SAP S/4HANA Senior Consultant
Controlling — Product Cost / Actual Cost (CO-PC / CO-AC) and Profitability & Margin Analysis
Role Overview
Actual cost today is produced entirely in Excel: SAP supplies only a raw variance extract, while product-number conversion, three-tier variance allocation, series derivation, category-based spending and absorption rules, sub-to-main mapping and quarter-end averaging live in spreadsheets maintained by a few individuals. The month-end process is long, the audit trail thin, and the logic carries real key-person risk. The target is SAP Material Ledger actual costing in collection-only mode — periodic unit price calculated and rolled up multi-level through the BOM for management reporting, while inventory and COGS remain at standard cost. Delivery includes a six-month parallel run before Excel is retired.
Key Responsibilities Lead Controlling validation workshops with the manufacturing controller and finance leadership; confirm the requirements and produce signed-off functional design.Configure Material Ledger actual costing in collection-only mode: ML activation per plant, currency and valuation setup, single- and multi-level price determination, and deliberate exclusion of post-closing so there is no financial-statement impact.Design the periodic unit price and multi-level roll-up so raw-material and semi-finished variances propagate through the full BOM to finished goods, with the actual cost component split carried through to allocation and reporting.Retain and validate the standard-costing foundation (price control S, annual CK40N, costing variants and sheets) and design cost object controlling: order costing, WIP, variance calculation and settlement.Map the nine cost-variance GL accounts onto standard variance categories and ML cost components; design the business-specific allocation logic — direct-by-item, pooled ratio distribution by plant and business area, business-area-only vendor discount allocation, series derivation, category-based spending and absorption, sub-to-main mapping and quarter-end averaging.Take and document the architecture decision — reposting custom allocation into Material Ledger versus combining it with the ML periodic unit price in the reporting layer — before custom development begins; drive upstream posting-quality remediation as the primary lever.Design margin analysis characteristics, derivation and the link from actual cost component split to item- and customer-level actual gross margin; plan and run the six-month parallel run to management-usefulness sign-off while maintaining SOX / J-SOX control integrity. BATCH MANAGEMENT & TRACEABILITY EXPERIENCE — PREFERRED, NOT REQUIRED
Batch Management and traceability experience is preferred but not required for this role — the actual-costing scope is item-level rather than batch-level. Candidates who understand the following will integrate more effectively with the manufacturing and inventory workstreams:How batch-managed inventory and batch valuation interact with Material Ledger — including split and batch-specific valuation, and why this program's collection-only design does not require them.FIFO lot-based gross-profit reporting (deferred to a later phase here) and the batch-level data it would depend on.How scrap and yield reported at lot and batch level in execution flow into production-order variance and therefore into actual cost, so costing and shop-floor reporting design stay consistent. Required Qualifications 8+ years SAP Controlling consulting with 5+ full-lifecycle implementations and hands-on Product Cost Controlling configuration responsibility; at least 2 on S/4HANA (1909 or later).Demonstrable hands-on SAP Material Ledger implementation experience — activation, actual costing run, single- and multi-level price determination, periodic unit price, actual cost component split and CKM3N/CKMVFM analysis. This is a hard requirement.Deep Product Cost Planning and Cost Object Controlling expertise: costing variants, cost estimates, costing sheets, WIP, variance calculation and settlement.Profitability analysis experience — margin analysis (account-based CO-PA) on S/4HANA, characteristic derivation, and product/customer-level margin reporting.Actual costing in report-only / collection-only mode, or the clear ability to explain the design implications of not running post-closing.Proven replacement of a spreadsheet-based finance process with a system process, including running a formal parallel run and securing sign-off.Strong CO–FI–MM–PP integration knowledge, SOX / J-SOX control experience, and the ability to explain a costing result to CFO-level stakeholders in business terms. Preferred Qualifications Bilingual English/Japanese (business level); prior delivery in Japan, including Japanese management-accounting conventions and J-SOX practice.Delivering costing allocation logic in a governed BW / SAP BTP reporting layer rather than bespoke ABAP.SAP Analytics Cloud or SAP Business Data Cloud for margin and cost reporting.Group Reporting, Universal Parallel Accounting or multi-valuation actual costing.Electronics or high-mix discrete manufacturing cost structures, including mold/tooling and engineer-to-order costing; ML performance tuning and month-end runtime benchmarking at scale.SAP certification in S/4HANA Management Accounting (Controlling). Language Requirement — Bilingual English/Japanese Preferred, Not Required
Fluent professional English is required for design documentation, deliverables and steering-committee communication. Business-level Japanese is a strong advantage — many process owners, shop-floor personnel and legacy-system custodians work primarily in Japanese, and much current-state documentation exists only in Japanese — but it is not a condition of appointment. Interpretation support, bilingual design documentation and pairing with bilingual business analysts are provided, and strong candidates will be considered regardless of Japanese-language ability.
Engagement Details
Full-time consulting assignment across the Explore, Realize and Deploy phases. Hybrid delivery with periodic on-site presence at the Japan sites during validation workshops, integration testing, cutover and hypercare. Reports to the workstream lead, working alongside client SMEs, client IT and the corporate global SAP template and clean-core governance teams.
