Manager, Business Systems and Data Management at Sunrise Farms – Surrey, North Dakota

The Manager, Business Systems & Data Management leads the operation, continuous improvement, and transformation of Sunrise's enterprise applications (ERP, WMS, MES, CRM, QMS) and the data platform. This role balances reliability with change—owning intake and prioritization, enhancement delivery, and data governance so that trusted information and stable systems enable day-to-day operations and strategic decisions.

This is first and foremost a delivery leadership role. The ideal candidate is a proactive, organized leader who builds accountability, drives execution, and removes blockers—not someone who defaults to doing the technical work themselves. Technical understanding is valued, but the priority is building and leading a high-performing team that delivers measurable business outcomes.

Delivery Leadership & Execution

• Own the delivery engine: establish and run a disciplined delivery cadence (intake, prioritization, sprint planning, demos, retrospectives) that produces predictable, high-quality outcomes.
• Set clear team and individual OKRs; track progress, remove blockers, and hold the team accountable for commitments.
• Manage competing priorities across enterprise applications and the data platform; make trade-off decisions and communicate them transparently to stakeholders.
• Drive a culture of "done is better than perfect"—iterate quickly, learn from delivery, and continuously improve velocity and quality.

Relationship Building & Stakeholder Enablement

• Build deep, proactive partnerships with Sales, Finance, Quality, Supply Chain, HR, and Operations leaders; maintain a regular cadence (intake, prioritization, roadmap reviews) to align systems and data outcomes with business priorities.
• Act as executive-facing point of contact for system health, data governance, and roadmap status; translate technical topics into business impacts and decisions.
• Drive change management—communications, training, and adoption plans—for each release and initiative; improve data literacy across teams.

Enterprise Applications: Run & Enhance

• Own day-to-day reliability, SLAs, and incident/problem management for all enterprise applications (ERP, WMS, MES, CRM, QMS); ensure monitoring, root-cause analysis, and preventive actions are in place.
• Lead a disciplined enhancement lifecycle: demand intake, scoping, solution design, configuration, integrations, UAT, release, and post-release stabilization.
• Govern environments and change control (dev/test/prod), including release calendars, regression suites, and documentation/runbooks.
• Coordinate with vendors and integrators (e.g., ERP implementers, WMS/MES partners); manage statements of work, backlogs, and performance against SLAs.

Vendor & Partner Management

• Serve as the primary IT relationship owner for external vendors, integrators, and consultants; manage SOWs, deliverables, and escalations.
• Hold vendors accountable to timelines, quality standards, and SLAs; conduct regular performance reviews.
• Coordinate across multiple concurrent vendor engagements, ensuring alignment on dependencies, scope boundaries, and shared milestones.

Data Platform & Governance

• Oversee the enterprise data platform (e.g., lakehouse) and analytics enablement; ensure standards are in place for data modeling, pipelines, and access.
• Lead master data management (MDM) and data quality—ownership, definitions, validation rules, reconciliation, and stewardship operating rhythms.
• Establish governance policies (security/privacy/retention/lineage) and certify BI assets; ensure metadata and documentation are maintained.
• Partner with the analytics community to drive a governed self-service model in Power BI; promote reusable semantic models and certified datasets.

Team Leadership & Development

• Build, coach, and retain a high-performing team (application/business analysts, integration/MDM specialists, data governance and analytics enablement).
• Create clarity of roles and responsibilities across IT, business, and vendor resources; evolve the operating model as Sunrise matures.
• Maintain an integrated systems-and-data roadmap with clear OKRs and KPIs; run a transparent backlog and quarterly planning process.
• Invest in team development—structured onboarding, capability growth plans, and a culture of learning and accountability.

Transformation & Cross-Functional Delivery

• Lead initiatives such as QMS implementation, IoT integrations/automation, M&A onboarding, and cross-departmental process optimization with measurable outcomes.

• 7+ years in Business Systems, Data Management, or IT operations, with 3+ years leading teams in a delivery management capacity.
• Track record of delivering projects on time and on budget across enterprise application portfolios (ERP, WMS, MES, CRM, or similar).
• Experience managing external vendors and integrators—SOWs, SLAs, escalation, and performance management.
• Proven ability to stand up and run delivery disciplines: intake, prioritization, backlog management, sprint/release cadences, and stakeholder reporting.
• Experience with or strong understanding of data governance, MDM, and modern data/BI platforms (enough to lead the team, not necessarily do the work).
• Excellent stakeholder communication and executive presence; ability to translate technical topics into business language.
• Respected and credible leader of analytical and technical professionals—earns trust through clarity, accountability, and follow-through

• Food manufacturing or discrete/process manufacturing experience.
• ITIL, PMP, or Agile certifications (SAFe, Scrum Master, etc.).
• EDI and integration platform exposure (e.g., Boomi); API and event-driven patterns familiarity.
• IoT and automation exposure.
• Process mapping and continuous improvement (Lean/Six Sigma) experience.
• MBA or equivalent business education.

• Relationship-first leader who balances empathy with accountability; excellent facilitator and communicator.
• Organized, detail-oriented, and documentation-strong; comfortable in ambiguity and rapid change.
• Bias for action—able to triage, decide, and iterate while maintaining quality and controls.
• Delegates effectively—empowers the team to own technical execution while maintaining visibility and accountability for outcomes.