Water Dcs Project Manager - Automation

Group overview:

Headquartered in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, we operate construction and manufacturing businesses, design & development centers and a host of facilities in the Middle East and other countries.

alfanar is involved in:

• Electrical, electromechanical and civil engineering construction
• Manufacturing and marketing electrical construction products
• Allied engineering services

Our main divisions:

• alfanar electric
• alfanar construction
• alfanar building systems

alfanar electric

alfanar electric is the industrial arm of alfanar, manufacturing a variety of low, medium and high voltage electrical construction products.

alfanar electric operates industries in:

• Riyadh and Jubail, Saudi Arabia
• Dubai, UAE
• London, UK

alfanar has a development and engineering center in Chennai, India.

Industrial complex, Riyadh

The center of alfanar’s industrial activities is alfanar Industrial Complex situated in the Third Industrial Zone on Al-Kharj Road, Riyadh.

Spread across 700,000 square meters, the complex houses alfanar’s facilities.

The complex has a comprehensive infrastructure including a data and communication center as well as a commercial zone.

Job purpose

Lead the end-to-end delivery of complex water DCS and automation projects, ensuring the successful integration of control systems, software, hardware, and third-party packages. Ensure projects are delivered safely and in accordance with contractual requirements, approved budgets, schedules, quality standards, profitability targets, and customer expectations.

Functional responsibilities

Project delivery management

• Lead projects from contract handover through engineering, procurement, production, integration, testing, commissioning, acceptance, and warranty support.
• Establish execution plans, schedules, responsibilities, governance, and performance targets.
• Ensure projects meet approved scope, schedule, budget, quality, safety, profitability, and cash objectives across multiple sites and teams.

DCS & automation solution delivery

• Oversee the delivery and integration of DCS, SCADA, PLC, RTU, communication systems, control panels, instrumentation, and third-party packages.
• Manage brownfield requirements, including legacy migration, phased cutover, redundancy, minimum downtime, and operational continuity.
• Ensure delivered solutions are reliable, maintainable, and compliant with customer and operational requirements.

Commercial & contractual management

• Monitor project revenue, costs, profitability, billing, cash collection, and financial forecasts.
• Manage contractual obligations, variations, claims, change orders, and commercial risks.
• Protect the company’s commercial position and report project performance, risks, and opportunities.

Customer & stakeholder management

• Act as the senior interface with customers, consultants, operators, and other key stakeholders.
• Lead progress meetings, steering committees, risk reviews, and action tracking.
• Manage expectations, escalations, design changes, acceptance requirements, and customer satisfaction.

Cross-functional & partner management

• Lead coordination across engineering, procurement, planning, production, quality, finance, project controls, testing, and commissioning.
• Manage technology partners, system integrators, subcontractors, suppliers, and site-service providers.
• Define responsibilities and interfaces, monitor performance, and ensure timely resolution of delivery issues.

Risk, quality & compliance

• Manage technical, operational, commercial, contractual, quality, and HSE risks throughout the project lifecycle.
• Ensure compliance with customer specifications, contractual requirements, applicable standards, and internal governance.
• Maintain accurate project documentation, risk registers, progress reports, and management updates.

Testing, commissioning & handover

• Oversee FAT, SAT, integrated testing, commissioning, and system-performance verification.
• Ensure technical issues, punch-list items, and customer observations are closed within agreed timelines.
• Coordinate training, documentation, spare parts, customer acceptance, and transition to warranty and after-sales support.

General responsibilities

HR proficiency:

• Ability to recruit, recognize and cultivate high performers and expose them in order to create a robust second line of management.
• Ability to recognize low performers and guide them to improve or release them.
• Ability to treat subordinates equally without any discrimination.
• Assessment criteria of subordinates is performance that leads to planned results.
• Ensure availability of delegation of authority matrix to have sufficient delegations as per company policy.

Responsibility:

• Must take full responsibility for his operation as per the job description and the required deliverables from this position, taking into consideration the general company guidelines.
• Able to anticipate problems and make the necessary proactive steps to prevent them.
• Ability to take necessary and proper timely decisions.

Delivery:

• Deliver the required results in timely manner with required quality and cost.

Making a tangible difference:

• Must make a tangible difference to his area of operation and exceed business expectations.

Business planning and performance:

• Able to transform the corporate goals into business plans.
• Able to plan, follow-up and execute those plans, whether they are annual or development plans.
• Monitor the plan performance and initiate action to strengthen results and take the corrective action accordingly.
• Provide periodic work progress reports.
• Responsible for monitoring and controlling budgets and expenses to achieve the optimum cost efficiency.

Organizational development:

• Develop the organizational structure according to the current requirements taking into consideration future and development plans.
• Ensure availability of job descriptions for all job roles and deployment.

Business process improvements:

• Develop, coordinate well-defined written systems, policies, procedures, and seek automations opportunities as much as possible.
• Should be conversant and able to navigate through IT solutions especially those relevant to his job and business.
• Promote the automated systems and using them fully, to spread its culture.

Quality:

• Quality is considered as alfanar’s prime competitive advantage as such, managers are expected to act accordingly.

Adaptation:

• Adapt to new and alternative techniques, technologies, management structures, and business models.

Health, safety and environment:

• Ensure a safe, secure, and legal work environment as per the standard regulations.

Qualification

Bachelor in Electrical Engineering or any relevant field

Experience

6 to 10 years

Skills

• Project control
• Project change management
• Project engineering
• Project management