Business Systems Architect / Integration Lead

Position Summary 

Nextpower is seeking a Manufacturing Systems Product Manager to lead the integration of contract manufacturing partners with our enterprise systems and data platforms. This role will own the business and systems roadmap required to make manufacturing transactions visible, reliable, and actionable across operations, supply chain, finance, quality, and analytics. 

The role sits at the intersection of business process, systems product management, data integration, and manufacturing operations. The successful candidate will understand how contract manufacturing processes translate into system transactions and data, then work with business stakeholders, technology teams, and external manufacturing partners to deliver scalable integrations and trusted operational insights. 

This is not primarily an MES implementation or shop-floor controls role. Experience with MES and factory systems is valuable, but the core requirement is the ability to own business outcomes, define product requirements, lead partner integrations, and build a governed data foundation using Microsoft Azure and Fabric. 

Key Responsibilities 

Product ownership and business process 

• Own the product vision, roadmap, backlog, and delivery priorities for contract manufacturing systems integration and manufacturing data products. 

• Partner with manufacturing, supply chain, procurement, quality, finance, logistics, IT, analytics, and contract manufacturing teams to understand current and future-state business processes. 

• Translate business needs into clear product requirements, user stories, acceptance criteria, process flows, data contracts, and measurable outcomes. 

• Define the system-of-record strategy, ownership, lifecycle, and business rules for key manufacturing transactions and master data. 

• Identify process gaps, manual workarounds, data-quality risks, and opportunities for automation across the manufacturing value chain. 

• Establish common processes and data standards that can scale across partners, plants, products, and regions. 

Contract manufacturing integration 

• Lead the onboarding and integration of contract manufacturing partners with enterprise applications and data platforms. 

• Define integration patterns for APIs, files, batch exchanges, event-based flows, and other partner connectivity methods. 

• Design and document mappings for relevant business transactions, including purchase orders, production orders, material consumption, receipts, work-in-process, finished goods, inventory, quality events, test results, shipments, and exceptions. 

• Establish reconciliation, validation, error handling, alerting, replay, and operational support processes for integrated transactions. 

• Coordinate requirements, design, testing, cutover, hypercare, and production support across internal teams, system integrators, and partner organizations. 

• Create partner onboarding standards, interface specifications, operating procedures, and support playbooks. 

Azure and Microsoft Fabric data platform 

• Define the data architecture and product requirements for capturing, standardizing, and serving manufacturing data for operational support and analytics. 

• Partner with data engineering and architecture teams to implement solutions using Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Fabric, including OneLake, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Data Factory Pipelines, Dataflows Gen2, Spark notebooks, SQL, semantic models, and Power BI. 

• Shape a governed medallion-style data foundation that supports operational reporting, historical analysis, cross-partner comparisons, and future advanced analytics. 

• Define manufacturing data models, business definitions, lineage, data-quality rules, retention requirements, and access controls. 

• Enable operational dashboards and analytics for production status, material availability, inventory, yield, quality, cycle time, throughput, schedule adherence, delivery performance, and exception management. 

• Work with analytics stakeholders to convert business questions into trusted metrics, semantic models, and reusable data products. 

• Promote data observability through monitoring of pipeline health, data freshness, completeness, accuracy, reconciliation status, and integration failures. 

Delivery, governance, and operations 

• Lead cross-functional delivery from discovery through implementation, user acceptance testing, deployment, and stabilization. 

• Manage scope, dependencies, risks, decisions, and stakeholder communications for multiple concurrent initiatives. 

• Establish production support ownership, service levels, incident and problem-management processes, and continuous-improvement priorities. 

• Ensure solutions meet requirements for security, privacy, auditability, resilience, scalability, and maintainability. 

• Use Azure DevOps, Git, and disciplined release practices in partnership with engineering teams. 

• Develop executive-ready status updates, process documentation, solution overviews, data-flow diagrams, and operational metrics. 

• Build strong working relationships with contract manufacturers and hold partners accountable to agreed data, process, and service expectations. 

Required Qualifications 

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems, Computer Science, Engineering, Supply Chain, Manufacturing, Business, or a related field. 

• 8+ years of experience in enterprise systems, product management, systems integration, supply chain technology, manufacturing technology, data platforms, or a related discipline. 

• Demonstrated experience owning technology products or capabilities from business discovery through delivery and ongoing operations. 

• Strong understanding of business process design and enterprise transaction flows across manufacturing, supply chain, inventory, quality, procurement, and logistics. 

• Experience integrating external partners, suppliers, contract manufacturers, or enterprise applications using APIs, files, batch processes, events, or middleware. 

• Experience defining data mappings, interface requirements, validation rules, reconciliation, exception handling, and data-quality controls. 

• Working knowledge of Microsoft Azure data services and Microsoft Fabric concepts, including OneLake, Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, Data Factory, SQL, data modeling, and Power BI. 

• Ability to work effectively with data engineers, solution architects, developers, analysts, business users, vendors, and executive stakeholders. 

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, including the ability to simplify complex business and technical topics. 

• Strong analytical, prioritization, problem-solving, and decision-making skills. 

Preferred Qualifications 

• Experience with Microsoft Fabric implementations, including Lakehouse, Data Warehouse, pipelines, notebooks, semantic models, Direct Lake, monitoring, security, and CI/CD. 

• Experience with manufacturing systems such as MES, ERP, PLM, QMS, WMS, TMS, or supplier/partner portals. 

• Familiarity with manufacturing concepts such as production orders, routings, work instructions, material consumption, genealogy, traceability, WIP, yield, defects, rework, and test results. 

• Familiarity with ISA-95, OEE, manufacturing quality processes, or factory data models. 

• Experience with Azure Data Factory, APIs/API management, event-driven integration, SQL/T-SQL, PySpark or Python, and data warehouse or lakehouse design. 

• Experience delivering operational reporting, Power BI semantic models, manufacturing analytics, or executive dashboards. 

• Experience with data governance, master data management, lineage, data contracts, and observability. 

• Experience leading global partner onboarding, plant rollouts, systems standardization, or manufacturing transformation programs. 

• Experience working with system integrators and technology vendors. 

• Knowledge of cybersecurity and access-control practices for enterprise and manufacturing systems. 

What Success Looks Like 

• Contract manufacturing partners can exchange required business transactions reliably, with clear ownership and rapid exception resolution. 

• Operations teams have timely, trusted visibility into production, material, inventory, quality, and shipment status. 

• Manufacturing data is standardized and available in Microsoft Fabric for governed reporting, analytics, and future AI use cases. 

• Business and technology teams share a clear roadmap, common process definitions, and measurable delivery outcomes. 

• Integration and data products are supportable in production, with monitoring, reconciliation, documentation, and defined service ownership.