Global Application Support Supervisor Supply Chain Systems

Ford is in the middle of a Supply Chain Transformation. One of the key focus areas to enable this transformation is to ensure robust management of supply chain risk and assurance of supply to ensure demand for our world-leading products can be met optimally.

As part of the transformation, we have initiated IT system development projects to support strategic business initiatives in various business units.

This role requires a blend of technical expertise, operational leadership, and modern support methodologies, collaborating closely with various internal & external stakeholders (including MP&L, Supply Chain Business partners, and our external suppliers). This is an excellent opportunity for an experienced IT professional looking to lead a global team, drive automation/innovation, leverage cloud, and AI technologies and ensure operational excellence in a critical business domain.

• Global Support Leadership: Lead the 24x7 global production support of supply chain management IT systems.
• Support Metrics & SLA Management: Define, monitor, and report on key operational metrics and performance indicators (e.g., Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)). Use data-driven insights to identify trends, measure team performance, and report operational health to leadership and business stakeholders.
• Vendor Management & Governance: Monitor and manage vendor Service Level Agreements (SLAs), drive accountability for deliverables, and escalate platform-level issues to ensure swift resolution.
• ITIL Process Governance: Oversee and enforce ITIL best practices—specifically Incident, Problem, and Change Management—to restore service rapidly while ensuring production changes do not introduce new issues.
• Tooling & Workload Management: Leverage ServiceNow (for ITSM and Incident-to-Problem-to-Change tracking) and JIRA (for backlog management and agile collaboration) to manage team workloads and track issues.
• Continuous Improvement & Automation: Drive a modernization culture by utilizing scripting (e.g., Python) and emerging AI-assisted tools (e.g., for incident summarization, automated runbooks, or knowledge base creation) to automate daily health reports and routine tasks, reducing manual toil.
• Incident, Escalation & RCA Management: Lead technical triage and cross-functional "war rooms" during critical, time-sensitive production outages. Conduct deep-dive Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and implement permanent preventative measures (e.g., enhanced monitoring).
• Integration & Cloud Troubleshooting: Diagnose and resolve complex integration issues between distributed services hosted in cloud and hybrid environments.
• Regional Hand-offs: Establish and maintain high-quality hand-off protocols with global, regional colleagues to ensure seamless support continuity and zero information loss for ongoing critical issues.
• Talent & Knowledge Development: Develop and maintain an appropriate level of resources with deep knowledge of Ford's supply chain business processes, application architectures, and modern technologies.
• Stakeholder Enablement: Train and support internal Business customers (MP&L, SCM) and external suppliers on vendor applications to ensure seamless adoption.
• Security & Compliance: Ensure strict adherence to security, compliance, and data privacy protocols, especially when diagnosing issues that involve accessing sensitive supplier information.
• Monitoring & Alerting: Monitor the performance and health of supply chain applications using enterprise monitoring, observability, and cloud-native diagnostic tools.

• Bachelor's degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Supply Chain Management, or equivalent professional experience.
• Strong functional knowledge and awareness of Supply Chain business processes and supporting IT applications.
• Hands-on experience in multiple roles across the spectrum of the application lifecycle.
• 10+ years of IT experience, with 3+ years in a supervisory or team leadership role managing a production support or operations environment.
• Proven experience in vendor management, including managing relationships under an SLA-driven model.
• Proven experience working with ServiceNow and JIRA in an enterprise support capacity.
• Basic to intermediate knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (GCP) infrastructure and services, with experience supporting cloud-native environments and managing associated support challenges.
• Basic knowledge of AI technologies and skills, including familiarity with Generative AI tools and an understanding of how AI can be leveraged to streamline IT production support processes
• Hands-on experience with scripting and automation (e.g., Python) to optimize support tasks.