Implementation Consultant

Job description

**Implementation Consultant** **About Upshop** Upshop is the leading provider of a unified SaaS platform built to simplify and optimize food retail operations. Our solutions connect forecasting, ordering, inventory, fresh operations, DSD, production planning, task management, eCommerce, and store execution workflows to help retailers improve sales, reduce shrink, optimize labor, and deliver exceptional customer experiences. Serving thousands of stores globally, Upshop partners with grocery, convenience, and food retailers to transform operational excellence through technology. **Position Summary** Upshop is seeking an Implementation Consultant to lead customers through the successful deployment and adoption of Upshop solutions. The Implementation Consultant serves as a trusted advisor throughout the implementation lifecycle, helping customers translate business and operational requirements into solution configurations, data requirements, integration designs, testing plans, training, and deployment activities. This role combines consultative customer engagement, retail operational knowledge, structured implementation delivery, and hands-on technical problem-solving to achieve measurable customer outcomes. The ideal candidate enjoys solving complex business challenges, collaborating directly with customers, and leveraging technology to improve retail operations. Experience in grocery, convenience, food retail, or related retail operations is highly valued. **Key Responsibilities** **Customer Engagement & Business Consulting** - Serve as a primary customer-facing resource throughout implementation projects. - Build trusted relationships with customer business leaders, operational stakeholders, and technical teams. - Conduct discovery sessions to understand customer processes, operational workflows, business objectives, and success criteria. - Provide consultative guidance on industry best practices and solution adoption. - Facilitate customer workshops, design sessions, testing reviews, training sessions, and implementation meetings. - Help customers align business processes and operational workflows with Upshop solutions. - Support change management and user adoption initiatives to drive long-term customer success. **Solution Configuration & Implementation Delivery** - Configure Upshop applications according to customer requirements and implementation plans. - Execute implementation activities across discovery, configuration, testing, deployment, launch, and hypercare phases. - Document customer requirements, configurations, business processes, and implementation decisions. - Validate solution configurations and ensure alignment with customer objectives. - Manage implementation deliverables and ensure assigned activities remain on schedule. - Identify project risks, dependencies, and issues and escalate appropriately. - Support customer readiness activities leading up to launch and go-live events. **Data Onboarding & Technical Implementation** - Partner with customer business and technical teams to collect, validate, transform, and onboard customer data into the Upshop platform. - Guide customers through data onboarding strategies utilizing APIs, flat file integrations, middleware solutions, and other approved integration methods. - Work with customers to map source system data to Upshop requirements and validate successful data ingestion. - Assist with data cleansing, validation, troubleshooting, and ongoing data readiness activities. - Support integrations involving ERP, POS, inventory management, forecasting, ordering, DSD, production planning, eCommerce, and other retail systems. - Collaborate with customer IT teams, third-party vendors, and Upshop Engineering resources to ensure successful system connectivity and data flow. - Troubleshoot configuration, integration, workflow, and data-related issues throughout the implementation lifecycle. - Validate customer data feeds and integration workflows to ensure accurate business outcomes following implementation. - Interpret customer requirements and translate them into software configurations, integration requirements, and implementation recommendations. **Technical Expertise** - Develop expertise across Upshop products, workflows, and retail operational use cases. - Develop working knowledge of APIs, REST services, JSON payloads, data structures, integration patterns, middleware platforms, and cloud-based technologies. - Maintain familiarity with Microsoft Azure technologies, including Azure SQL, Azure Cosmos DB, Azure Blob Storage, Entra and related data concepts. - Plan and execute functional, integration, regression, hardware, workflow, and launch-readiness testing, and support customers through user acceptance testing. - Partner with Product, Engineering, Support, and Customer Success teams to resolve customer challenges and improve implementation outcomes. **Continuous Improvement & Innovation** - Contribute to implementation playbooks, documentation, training materials, best practices, and reusable implementation assets. - Capture lessons learned and recommend improvements to implementation methodologies and delivery processes. - Identify opportunities to improve customer onboarding experiences and implementation efficiency. - Leverage AI-enabled tools and automation technologies to improve documentation, testing, customer onboarding, knowledge management, and project execution. - Share expertise and mentor newer team members as implementation experience grows. **Required Qualifications** - Bachelor's degree or equivalent combination of education and relevant experience. - 3+ years of experience in software implementation, consulting, professional services, retail technology, or a comparable customer-facing solution delivery role. - Strong written and verbal communication, presentation, facilitation, documentation, and stakeholder-management skills.