The Commercial Asset Manager safeguards customer relationships, contractual performance and financial outcomes across SolarAfrica’s renewable energy portfolio, ensuring an excellent customer experience and optimised lifetime asset value.
Position of the job in the organisation:
The Commercial Asset Manager will report directly to the Asset Lead: Onsite
Principal responsibilities:
- Contract management: Manage SPV and customer contracts, monitor and report on obligations and SLAs, provide financial and administrative support, and interpret agreements where disputes or ambiguities arise.
- Customer experience and relationship management: Take over the relationship at deal signature, act as the primary customer contact, resolve issues promptly, and maintain strong relationships through engineering, project delivery, operations and maintenance, including at least four customer visits per year.
- Cross-functional coordination: Lead collaboration with operations, engineering, finance and project development teams to deliver excellent service, coordinate activities, resolve technical issues and improve asset performance.
- Financial management and reporting: Analyse asset performance and financial metrics; ensure accurate, timely business, customer and stakeholder reporting; complete customer billing by the third business day of each month; and support budgets, forecasts and financial reports.
- Asset optimisation and data management: Work with the Technical Asset Manager to establish and track KPIs, improve maintenance strategies, increase uptime and efficiency, reduce downtime, and maintain secure and confidential project data.
- Health and safety: Comply with all applicable fire, health and safety requirements, attend required training, and act in accordance with policies and risk assessments.
- Perform any other duties associated with the role or any other reasonable request by management.
Experience & Skills
- Bachelor’s degree in finance, management, law or a related field.
- At least three years’ proven experience in customer management, preferably in an asset-based business.
- Strong contract interpretation and management capability, with a sound understanding of financial management, budgeting, forecasting and reporting.
- Proficiency in MS Office; experience with CRM, asset management, monitoring or reporting systems is advantageous.
- Valid driver’s licence and willingness to travel for customer visits.
Specific attributes:
- Strong customer orientation with the ability to build trusted relationships and resolve issues promptly.
- Demonstrated contract management experience, including monitoring, reporting and financial and administrative support.
- Financial management capability across budgeting, forecasting, billing and performance reporting.
- Leadership, cross-functional collaboration and clear stakeholder communication.
- Analytical problem-solving, attention to detail and a proactive continuous-improvement mindset.
- Strong technology-savvy and digitally driven approach to reporting, monitoring and workflow efficiency; practical use of AI and automation tools is advantageous.
Desirable attributes:
- Experience in the renewable energy or Solar PV industry.
- Experience in an asset-based industry such as utilities, mining or real estate.
- Experience using HubSpot or another CRM platform.
What Does Success Look Like?
By 3 Months
- I will have completed onboarding into the AM operating model, systems, reporting cadence, customer portfolio, key stakeholders, and the commercial obligations linked to the assigned contracts.
- I will have reviewed the assigned customer contracts, PPA timelines, SLA obligations, ASR and service-fee requirements, arrears position, renewal dates and key risks, with a clear tracker in place for follow-up actions.
- I will have established communication channels with key customers, Funds, Finance, O&M, Engineering and Projects, ensuring clear ownership, expectations and response timelines for customer and portfolio matters.
- I will be able to produce accurate first-pass customer and internal reporting using available monitoring, CRM, finance and document-management systems, with improvement opportunities identified for efficiency and quality of output.
By 6 Months
- I will be actively managing the assigned portfolio with clear ownership of customer matters, contract obligations, SLA tracking, HubSpot tickets, arrears follow-up, billing timelines and reporting deliverables.
- I will have built credible working relationships with key customers and internal stakeholders, conducting structured customer engagements and driving issues to closure through effective cross-functional collaboration.
- I will be preparing consistent asset management reports covering performance, maintenance activity, contractual obligations, financial metrics, risks and actions, with data quality issues escalated and resolved timeously.
- I will have implemented practical improvements to workflows, trackers, systems use or reporting templates to reduce manual effort, improve accuracy and support better customer-facing responses.
By 12 Months
- I will be able to demonstrate measurable improvements across the assigned portfolio, including customer relationship health, SLA compliance, HubSpot closure discipline, billing accuracy, arrears recovery, reporting quality and asset performance visibility.
- Together with the Technical Asset Manager and relevant departments, I will have embedded a consistent asset management framework with clear KPIs, reporting mechanisms, escalation routes and customer communication standards.
- I will have identified and implemented long-term actions that improve portfolio value, customer trust, contractual compliance, operational efficiency and the sustainability of the customer portfolio.
- I will be seen as a dependable owner of customer and commercial matters, able to use contracts, data, systems and cross-functional relationships to drive matters to closure and protect SolarAfrica’s commercial outcomes.
Core Values:
We hire, reward, and recognise our team against these values. It is imperative that you believe in these values and demonstrate them consistently.
- We are passionate and proud of what we do.
- We communicate candidly, especially when it is difficult
- We take the initiative, share our mistakes, and grow together
- We are dependable and take accountability
- No one person is bigger than the solution - no egos.
We are currently only considering candidates based in South Africa with valid working rights. Unfortunately, we are unable to consider applications from outside the country at this time.
