IT Application Support Manager

It's hard to imagine that the first Entertainer store only opened back in 1981. Today The Entertainer is the U.K.’s Largest Independent Toy Retailer. We have over 170 UK stores stretched across England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and the islands and we are still growing! We are also partnering with a growing number of retailers to showcase our brand selling our toys in their retail space, and we sell toys online via our website www.TheToyShop.com and other partner channels!

As a business, we own the Early Learning Centre, and Totally Toys brands as well as our own brand Addo Play. Outside of the UK we own the Poly Juguetes toy shops in Spain plus numerous Entertainer and Early Learning Centre international franchise partnerships.

We offer a standard 39.5 hour contract as well as a supportive Blended Working Policy which includes homeworking.

Your rewards will include:

- Birthday Leave plus 33 days holiday (including Bank Holidays)

- Generous Toy Discount

- High Street & Leisure Discounts

- Payroll Giving

- Enhanced Maternity & Paternity Pay

- Cycle to Work scheme

- Profit Related Bonus

- Life Cover

- Pension

Working within our IT Team your main objective will be to manage the Application Support Team. You will be an experienced support manager with a sound understanding of a retail IT landscape and retail business processes. Managing a team of one, you will be required to work closely with the program delivery team and key business stakeholders supporting existing and delivering new IT applications to support business growth.

This role will require an individual with a keen eye for detail coupled with strong diagnostics skills, supported by a technical mindset. You will have excellent communication skills. both written and verbal, that will help support business engagement. Ideally the candidate should come from a retail background and having worked with business ERP, information tools, warehouse management systems and POS.

Responsibilities

• Line Management responsibility for the Application Support Analyst. Work with the IT service manager to deliver continual service improvement
• Working in a second line support function for all business application incidents.
• Oversee the installation and maintenance of software applications in order to streamline business operations.
• Work with 3rd party vendors to understand the core applications in detail and work with them on triage of problems and resolution of incidents.
• Work with all teams at The Entertainer, understanding how they use system, identify their problems and support resolution of reported incidents.
• Investigate issues with data and manage interface problems between core applications.
• Working with the Project team on changes to applications and support the service transition process.
• Drive continual service improvement.
• Take an active part in wider IT support escalation processes as required, including some out of hours support.
• Work with the project team on the setup and maintenance of non-production environments.
• Support the IT service change control processes and attend CAB meetings.
• Informing various stakeholders about any problems with the application sets.
• Create and execute application test scripts.
• Assist in the training of end users and IT support team.

Skills & Experience

1. A minimum 3 years’ experience working in an application support role.
2. Ideally, worked in retail with at least 2 years line management experience.
3. Experience of data reconciliation work and error detection handling.
4. Able to identify the business impact of issues and to prioritise and escalate as appropriate.
5. Experience in IT Disaster Recovery testing and IT capacity management planning experience.
6. Excellent customer service skills and experience of working in a service orientated environment.
7. Ability to prioritise when faced with multiple tasks.
8. Great attention to detail whilst analysing and reconciling the data.
9. Strong knowledge of Office 365 and windows operating systems.
10. Sound knowledge of various applications and databases, including SQL server, Hybris, Unit4, Manthan Scale, JIRA.
11. Understanding of IT security, infrastructure, and governance.
12. Exposure to multi-channel and web-based retail systems.