planning and testing, maintenance, monitoring and resolution of IT incidents and requests across those group third party applications managed within the IT Support and Operations function.

Responsibilities

• Deputise for Head of Applications as required
• Direct line management of US based Application support Team
• Delivery of application support services such as (but not limited to) monitoring, maintenance, incident and problem resolution for our group applications.
• Proactively drive clarity on strategy, design, architecture within RS Americas for new systems as required
• Working with the other RS Teams, assist in ensuring there is clarity of ownership for all systems and solutions within RS Group.
• Manage resolution of major incidents, ensure follow up root cause analysis is completed including any preventative actions.
• Ensuring application performance and availability service Levels are met and identify ways to continually improve availability.
• Reporting availability and performance against service levels to the stakeholders on a regular basis.
• Accountable for oversight of DR plan and testing globally. Ensuring our annual DR tests with all our third parties and IS&T teams are carried out. With objective of ensuring we have sufficient DR plans for our critical platforms.
• Define, review and accept support model for new applications and upgrades into production, ensuring that all elements required to support are in place and any risks or issues prior to go-live are managed and accepted with the stakeholders as part of the go-live criteria.
• Attending Change Advisory Board (CAB) meetings as required and assessing requests for change for their impact on availability.
• Accountable for the lifecycle management of applications supported by IT Support and Operations function working with the other teams to gain input and acceptance to the lifecycle plan and raising any lifecycle issues in a timely manner with the business owners.
• Maintaining application non-functional requirements which projects need to adhere to.
• Assist with budget management of the operating costs for application services including being accountable for the monthly and annual forecasting of these budgets.
• Prioritising the initiatives which will be funded by the Keep the Lights on budget.
• Accountability for the delivery of the agreed application initiatives prioritised within the Keep the Lights on budget.
• Management of the application configuration data and information.
• Working with project teams to ensure configuration data is captured, documented and managed correctly when introducing new services.
• Ensure on-going maintenance of the Configuration Management Database working with the application and other support teams and suppliers, to update interfaces and dependencies that exist between IT services, components, supporting services, and configuration items (CIs) across the applications supported by the IT Support and Operations function.
• Agreeing and maintaining a clear set of application categories with the business which define the criticality of each application including disaster recovery requirements, availability, performance and support hours based on the agreed criticality category such as mission critical, important etc,
• Defining and maintaining the tools and tool strategy needed to support our applications such as monitoring tools.
• Management of availability and relevant security and other vulnerability patching planning and requirements for the applications.
• Manage the renewal of contracts with suppliers for applications.
• Ensuring that the demand process is followed to allocate resources needed to deliver the agreed initiatives prioritised within the Keep the Lights and Strategic portfolios.
• Relationship management across all the teams within IS&T, HR, Finance and our key business functions who own and use the applications supported by the IT Support and Operations function.

How I make a difference in this role

• Maintain strategic relationships with the internal teams and vendors who provide the support services for this area.
• Develop close working relationships with our business functions to ensure the support for these services enables the business processes in line with the agreed service levels and support model.
• Support the IS&T teams with the strategic planning of these services to meet our future business priorities and plans.

Org Structure

• Reports into the Head of Applications and is Direct Line Manager for US based Application Support team.

Candidate Requirements

Essential Qualifications, Skills & Experience

• Clear Understanding on ITIL principles and Processes
• Experience supporting group applications and group teams.
• Solid understanding of Incident, Problem, Change and Release management processes.
• Management of budgets in excessive of £1M and experience of managing to budget and evidence of driving successful cost savings initiatives.
• Extensive experience of defining application support models across a variety of solutions such as SaaS and on-premise and cloud hosted applications.
• Ability to maintain clear and focused thinking under stressful/high pressure situations.
• Experience of managing in-house and outsourced support teams.
• Ability to translate technical information into business terminology to ensure the business are clear on the technical impact of any application issues to their operations.
• Stakeholder management across all levels within our organisation.
• Excellent vendor management capabilities including extensive experience of deploying and managing suppliers to a formal supplier relationship management model. This includes the ability to define and manage suppliers to contractual obligations and SLAs.
• Strong verbal, written communication skills.
• Strong decision-making skills especially under high pressure situations such as incidents.
• Extensive experience of managing the lifecycle of an application.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• ITIL Practitioner
• Working knowledge of project Management lifecycle and methodologies (e.g. Prince 2, PMM, Lean, Agile, Waterfall etc.)

Essential Qualifications (Must be evidenced at offer stage)

• ITIL Foundation

Equal Employment Opportunity

RS Americas is an equal opportunity employer and maintains policies and practices that are designed to prevent and prohibit unlawful discrimination against any qualified employee or applicant on the basis of race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, military/veteran status, disability, genetic information, citizenship status, or any other unlawful classification to the extent protected by law. This policy of non-discrimination applies to all employment practices, including hiring, compensation, benefits, promotion, training and termination. Employees who engage in unlawful discrimination will be subject to disciplinary action, up to and including termination.

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