Director of Technology

This position is on site in Jessup, MD 5 days a week.

The Director of Technology is the single accountable owner of technology at Alliance Material Handling. This role sets and maintains a multi-year technology roadmap covering software, security, data and the skills required to run it, leads the evaluation and implementation of our next ERP platform, builds the data and integration layer that everything else depends on, and brings artificial intelligence and automation into our operations as a working capability rather than a series of demonstrations.

The role also owns the project discipline by which all of it gets delivered.

This is a build role. Alliance runs fourteen systems with limited integration, a core ERP that offers no project accounting, and a $210M Warehouse Solutions business that manages job costing, WIP and milestone billing in Excel. We have improved in most of these areas over the last several years, but almost always through brute force, meaning more people, rather than technology.

The first requirement for this role is not deep technical expertise. It is the ability to run complex, cross-functional projects to completion and to map and redesign the processes underneath them. We are looking for a program leader who is technically fluent, not a technologist who also manages projects.

• Technology Strategy & Roadmap
  • Own and maintain a multi-year technology roadmap covering software, data, staffing and skills, aligned to where the business is going rather than where it has been
  • Consolidate technology ownership that today is shared across several executives, and serve as the single point of accountability for technology decisions and outcomes, including networking and security
  • Bring recommendations to the leadership team with costs, risks, payback and a phased plan, and be accountable for delivering what you recommend
  • Maintain a prioritized, quantified backlog of technology investments and revisit it as the business changes
• ERP Evaluation & Implementation
  • Run an evidence-based evaluation across candidate platforms, scored against documented business requirements and customer demands
  • Own the relationship with the current ERP vendor, including support obligations, end-of-life exposure, licensing and renewal pricing
  • Lead implementation once a platform is selected, including scope, sequencing, budget, data migration, testing, training and cutover
  • Inherit and build on a completed third-party assessment and an open recommendation rather than starting from a blank page
• AI & Automation
  • Build and maintain a prioritized, quantified AI and automation use‑case backlog tied to specific processes and dollars
  • Take a small number of use cases into production and prove value in hours and dollars rather than demonstrations
  • Establish guardrails for data security, accuracy and human review before any use case reaches production
  • Report results honestly, including the use cases that do not work and should be stopped
• Data, Integration & Reporting
  • Retire Excel as the reporting layer for job costing, WIP, milestone billing and other core processes
  • Establish a single source of truth for operational and financial reporting across both the dealership and Warehouse Solutions businesses
  • Reduce the share of finance and operations time spent assembling data rather than analyzing it
• Vendor & Partner Management
  • Select, scope and manage software vendors, implementation partners and development partners and own the relationship with our existing 3rd party help desk, network and security vendor and ensure effective support across the organization for a competitive cost
  • Hold partners to delivery against written acceptance standards and dates, renegotiate scope where needed, and end relationships that are not…