Ajinkya Apte

About Me

I am a highly motivated senior servant leader with a strong belief in agility and an agile mindset. Currently, I lead the Commercial Platforms and Delivery at Imperial Brands PLC, where I manage the commercial technology vision, commercial IT portfolio, and product management. My role involves partnering with business units to drive innovation and deliver impactful IT solutions.

My career began at Persistent Systems Limited, where I developed corporate and technical skills by supporting international clients. I then joined Heineken’s International Graduate Program, gaining experience in IT strategy, projects, and operations. I later managed the Office 365 suite and service management for Europe, and led Agile transformation initiatives to enhance time to market and customer collaboration.

At Upfield, as Head of IT for South-West Europe, I aligned IT strategy with business priorities, driving global program execution and delivering impactful IT solutions. Throughout my career, I have demonstrated strategic thinking, business partnering, and a commitment to global delivery, fostering innovation and leading teams to meet evolving business needs.

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Experiences

Driving the strategic vision, execution, and leadership of global commercial technology platforms and program delivery.
Shape and execute strategic IT roadmaps in collaboration with Sales, Trade, and Digital Marketing, ensuring technology investments drive measurable business value.
Define and lead the Product and Platform vision for B2B and B2C, aligning technology roadmaps with a three-year business strategy and enterprise priorities.
Oversee the global commercial IT portfolio, ensuring the successful delivery of scalable, high-impact solutions that meet evolving business needs.
Provide strategic leadership to architects, platform leads, and delivery teams across Product Development, Platform Implementation (Programs), DevOps, and Support.
Foster strong partnerships with strategic vendors such as Salesforce, commercetools, and Optimove, identifying and implementing the right solutions to drive competitive advantage.
Establish and govern agile methodologies, engineering standards, and delivery frameworks to optimize execution and ensure value-driven outcomes.
Lead and manage outsourcing partnerships, ensuring alignment with strategic objectives and effective execution of the commercial technology roadmap.
Advise and support the VP of IT Commerce in shaping a 3-5 year strategic vision for commercial IT, driving innovation and operational excellence.

I led the IT strategy and operations across seven markets (Netherlands, Belgium, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Cyprus) and three factories (Netherlands, Portugal, and Greece). I serve as a strategic business partner, ensuring alignment between IT and business priorities while driving the execution of global programs and delivering impactful IT solutions.
Oversee the IT strategy and service delivery across South West Europe, managing all IT operations for the markets and factories, and ensuring alignment with business objectives.
Act as the primary IT point of contact for business units, fostering strong relationships with four General Managers and three Factory Directors, ensuring that IT solutions effectively meet business needs.
Serve as the strategic liaison between the business and global IT transformation projects, supporting the seamless divestment of Upfield from Unilever and ensuring successful project execution.
Lead efforts to drive business innovation by leveraging technology to create value, working closely with leadership to identify and implement opportunities that enhance operational efficiency and business growth.
Manage business IT demands to ensure that all technology projects are delivered effectively, meeting business goals, and adding tangible value.
Contribute to central IT cost management and take responsibility for managing local IT costs, ensuring that budgets are optimized and aligned with business priorities.
Proactively identify opportunities to enhance IT services, continuously improving processes and ensuring IT solutions support the efficient and effective operation of the business.

Lead work stream to create agile delivery organisation
Do portfolio planning/Big room planning and help setup OKRs with Portfolio Managers
The set-up of the actual product team (including structure governance and Agile ways-of-working
Enabled Product Owner in Initiating, Preparing and Launching Product and Product teams
Set up escalation mechanism (e.g. sponsor)
Identity relevant budget lines and navigate budget governance to obtain ownership over this budget
Change management around adoption and transformation towards agility
Setting up to DevOps teams

Responsible for Application support service management for portfolio of 8 million
Lead Agile implementation project for ERP and BI/BO application support service for region and successfully decrease new development delivery time from 60 days to 20 days- Approx team size 20
Held Service reviews and acted on Pro-active & on- requests to European operating companies
Monitor supplier performance and liaise with supplier to ensure pain point are address and SLAs are green
Drive regional service improvement initiatives
Acted as a SPOC for escalation within Europe region for Application support and managed stakeholders in European Operating companies IT teams
Help drive negotiation with liaising with multiple senior stakeholder and with supplier to bring saving of 2mEUR

Was responsible for creating technology roadmap for Office 365 cloud solutions
Worked as an application manager for Microsoft collaboration platform (office 365 - Sharepoint OneDrive Teams Delve )
Managed continuous improvement projects to improve process and technology to enable people
Lead projects for system maintenance project( ERP and Non -ERP systems)- approx team size 10-15 FTE
Managed outsource team (5 FTe) to ensure delivery is made as per agreed SLA

International Graduate Program

Heineken International

September 2013 to March 2015

Full-time

Amsterdam

Netherlands

"The IGP is built around three six-month assignments which are designed to provide intensive and contrasting learning experiences. This is quite a challenge for the individuals involved: every six months, they have to establish themselves in a new country, start a new job and embed themselves in a new team."
"For the 2013 edition, 15 International Graduates have been selected out of more than 22.000 applications around the world"
Worked on various IT and non-IT functional areas such as performance mgmt, financial /business analysis and change mgmt
In Nigerian Breweries ,Acted as local project manager and did activities such as change management , stakeholder management , planning ,budgeting for SAP roll out.Created and executed user training as well as change awareness strategy
In CEE regional office, work as IT business analyst

I was responsible for the requirement interpretation and implementation of solution for critical modules
I worked on the projects that would automate presale /post-sale activities of services of one of the Reputed US based company
Participate in requirement analysis, risks analysis and worked with Business Analysts for User Acceptance Test (UAT)

Education

Essentials of Growth growth marketing Deep dive into the cutting-edge growth processes, frameworks and mental models used by fast growing companies and their people.

Unique Master’s program in International Business to provide international companies with graduates who have both international business and management skills,with cross-cultural competencies

Learn more

Demonstrates an advanced level of Scrum mastery. PSM II certificate holders show an understanding of the underlying principles of Scrum and can effectively apply Scrum in complex, real-world situations.

This course has been designed by the University with senior industrialists in the Electronics & Telecommunication field. The career paths followed are diverse ranging from electronic product design to heavy electrical plant maintenance, from technical focus to customer focus.

Skills

Salesforce Consumer goods cloud
Salesforce.com
Salesforce marketing cloud
Salesforce Experience cloud
Saleforce loyalty management

Digital Delivery
eCRM
Consumer data platform
Personalization
Azure DevOps
eCommerce (Commercetools)

Professional Scrum Master

Expert
Scaling Agile Frameworks

Advanced
Creating CI/CD /DevOPS teams

Advanced
Lean KanBan

Good

Project Management (Prince 2 certified)

Prince 2 certified

Good
Change Management

Advanced
Budget Management

Advanced
Performance Management/ Dashboard creations

Advanced

Change and release management

Expert
Supplier management

Advanced
Application support

Expert
Contract Management

Expert
Incident and Problem Management

Expert
SLA management

Expert

Google analytics/tag manager
Design thinking/ personal Canvasing
Usability Hub

Office 365 - SHarepoint , One drives , Team , Delve

Good
Oracle DBA

Good
Appian -Business Process Management tool

Good
MS Excel-advance

Advanced
Java/Java scripts

Good

English-Proficient
Dutch- Beginner
Hindi-Proficient
French-Beginner

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Open for opportunities

Head of Commercial Platforms and Delivery (Sales & Trade and D2C eCommerce)

Head of IT (South-West Europe)

Agile Transformation Lead

Head of Service Management (Europe)- Business Applications

Business Application Manager

International Graduate Program

Software /Solution Engineer

Certified Growth Hacker/Growth Marketing Immersive

Growth Tribe

MASTER IN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS (MIB)

GEM/ Grenoble Graduate School of Business ,Grenoble France

PROFESSIONAL SCRUM MASTER

Scrum.org

B.E.(Electronics and Telecommunication)

University of Pune/ Maharashtra Institute of Technology ,Pune India

IT Sales and Trade

Digital and eCommerce

Agile and DevOps

Project and IT Management

IT Service Management

Growth Hacking

Technical

Language

Sports

Music