Group Transformation Chief Operating Officer — Consumer Goods Services

The mandate

A consumer-goods group is changing ERP and service processes across regions that have developed different ways of handling customers, suppliers and financial close. Several initiatives claim the same benefits, while process owners are not consistently involved in design or readiness decisions. The group transformation COO will hold executive accountability for an enduring operating office that connects change delivery to service ownership, recipient outcomes and verified financial benefit.

Eighty transformation professionals support the office, working with executives accountable for approximately 900 service roles. The initial two-year agenda combines service integration, global process ownership and ERP operating readiness. Employment is open-ended; the office remains responsible for subsequent transformation waves and benefit sustainability. Pune is the base, with planned travel aligned to readiness reviews and significant regional operating decisions rather than a requirement for continuous international presence.

The COO determines transformation sequencing, resolves cross-process dependencies and controls approved programme resources. Technology leadership retains architecture and security authority, while finance owns accounting policy and benefit recognition standards. The board approves major scope changes and structural operating moves. The COO may stop a release from an operating-readiness perspective, with evidence and a recovery decision, but cannot overrule specialist sign-offs or treat a successful system test as proof that service operations are ready.

The durable result is a transformation portfolio whose owners understand the operating decisions and evidence required at each stage. Benefits must be attributable, avoid duplication and remain visible after programme closure. Product manufacturing strategy, market brand decisions and unrelated technology infrastructure renewal are excluded. The executive office must nevertheless expose their dependencies when service changes rely on decisions elsewhere, rather than hiding them in an optimistic integrated plan.

What you will own

• Establish a transformation decision portfolio that identifies shared dependencies and competing benefits, requiring each initiative to name an operating owner and the evidence needed before its claimed value enters group commitments.
• Decide programme sequencing within approved resources, comparing operational readiness, control consequence and recipient capacity rather than prioritising only the initiatives with the most persuasive financial headline or earliest technology completion date.
• Govern ERP operating-readiness reviews through end-to-end service rehearsals, testing exception handling and recovery with actual process owners before recommending release or exercising a delegated stop decision.
• Build a benefit verification book with finance, separating attributable savings from cost transfer and duplicated claims while preserving a clear distinction between expected, implemented and sustainably realised improvement.
• Lead cross-regional process ownership decisions that survive programme closure, assigning maintenance, escalation and service review responsibilities so an improved design does not become ownerless once the transformation team moves on.
• Develop transformation executives who can combine rigorous delivery with operational judgement, maintain candid escalation and challenge unsupported readiness claims without either surrendering authority to technology schedules or blocking useful change unnecessarily.

Candidate qualifications

• Demonstrate enterprise COO or equivalent shared-services transformation accountability within a 22–28-year career, with consumer-product, food-service or financial-services operating experience. Show a transformation decision you personally owned across process or regional boundaries. Large programme budgets alone do not establish fit; the evidence must include what changed in recipient operations and how the result was governed after delivery.
• Bring practical SAP or comparable ERP transformation understanding alongside P2P, O2C, R2R or FP&A process leadership. Explain an end-to-end readiness test that found a weakness missed by ordinary system testing. The role does not demand architecture ownership, but requires enough operating knowledge to insist on qualified specialist sign-offs and recognise where service readiness remains unproven.
• Have established credible benefit governance, including removal of duplicate claims and distinction between genuine improvement and cost shifted elsewhere. Selection will examine an initially attractive case you revised, the evidence used and how senior sponsors responded. Continuous-improvement or GBS training is valuable when it supports disciplined judgement rather than a promise that automation automatically creates sustainable value.
• Show executive leadership of transformation managers and operating counterparts through difficult sequencing and release decisions. You must preserve accountability across the programme-to-operation boundary, develop a succession bench and communicate residual risk clearly to a board. Purposeful regional travel and direct examination of process rehearsals are necessary; the executive cannot rely exclusively on project status reports prepared to demonstrate progress.

Application

Applications for this mandate are received in one way only: through the India Board Terminal's application process. It is automated end to end. Your Executive Passport travels to the mandate holder in its confidential form, your answers to the three questions below are read before anything else in your file, and every stage that follows is recorded on your applications page.

There is no address to write to and no intermediary to call. The mandate holder reads what the Terminal delivers and nothing else, which is what keeps the process the same for every applicant and keeps your name out of it until you release it. Applications close on 13 October 2026. Mandate reference CVU-PER-2026-IND-118.