Consultant

Job title: Consultant

Type of contract: Consultant Contract

Level: Level 4 - Executive

Hiring Unit: Bureau for Digital Business Solutions (DBS)

Duty Station: Paris

Work location: Remote

Duration of contract: 11 months

Hiring open to: External candidates

Application deadline (Midnight UTC+2 Time): 12/10/2026

UNESCO Core Values: Commitment to the Organization, Integrity, Respect for Diversity, Professionalism

Overview

Under the supervision of the CITO, and in close consultation with DBS staff, the consultant will ensure the operational continuity, technical integrity, and controlled evolution of UNESCO’s SAP landscape while supporting preparations for its future transformation and migration to SAP S/4HANA and key transformational initiatives.

Assignments

UNESCO operates SAP ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 8 (ECC) as a core component of its enterprise application landscape. The platform supports financial management, public-sector budget execution, human resources, payroll, banking and payments, real estate management, and other critical corporate processes.

The SAP installation is mature and has evolved over more than 20 years. It is extensively customized, with approximately one third of the executed code comprising custom developments. These developments are concentrated primarily in Funds Management, Project System, Human Resources Organizational Management and Payroll, Personnel Budget Control, workflows, banking, and payments.

The environment is characterized by the following:

• More than 70 per cent of business transactions originate from or are processed through applications outside SAP, requiring extensive integration with other corporate systems
• Budget planning and execution are closely integrated with Salesforce. This is one of the principal integrations to be understood, maintained, and further developed
• SAP Workflow is used extensively as a primary enabler of corporate processes and is integrated with an external Role Management solution built on top of SAP
• The system supports nine company codes
• UNESCO and its Institutes manage more than 150 active bank accounts
• A significant portfolio of custom developments and interfaces has accumulated over approximately 20 years and must be maintained while progressively preparing the landscape for a future migration to SAP S/4HANA

UNESCO maintains a small, highly skilled SAP team. Given the breadth, complexity, and business criticality of the environment, UNESCO requires a senior consultant capable of assuming several complementary responsibilities within a single assignment.

Business requirements are not always available as complete or formally documented specifications at the outset of an initiative. Consequently, solution requirements frequently need to be elicited, clarified, and progressively refined through collaborative working sessions with business owners, subject-matter experts, and technical teams. This iterative approach is essential to establish a shared understanding of business processes and controls and to translate operational needs into implementable functional and technical specifications.

Long Description

Purpose of the Assignment

The purpose of the assignment is to ensure the operational continuity, technical integrity, and controlled evolution of UNESCO’s SAP landscape while supporting preparations for its future transformation and migration to SAP S/4HANA and key transformational initiatives.

The assignment is deliberately designed as a multi-hat senior role. The consultant will act simultaneously as:

• SAP solution and integration architect
• SAP technical team lead
• Coordinator of SAP support and development activities
• Senior technical and functional adviser
• Hands-on SAP developer and troubleshooter, where required
• Technical focal point for coordination with business owners, internal IT teams, implementation partners, banks, and other external service providers

The consultant must therefore combine strategic architecture capabilities with detailed knowledge of the existing solution and the ability to intervene directly in its design, configuration, development, integration, and support.

The role covers financial accounting, public-sector budget execution, banking and payment processes, Project System, Grants Management, Flexible Real Estate Management, SAP Workflow, custom SAP Fiori-type applications, integration architecture, custom ABAP development, S/4HANA readiness, and the application of agentic AI to SAP support and quality assurance.

Scope of Work and Responsibilities

The consultant will perform the following continuing responsibilities throughout the assignment. Activities identified as “operational support” concern the continuity and maintenance of the existing environment, while “evolution and pipeline” activities concern planned enhancements and transformation initiatives.

SAP Architecture, Technical Leadership and Team Coordination

• Provide overall technical and solution architecture leadership for the SAP domain
• Ensure the coherence of SAP solutions, interfaces, custom developments, workflows, security dependencies, and related architectural decisions
• Lead and coordinate the work of the internal SAP team and relevant external consultants
• Plan, prioritize, assign, and monitor SAP support, maintenance, development, and transformation activities
• Coordinate dependencies between SAP and other corporate platforms, particularly Salesforce, MuleSoft, the external Role Management solution, banking platforms, and custom web applications
• Maintain the SAP activity backlog and Jira dashboards, ensuring that priorities, ownership, dependencies, risks, and delivery status remain current
• Prepare and present technical and delivery status updates to management, business owners, project teams, and other stakeholders
• Facilitate technical decision-making, identify risks and constraints, and escalate matters requiring business or management arbitration
• Review technical designs, development specifications, code, and implementation plans to ensure compliance with agreed architecture and quality standards
• Support incident resolution and take direct ownership of complex or critical technical issues where senior-level intervention is required
• Plan and facilitate co-working workshops with business owners, subject-matter experts, and technical teams to elicit, clarify, challenge, and refine business requirements
• Analyse existing processes, system behaviour, custom developments, interfaces, reports, controls, and available documentation to identify requirements that may not have been formally captured
• Translate business needs and workshop outcomes into structured process definitions, functional specifications, user stories, acceptance criteria, solution designs, and technical requirements
• Identify gaps, ambiguities, inconsistencies, dependencies, and decisions required, and work with the relevant stakeholders to obtain clarification and agreement before implementation
• Maintain traceability between agreed business requirements, functional specifications, technical designs, development activities, and test scenarios
• Support business stakeholders in validating and formally confirming the refined requirements and proposed solution before development or deployment

SAP S/4HANA Preparation

The consultant will support UNESCO’s preparation for a future migration to SAP S/4HANA, including:

• Inventory and classification of approximately 20 years of custom SAP code
• Identification of obsolete, redundant, replaceable, and business-critical custom developments
• Assessment of custom-code compatibility and remediation requirements
• Analysis of interfaces, workflows, enhancements, reports, forms, and external dependencies
• Assessment of the impact of the proposed migration on the wider application landscape
• Preparation for Business Partner migration
• Contribution to the definition of transition options, sequencing, effort estimates, risks, and implementation roadmaps
• Ensuring that current enhancements do not unnecessarily increase future migration complexity or technical debt

Agentic AI and Intelligent Automation

The consultant will contribute to the exploration and responsible application of agentic AI and automation within the SAP domain, including:

• Use of process-mining approaches to identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, control weaknesses, and automation opportunities
• Design of AI-assisted capabilities to facilitate SAP incident analysis, knowledge retrieval, troubleshooting, documentation, and support activities
• Exploration of agents capable of supporting technical and functional analysis while respecting UNESCO’s information security and governance requirements
• Automation of testing for custom web applications using Playwright or equivalent technologies
• Development of reusable test scenarios and integration of automated testing into relevant delivery and quality assurance