IT Manager – Applications Operations Center of Excellence (COE)

Overview

Join Reynolds Consumer Products…and Drive Your Career across a world of opportunities! We provide amazing job opportunities for growth with competitive salaries and benefits in an exciting, dynamic, fast-paced, and high-performance organization. Are you looking to build a strong career? Then we have an opportunity for you! We are searching for an IT Manager – Applications Operations Center of Excellence (COE) to join our team located at our headquarters in Lake Forest, IL.

Responsibilities

Your Role 

 

Reynolds Consumer Products is seeking a strategic and hands-on IT Manager to lead our Applications Operations Center of Excellence (COE). This role is pivotal in ensuring operational stability, continuous support, and performance optimization of enterprise applications. The successful candidate will provide leadership across application support functions, focusing on system monitoring, functional improvements that align with business priorities, and ensure our applications portfolio effectively supports business objectives.  This role will support application operations across both corporate environments and business operations locations, including manufacturing plants, distribution centers, and warehouse facilities. 

 

You will have the opportunity to Make Great Things Happen!

Application Support Leadership:

• Lead the Applications Operations COE, ensuring the reliability, performance, and availability of critical business applications across the enterprise.

Monitoring & System Health:

• Implement and oversee proactive monitoring tools and dashboards to maintain real-time visibility into application health, performance, and usage trends.

Incident & Problem Management:

• Act as the primary escalation point for major incidents and recurring issues. Coordinate cross-functional teams to ensure rapid incident resolution and root cause analysis.

Operational Readiness:

• Ensure applications and systems are operationally ready for production use, including adequate monitoring, alerting, documentation, and support structures.

Vendor Oversight:

• Manage relationships with third-party application support providers, ensuring SLA adherence, timely system upgrades, quality delivery, and alignment with internal support processes.

System Lifecycle Operations:

• Own the operational aspects of system lifecycle management, including upgrade planning, patch management coordination, and operational impact assessments.

Cross-Location Collaboration:

• Work closely with teams in corporate offices and business operations sites (e.g., manufacturing and warehouse environments) to ensure application performance and support align with operational needs.

Compliance & Operational Governance:

• Ensure all operational support processes align with corporate governance, risk, and compliance requirements, including audit-readiness and control effectiveness.

Continuous Service Improvement:

• Identify and drive improvements in application support processes, automation, performance tuning, disaster recovery planning, and incident response.

Operational Metrics & Reporting:

• Develop and track KPIs to measure system availability, incident resolution times, and operational efficiency, providing transparency to IT and business leadership.

 

You will love it here if…

• You put safety first, always.
• You listen, learn, and evolve.
• You are passionate about collaboration, teamwork, and achieving shared goals.
• You treat all people with respect, operating ethically, and embrace inclusivity.
• You are committed to improving our impact on local communities.

Qualifications

We need you to have:

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, or related field.
• 8+ years of progressive IT experience, including at least 4 years in operations or application support leadership.
• Experience supporting enterprise applications in both office and operational environments (e.g., factories, warehouses, logistics centers).
• Strong experience with system monitoring, alerting, and incident management platforms.
• Familiarity with SAP systems, particularly S/4HANA, is highly preferred.
• Solid understanding of ITIL frameworks and operational best practices.
• Proven success managing external vendor