SAP

These are the key questions which were asked when a company interviewed to hire a SAP consultant a few years back.  How much of this has changed today? Now focus has shifted to the following questions besides the questions asked above:

What is your domain experience? How many business transformation projects you have worked on? Which industries you have experience or knowledge in implementing end to end business processes? How is your client engagement and business process consulting skills?

Marked difference has been additional expectation on business process part of the knowledge which was not much in focus few years back. One of the expectations from client today is for SAP consultants to bring business knowledge and experience along with SAP functional/technical skills to do the business transformation programs or rollouts or support. Client organization has a layer of business process experts who play the role of a bridge between SAP consultants and the business. This layer is fast disappearing as client expect this to be performed by SAP consultant as he/she gains more knowledge on client business processes

Key drivers for this expectation are:

·         Client have matured on SAP product understanding and knowledge

·         Same consultants understanding the business requirement, providing consulting on what process will work best for the client and implementing the same in system leads to less iterations and mismatch in what is expected by business and what is delivered

·         More value from the consultant at the same price

·         Reduction in time, effort and cost involved from client organization’s perspective besides reduction in overall cost for such programs

 SAP roadmap is to be seen as its solutions providing end to end support to business process rather than a composite application of multiple modules to support key functions like finance, logistics, controlling etc. SAP business suite applications are all packaged with this aspect in mind.

With this as a background business process knowledge is critical to success for any SAP consultant be it on functional or technical side of the solution. Due to the rapid growth of SAP consulting market, average domain experience level of SAP consultant is coming down as demand for consultants cannot be met completely by experienced people from business joining the consulting. Different companies who provide SAP consulting services are finding different ways to fill up this gap – one of them being by hiring fresh graduates/post graduates from colleges/universities and grooming them on SAP and business process skills.

So how to build domain experience in these consultants in short span of time? How to groom them in a manner to make them more all round consultant – both SAP and domain? Besides that in this changed scenario how existing consultants have adapted themselves and what additional we need to do to meet client and market expectations?

Look out for answers to these questions in the next post.