Manager, Business Processes Transformation

The Organization
The Alliance of Bioversity International & CIAT delivers research-based solutions that harness agricultural biodiversity and sustainably transform food systems to improve people's lives. Alliance solutions address the global crises of malnutrition, climate change, biodiversity loss, and environmental degradation.

The Alliance works with local, national and multinational partners across Latin America and the Caribbean, Asia and Africa, and with the public and private sectors. The Alliance is part of CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future, dedicated to reducing poverty, enhancing food and nutrition security, and improving natural resources and ecosystem services.

About the position
The Alliance is at a significant moment in its institutional maturity. With the organizational merger of Bioversity International and CIAT now consolidated, the Alliance is ready to move beyond co-existence toward genuinely unified ways of working. This means redesigning its operational processes end-to-end
- lean, simplified, and fit for purpose
- and embedding them in a modern, integrated digital infrastructure. The Manager, Business Processes Transformation, will lead this transformation agenda over the coming years.

The first and most significant delivery will be the Alliance Corporate System (ACS) Single Client project
- a strategic initiative to consolidate the Alliance's two separate ERP clients into a single unified system, preserving legal entity separation for statutory reporting while delivering a single source of truth and a consistent user experience across the organization. At its core, this is a business process reengineering initiative: the Alliance will not replicate legacy processes but will use this as a deliberate opportunity to simplify, improve, and future-proof how it works. Beyond the ACS
- Single Client project, the role will continue to support ongoing process improvement, ERP product evolution, and change adoption across the Alliance.

Based in Rome, Italy, the Manager, Business Processes Transformation, will lead the end-to-end delivery and coordination of the program, acting as the central coordination point across all workstreams. The role liaises between the external implementation partner, the Systems Integration team, Data Management and Open Science team and the business stakeholder community, ensuring that design and delivery decisions reflect the Alliance's institutional interests rather than those of any individual entity or vendor.

This is a program governance and coordination role, not a hands-on technical or configuration position. The Manager, Business Processes Transformation, reports directly to the Global Director, Digital Transformation, and is responsible for coordinating delivery, risk, scope, budget, and reporting throughout the project lifecycle.

Key duties and responsibilities

Lead the implementation of the program vision, roadmap, and value case, aligning key milestones to institutional priorities and the Alliance's 2026-2030 Strategy objective of Embody Institutional Excellence.

Champion business process reengineering as the guiding principle of the project, ensuring that process improvement and simplification precede system configuration, and that the Alliance does not replicate legacy inefficiencies in the new environment.

Lead the vendor selection and Request for Proposal process prior to mobilization; manage the external implementation partner throughout the project lifecycle, including performance monitoring, invoice validation, and coordination with the infrastructure team.

Track and report on project budget and expenditure; monitor Business Owner time commitments against agreed allocations and flag risks promptly.

Coordinate the six end-to-end process improvement threads—Opportunity to Impact (funding pipeline, grants and sub-grants, research outputs, and impact reporting), Procure to Pay (requisitioning through supplier payment, supplier master, approval matrix, and accounts payable), Hire to Retire (onboarding through separation, organization structure, position administration, and payroll), Plan to Deliver (multi-year budgeting, planning tool integration, budget execution, and fund checking), Record to Report (general ledger, cost accounting, period close, financial statements, and statutory and audit compliance), and Foundation (master data, chart of accounts, system configuration, access management, integrations, and reporting infrastructure)—across Business Owners and functional teams, ensuring cross-workstream coherence and timely sign-off at each phase gate.

Oversee the data migration strategy in coordination with the Systems Integ