Product Expert, PLM and ERP

Product Expert, PLM and ERP

Brooklyn, NY; Washington, DC

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

The Role: Product Expert PLM and ERP

Altana's mission is to fix globalization. At the heart of that mission is a problem most enterprises know intimately but haven't been able to solve: the systems that define, source, build, and ship products don't talk to each other — and the cracks between them are where compliance breaks down, duties are miscalculated, and supply chain risk hides in plain sight.

PLM systems know what a product is designed to be. ERP systems know what was ordered and built. Trade and logistics systems know what was shipped and declared. In theory, these should tell a coherent story. In practice, the products these systems model diverge, lack granularity or were stylized in a way that makes the changing face of globalization break down. The as-designed BOM, the as-sourced BOM, and the as-built BOM diverge — silently, constantly — and nobody finds out until a shipment is held, an audit is triggered, or a forced labor allegation surfaces three tiers deep in a supply chain no one has fully mapped.

It doesn't have to be this way.

Altana's Product Passports represent a fundamentally different model: a structured, continuously maintained product identity that spans the full lifecycle — from design intent through physical production and across international borders. Imagine a world where an enterprise's bill of materials, component origins, supplier relationships, and classification logic are maintained as living, collaborative records — so that when a commercial invoice becomes a customs entry, the data flows automatically, the classifications are defensible, and the compliance posture is built into the product itself, not reconstructed after the fact. Where the gap between a SKU in an ERP and a line item on a CBP entry is closed not by manual rekeying, but by a product model that was right from the start.

As Product Expert for PLM and ERP, you will be the domain authority who helps Altana build this future. You've lived inside these systems — implementing PLM platforms, configuring ERP workflows, tracing the broken handoffs between product engineering, procurement, manufacturing, and trade compliance. You know exactly where the seams fail. Now you're ready to stop patching them and build the solution.

You will work at the intersection of deep enterprise systems expertise, product strategy, and modern AI tooling — translating what you know about how PLM, ERP, and trade systems actually interact into product experiences that make the complexity invisible and the compliance automatic.

What You'll Do

Reimagine the Product Data Lifecycle

• Own the product vision for how Altana's Product Passports serve as the connective tissue between PLM, ERP, and trade compliance systems — replacing the fragmented, snapshot-in-time data handoffs that define enterprise product data today.
• Define how the as-designed, as-sourced, and as-built views of a bill of materials are reconciled and maintained over time — and what it means for trade compliance when they diverge.
• Design the workflows that allow enterprises to propagate product changes — new suppliers, substitute components, revised country-of-origin determinations — continuously across their commercial documents, classifications, and regulatory filings.

Close the Gap Between Product and Trade

• Own the product vision for how structured product data flows from a SKU definition through a commercial invoice, advance ship notice, and customs entry — automatically, accurately, and with full audit trail.
• Identify where manual, error-prone processes (data re-entry between systems, BOM-to-invoice reconciliation, HTS classification at the line-item level) can be automated, validated, or eliminated entirely through a well-modeled product identity.
• Build the case — with data, customer evidence, and working prototypes — for prioritizing the integrations and automations that unlock the most compliance value.

Turn Systems Expertise into Product Requirements

• Translate your firsthand experience with PLM implementations, ERP configurations, and the broken handoffs between them into concrete product features your engineering partners can build.
• Define how Altana captures the product model — components, materials, suppliers, origin determinations — in a way that is rich enough to support trade compliance, flexible enough to reflect real-world manufacturing variance, and structured enough to be machine-readable.
• Serve as the internal authority on how enterprise product data is created, versioned, and consumed across the supply chain lifecycle, keeping product decisions grounded in operational reality.

Build Collaboratively with AI

• Use AI tools to prototype workflows, generate explanations, and rapidly test ideas with customers and engineers — before a single line of production code is written.
• Think creatively about where AI can eliminate friction at the PLM-ERP-trade interface: extracting structured BOMs from unstructured documents, reconciling as-designed vs. as-built discrepancies, recommending classifications from component-level data, or flagging origin risks before a shipment is tendered.
• Champion a culture of "show, don't tell" — use demos, mockups, and AI-assisted visualizations to align stakeholders and accelerate decision-making.

Partner Across the Ecosystem

• Engage directly with enterprise product engineers, trade compliance teams, procurement leaders, and ERP/PLM administrators to deeply understand their workflows, pain points, and workarounds.
• Work with government-facing product teams to ensure the enterprise product data model is designed as the complement to CBP's enforcement and facilitation tools — so that what an importer knows about a product is what regulators need to see.
• Collaborate with engineering on API design and data schemas that connect PLM platforms, ERP systems, logistics networks, and Altana's Product Passport layer in ways that feel seamless — not like another integration project.

Who You Are

You know these systems from the inside. You have spent 5+ years working with PLM and ERP systems in an enterprise manufacturing, sourcing, or trade compliance context — not as a software vendor, but as someone who had to make them work together. You've traced a component through a multi-level BOM, watched the as-sourced reality diverge from the as-designed spec, and dealt with the downstream consequences in procurement, manufacturing, and customs.

You understand the full product-to-shipment data chain. You know the difference between a SKU, a BOM line, a purchase order, a commercial invoice, an advance ship notice, and a customs entry — and you understand precisely how data integrity breaks down at each handoff. You've seen what happens when an ERP item master doesn't match what's actually being shipped, and you know why that matters for trade compliance.

You're a systems thinker. You don't just know the configurations — you understand why the architecture works the way it does, where the seams fail under real-world conditions, and what a genuinely better version would look like. You're frustrated by friction that has been normalized and energized by the opportunity to fix it at scale.

You're tech-enabled and AI-curious. You don't need to write code, but you're comfortable talking to engineers about data structures, API design, and integration architecture. You use AI tools actively in your own work — to draft, prototype, analyze, and explain. You're excited about what automation and machine learning make possible at the intersection of enterprise product data and global trade compliance.

You communicate with clarity and conviction. You can explain a BOM reconciliation problem to an engineer who has never worked in manufacturing, and explain a data integration architecture to a trade compliance officer who has never opened an API spec. You write clearly, prototype quickly, and bring people along.

You're a builder, not just an advisor. You're ready to move from identifying problems to owning their solution. You want your fingerprints on a product that changes how enterprises connect their internal systems to the demands of global trade — not just a deck that describes it.

Preferred Qualifications

• 5+ years of hands-on experience with PLM and/or ERP systems (SAP, Oracle, Teamcenter, Windchill, Arena, or equivalent) in a manufacturing, sourcing, or trade compliance context
• Deep familiarity with bill of materials structures — multi-level, configurable, and as-built variants — and how they are created, maintained, and consumed across the product lifecycle
• Working knowledge of how product data flows into commercial documents: commercial invoices, packing lists, advance ship notices, and customs entries
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