Senior Director of Enterprise Applications

About the role

The Enterprise Applications Director is responsible for the day-to-day administration and stability of the organization’s financial systems portfolio, with primary accountability for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (D365 F&O).

Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary operational owner of D365 F&O and other financial systems within the Finance Systems team’s purview, ensuring platform stability, performance, and alignment with organizational requirements.
• Maintain a comprehensive inventory of applications, integrations, and data flows across the financial systems landscape; identify gaps, redundancies, and opportunities for rationalization.
• Partner with IT and business stakeholders to evaluate, onboard, and retire financial system components in a controlled, well-documented manner.
• Monitor system health, coordinate scheduled maintenance windows, and ensure adequate business continuity and disaster recovery planning is in place for critical financial platforms.
• Lead recurring vendor governance meetings; track open issues, escalate risks, and drive resolution in a timely manner.
• Evaluate vendor performance against defined SLAs; provide input into contract renewals and statement of work negotiations.
• Own the end-to-end user access lifecycle for D365 F&O and related financial systems, including provisioning, modification, periodic review, and termination.
• Maintain and enforce a robust security role framework aligned to the principle of least privilege, ensuring Segregation of Duties (SoD) policies are embedded into role design and access assignment.
• Lead periodic user access reviews in partnership with Controllership leadership and business control owners.
• Maintain audit-ready documentation of access controls, role definitions, and SoD conflict matrices to support internal audit, external audit, and compliance reviews.
• Own the financial systems cost model, tracking total cost of ownership across hosting, licensing, support, and implementation spend.
• Administer D365 F&O and ancillary application licenses, ensuring the organization is appropriately licensed, cost-efficient, and compliant with vendor agreements.
• Evaluate licensing tiers to align user assignments with functional needs and minimize unnecessary license expenditure.
• Produce periodic cost-to-serve reporting for Finance leadership, highlighting variances, trends, and optimization recommendations.
• Oversee master data governance for key financial system data domains, including chart of accounts, cost centers, financial dimensions, vendor/customer master records, and project master data.
• Establish and enforce data quality standards, creation workflows, and approval hierarchies for master data changes in D365 F&O.
• Partner with business stakeholders to manage master data requests ensuring timely, accurate execution and proper documentation of changes.
• Support new legal entity deployments by executing master data setup, system configuration, data migration, and ledger opening balance loading activities.
• Administer and maintain D365 F&O system configurations across a broad range of functional areas, including approval workflows (e.g. AP, AR, journal entries), bank account set-up and maintenance, financial report maintenance, and other system-level configuration required to support day-to-day finance operations.
• Respond to configuration change requests across all administered functional areas; test, document, and deploy modifications in alignment with change management and internal control procedures.
• Maintain current documentation of all system configurations, ensuring that configuration records are audit-ready and reflect the current state of the production environment at all times.
• Proactively review configuration settings against evolving organizational structures (e.g., delegation of authority updates, new legal entities, personnel changes) to ensure configurations remain accurate and control gaps are mitigated.
• Support the execution of application version upgrades per defined technology vendor deployment schedules, ensuring adherence to testing, change control, and deployment methodologies.
• Operate the Finance Systems help desk function, serving as the first point of escalation for end-user issues related to D365 F&O and connected financial applications.
• Triage, prioritize, and resolve (or coordinate resolution of) system issues, working with the managed service partner, Microsoft, or other vendors where escalation is required.
• Track help desk metrics (volume, resolution time, recurring issues) and report trends to Finance leadership.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Finance, Accounting, Information Systems, Business Administration, or a related field required; Master’s degree preferred.
• CPA, CMA, or relevant technology certification (e.g., Microsoft Dynamics 365 certifications) preferred.
• 8+ years of progressive experience in finance systems administration, ERP operations, or a related field; at least 3 years in a leadership or senior individual contributor capacity.
• Hands-on experience administering Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (D365 F&O), including security role configuration, workflow administration, and master data management.
• Demonstrated experience managing vendor relationships and third-party implementation partners (e.g. Avanade, Hitachi, Accenture, or equivalent).
• Experience with application license management, cost modeling, and total cost of ownership analysis for enterprise financial systems.
• Familiarity with ERP user access management principles, including Segregation of Duties (SoD) frameworks and periodic access review processes.
• Experience supporting multi-entity environments and/or new legal entity deployments is required.