SAP Practice Leader

Job Details and Responsibilities

As the Lemongrass Practice Leader, SAP Functional Transformation, you lead the practice that puts functional capability behind everything we deliver and sell. The practice brings together Advisory, functional consultants and the Forward Deployed Engineering (FDE) team: the people who spend their time with customers on what the customer wants to change and improve.

You will work closely with the leaders of Projects and Operate, our two routes to market, with Product Management on offers and go-to-market, and with Business Development Managers to win and grow customers. You carry both a sales target and a delivery target. You are expected to lead from the front: in front of customers, in front of the team, and in the design of how the practice works.

Responsibilities:

• Leadership and practice build
• Lead the Consulting practice, including Advisory, functional consultants and the FDE team, setting vision, structure and operating rhythm.
• Build the practice in phases: start with a small internal team augmented by contractors to reach scale quickly, then convert to employees once critical scale is reached.
• Set the onshore and offshore model: functional delivery fully onshore while the practice is subscale, moving to a blended onshore/offshore model at scale. Support Operate in its offshore delivery model.
• Create the methods, templates, quality gates and collateral the practice needs, and hold the practice to the build milestones agreed with the executive team.
• Sales and customer engagement
• Own a personal sales target and a practice-level sales target. Lead the senior customer conversations on customer Initiatives and Capabilities, not only Enablers.
• Work with Business Development Managers so they can carry customer conversations with confidence. We do not run a separate pre-sales layer: the people who deliver are the people customers want to talk to, and you ensure the right delivery people join the right conversations.
• Act as executive sponsor for key customers and as an escalation point for design, quality or delivery risk.
• Partner with Product Management to shape offers, pricing inputs and go-to-market so that what the practice sells is what it can deliver.
• Delivery and quality
• Be accountable for design authority and delivery quality across the practice’s work on ECC to S/4HANA conversion, Brightfield selective transitions, functional application management and agentic process optimization.
• Work with Projects and Operate leadership on staffing, handoff from project to run, and the capture of functional design knowledge.
• Own practice utilization, planning non-billable time deliberately while the practice is being built, and managing capacity across contractors and employees.
• Set the practice's approach to AI: where LCP AI, agentic process optimization and other AI tools are used in discovery, delivery and run to speed up documentation and improve customer and project outcomes, and hold the practice to measuring the result.
• Talent and culture
• Recruit, develop and retain senior functional architects, functional consultants and advisory talent. Agree grading, role profiles and career paths with HR.
• Manage contractor ratios and the conversion of long-standing contractors to employees against agreed triggers.
• Build a culture of accountability, customer focus and continuous learning.
• Financial and operational oversight
• Support P&L management for the practice, including planning, forecasting, utilization and revenue performance.
• Work with Finance on the practice investment plan and report progress against it.

Key Performance Measures:

Targets are set annually with the President & COO and the executive team. Indicative structure:

Measure

What it covers

Sales

Practice-sourced and influenced bookings against the annual practice sales target, plus a personal sales target.

Utilization

Personal and practice billable utilization against plan. In FY27 the practice plans non-billable time for build and selling, and no principal is planned above 70%.

Delivery quality

Customer satisfaction (CSAT), design quality gate pass rate, and number of customer escalations.

Practice build

Delivery of agreed milestones: offers, methods and collateral, hiring plan, contractor to employee conversions.

Customer outcomes

Reference customers won, repeat work, and project-to-run conversions into Operate.

People

Hiring and ramp against plan, retention, and quality of staffing on customer engagements.

Qualifications

Qualifications & Experience:

• Bachelor’s degree in a related field such as Information Systems, Finance, Business or Engineering, or equivalent experience. Advanced degree preferred.
• 15+ years of SAP consulting experience, with at least 7 years leading a consulting practice or large functional team.
• Deep functional knowledge of SAP S/4HANA, with hands-on background in ECC to S/4HANA conversions and a clear grasp of mandatory functional change (for example Business Partner, Universal Journal, credit and MRP Live).
• Proven record of building and growing a consulting practice, including hiring, utilization management and a hybrid of contractors and employees.
• Proven record of selling and closing consulting engagements, with a history of meeting a personal and a team sales target.
• Credible executive presence, able to lead conversations with CIO, CFO and COO level stakeholders.
• Experience running delivery with onshore and offshore teams.
• Financial acumen, including utilization, revenue and cost-of-delivery management.
• Demonstrable skills in using AI to further customer and project outcomes, and the ability to set how a practice applies it.
• Excellent communication, negotiation and presentation skills.
• Based in the United States.
• This position requires travel of up to 75%, mostly to client sites in the United States, for customer executive engagement, key engagements and time with the team, and may require international travel as needed to meet business and client requirements.

Preferred:

• SAP certifications or SAP Activate and clean core methodology experience.
• Experience with RISE with SAP and Brightfield-style selective transitions.
• Experience working alongside managed services (application management) teams.

This position may require domestic and international travel as needed to meet business and client requirements.

Selected applicant will be subject to a background investigation, which will be conducted and the results of which will be used in compliance with applicable law.

Lemongrass Consulting is an Equal Opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, religious creed, sex, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, genetic information, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, or other applicable legally protected characteristics.

About Lemongrass

Lemongrass Consulting (www.lemongrasscloud.com) is a software-enabled services provider specializing in highly automated professional and managed services for enterprise SAP customers. Our objective is to help customers realize the full value of their SAP transformations by reducing cost, increasing agility and unlocking innovation, delivered on the world’s most comprehensive cloud platforms – AWS, Azure, GCP and SAP Cloud ERP.

We have worked with AWS since 2010 and we are a Premier Amazon Partner Network (APN) Consulting Partner, a Microsoft Gold Partner, a Google Cloud Partner and an SAP Certified Partner. Our team is what makes Lemongrass exceptional. At Lemongrass you will work with some of the smartest and most motivated people in the business, in a culture of innovation and collaboration.

We are building a functional Consulting practice to support our customers through ECC to S/4HANA conversions, Brightfield selective transitions, functional application management and agentic process optimization. This role is part of that build.

Why Lemongrass:

You've led SAP consulting at scale. Now come and build a practice from the ground up, not just run one.

Lemongrass runs and modernizes SAP for some of the world's largest companies, in close partnership with SAP, AWS, Microsoft and Google Cloud. We're growing fast in RISE, BTP, Data (BDC) and LCP AI, our platform that finds process improvements and scopes AI use cases across the S/4 core.

We're hiring a Practice Leader, SAP Functional Transformation to lead a small founding group: senior functional architects, functional consultants, Advisory and the FDE team. You set the direction, lead the executive conversations alongside our Business Development Managers, and are accountable for what the practice sells and delivers. If you're ready to own a practice rather than wait your turn, this is a seat at the table now.

• Real ownership: you carry the practice's sales and delivery targets and lead the executive conversations with CFOs, COOs and CIOs.
• Build something: you hire and shape the whole practice, from the first architects to the Advisory and FDE teams, and decide how it grows from contractors to employees.
• Be at the front of SAP plus AI: clean core, process mining and agentic use cases are the practice's daily toolkit, not a slide, and you set how it uses them.
• Pace and access: a flat, entrepreneurial company where good ideas get decided in days, not quarters, with direct access to the President and COO.