This is the final part of the SAP Training online video series on how to create hierarchies. In this video I will explain what hierarchies are and show you how to set them up in SAP Business intelligence.

Let me know what you think of the video, do you have suggestions on what I should include in subsequent videos? Please leave a comment and let me know.

Today’s post is an interesting one, you have been hearing me rant about my SAP training and module selections for a while now so I decided to shut up and let you guys hear some very good advice from the experts as well.

Who better to hear it from than a 17-year SAP veteran, who is one of the people who moderate the SAPFans forum. She is known as ‘Fish’ to the thousands of SAP newbies and experts looking for advice on the SAPFans forum, here real name Mylène Dorias. She has been an SAP consultant for 17 years, specializing in various modules including Material management (MM) SAP Basis and Security.

She agreed to do an interview and I got to ask her the questions that have been on my mind and on your minds as well. She also gives a reality check to people looking to break into SAP consulting.

Just in case you wondered, when Mylène refers to the ‘Elder race’, she is talking about the member’s moderators on the SAPFans forum who have been doing a great job since 2001. Here is the interview, enjoy.

Tell us a little bit about yourself. what you do? What field of SAP are you involved in?

Currently I am a Basis and Security Admin (SAP) in permanent employment. I have been ‘doing SAP’ for 17 years now, mainly in MM, WM, Basis and Security.

17 years! wow, that is a lot of experience. You must enjoy what you do. Do you?

Of course, I do. Everybody staying in any given job for so long a period would do this only if she/he enjoyed it (always/mostly/sometimes/any given day …).

Can you tell us what is the importance of having a passion in what you to do be able to succeed?

It’s one of the major factors that keep you going, even if success proves difficult at times. Other major factors: persistence; the will to solve problems on your own; the ability to attack problems from different angles; the ability to always learn something new; patience (that being the one buggering me still) …

When/Why did you start up SAPFans?

The ‘when’-part is a bit difficult to answer, since it is no longer traceable and I actually do not remember the year exactly: 1998? 1999? 2000?. The forum crashed in 2002 (see board ‘Announcements) and we all started again in October 2002, which is why you see ‘The Elder Race’ always with a ‘Join-Date’ of October 2002.

The ‘why’-part is much easier. I found this board whilst searching for a solution for a problem which I wasn’t able to solve myself at the time. I stayed and started giving answers to posts, recognising that I know bits that can help other people. Am still here :lol: and a global moderator now :shock:

Who else is involved with SAPFans, who are your partners?

This question is a tiny bit unclear. I do not own this board, I am just a mod. The owner is Rao Tella, last known to live somewhere in the USA. He doesn’t show up in here (except to read his PMs), but can be reached via the admins or PM.

Otherwise involved. Well, the ‘Elder Race’ of course, some of them permies, some of them consultants (freelance or employed), some of them still showing up, others long gone. Since SAP started their own forums a couple of years ago, the traffic in SAPFans has slowed down considerably.

What kind of help do people come to look for on your site?

From basic to expert questions concerning knowledge of functionality in SAP to advise on their careers or studies (certifications). GD (General Discussion) is open for everything else: jokes, games, receipes, banter and sincere, well meant insults :).

So you have experience in MM and Basis and Security, how easy is it to make a sideways move into a different SAP area?

Easy. The high level of integration in SAP software inevitably leads you through several areas (losely attached ones, e. g. setting up netservices (Basis) and making those save (Security) – or closely related ones, e. g. Account Determination (MM/FI) as follow up for Purchase Order Settings (MM-PUR). Once you crossed the border to a related topic, a complete switch-over is possible (sometimes even considered professional)

What is your view on SAP as a company first? and as a career option?

SAP is a company who developed (and persists to do so) a splendid software solution, that is – IMHO – superior to everything else on the market, due to their concept of high integration of every aspect in a business that needs software-based assistance.

On the downside: they have been growing too fast and show the same signs of degrading support, confusing marketing and product policy and arrogance as every other software giant does (e. g. Microsoft). Their efforts to offshore software development was another mistake, IMO since this caused the standards which were stable within the complete systems, to slack. So did the offshored support. They are about to get a grip on this, though.

As a career option. Hhhmmm. I truly think, that there are too many people, trying to make a career in SAP which do

• a.) not qualify
• b.) cheat their way in and
• c.) trying to go to the top without the experience necessary.

Don’t get me wrong: I am sure that there are lots of people who have the education and are trying to get the experience plus working very hard on a solid base of expertise. There are, however, many others. As a moderator of a board you get to see both types, sadly enough, more of the ‘others’.

SAP didn’t help that matter with their ‘Certification-Made-Easy’ policy – but again: they seem to get a grip on this, also. Hopefully time will filter out all the second-rate consultants and developers and leave the real experts. Wait and see.

A lot of people looking to start a career in SAP, for whatever reasons
From your experience, can you tell us what a newbie needs to know, maybe a reality check that it is not all it is hyped to be or maybe it is… let us know

A newbie to SAP needs to know the software in the ‘area’ (module) she/he is working in, down to the last bit and tool. More importantly though: she/he needs to know the business processes of the company/customer exactly. Plus the business needs, of course. Such is not done, coming freshly from a University and having one or more certificates in SAP. This needs years of experience.

The quality of a SAP consultant shows when she/he is able to match the business processes/needs against the software, whilst keeping an open eye on possible future changes whilst trying not to re-invent the wheel.

Custom made developments may be necessary, hence should be expertly designed, flexible for future requirements and done in a way that enables easy maintenance and or portability. This is not done, coming freshly from … see above.

What you call hype, bases mostly on the assumption that one can come out of school, get a few SAP certificates and start earning the big money. Deadly. wrong. In the long run, this will not work out. Experience is the key to being a successful SAP consultant.

Unfortunately, all the ads of SAP-Education and other institutes try to keep this under the carpet. Which gains them the ‘tarnished’ reputation they have now. Sadly enough, there a enough flim-flam operations out there that ride the wave of the SAP hype and cheat unknowing/inexperienced people out of their money for education/certification … which is why we on SAPFans try to convince freshers to gain experience first, certification later.

Still, current worldwide recession or no – I think, a career in SAP is desirable, if one is willing to work extensively on ones knowledge of the software and on the business experience. This takes years. Every type of expertise does.

Coming back to your advice on gaining experience first, certification later. How does one gain experience first? It is not easy these days to get a company looking to hire a fresher. Is it not better to get some kind of training to put yourself ahead of some of the competition.

Yes and no :| Having had (extensive) SAP training without holding a job to which to apply this training is like training for your drivers license without ever having sat in a car – and with much the same result, I guess. Just to stay with that metaphor: there might be some advantage in trainig first – it’ll give you an edge in interviews and so on, but it surely will not enable you to make a perfect U-turn in a 40 ton truck at 70 mp/h on first try. every employer will still know, you’re a fresher.

Maybe we can agree on this line: training -> experience -> certification. The certificate in itself does you no good, it is (in its essence) a piece of paper stating the expertise you have achieved by training+experience. I am not alone in this: most of the ‘Elder Race’ of the SAPFans thinks like this, search the ‘Education’-forum – one example here:

Of course, you are absolutely correct that these days it won’t be easy to be hired as a fresher. These days you cannot even apply for a SAP job without having a University Degree of some kind … for the ‘Elder Race’ this was different – most of us have never seen a University, we came from all other jobs into SAP. So, there’s merit your emphasising the value of training. But. Theory alone will still not help you with that U-turn

That was the interview and I want to say a special thank you to Mylène for giving us her insights. For me it has been very helpful.

Do you have any other questions you would like to ask? Feel free to ask it in the comments and I am sure I can get her to come back and answer them.

If you want to get in touch, Fish resides at the SAPFans forum as a global uber-moderator. She and the others from the ‘Elder race’ will answer any questions you might have on SAP.

I sent an email last week to you, the people subscribed to my blog. I asked you to let me know about any questions you may have on the ‘Beginner’s guide to sAP’ report and also questions on SAP in general. I have received a great deal of responses from you and I would like to thank you all for sending in your questions.

In this post, I will pick some of the questions that came up more than once and publish the answers I gave to the people who asked the questions.Here are your questions.

How do I know which SAP module is in demand?

This is one question which I always see coming up again and again. This does not come as a surprise because the SAP landscape is broad. With more than 25 industry solutions and more than 6 business process solutions, choosing which SAP module to start your career in can be a daunting task.

I did tackle this question in a previous post and I have had a lot of feedback in the comments on that same post. Feel free to go back and read the post but the main points to consider are

• Choose a module that is core to most company’s business processes and
• Choose a module that is needs similar skills to what you currently do or have a passion in doing

You can check for demand using job boards and research agencies. If you live in the UK, you can use ITJobsWatch. I have chosen SAP Business intelligence because it fits into the picture after considering both points.

How can I get hands-on practice for SAP certification?

There were two variants of this question. Some people wanted sample questions to pass the certification tests and some wanted to actually try their hands on SAP software. SAP offers sample questions on their website. Click here for the SAP sample questions. That is a great resource for anybody looking to take certification exams on the topics listed.

Getting hands-on experience with SAP software is also a must if you want to break into SAP consulting. There are companies that offer access to SAP software for a monthly fee. You can find more information in a previous post here. The price range is about $99.00/per month.

Some want to buy SAP IDES images from ebay. This is really not the way to go. Most of those images are either scams or images of really out-dated software. Not to talk about it being illegal. To get the job you want, is $99.00 too much of an investment to make? I don’t think so.

Where can I find affordable SAP training?

This is a question I asked myself a couple of months ago when I was looking to get SAP business intelligence training SAP training from an SAP academy is prohibitively expensive, running into thousands of $$. I found an institute here in London that had a good offer and threw 6 months of SAP IDES access in as well. I took the course and I loved it.

I have decided to develop a training course/study guide that will focus on SAP business intelligence and offer it to a limited number of subscribers of this blog for a massive discount. I am hoping these poeple will help me shape the course into the best SAP online course there is out there. I don’t want to go into too much detail but this is the first time I am announcing it and it is work in progress and if you want to more information,  you will have stay tuned and make sure you are subscribed to my mailing list.

I already have SAP training, how do I get a job?

This is another question that comes up very often. It is hard for freshers to get a job in SAP. There are no step-by-step rules. Let me give you one small tip though.

The world is changing, we are entering into the age where social media is becoming a part of our daily lives. The days of sending out CV’s and hoping that someone calls us for an interview are over. The best way to get a job in this economy is to stand out by getting into a discussion with the people that are working for the companies you want to work for. SAP has a community network SCN where a lot of SAP consultants, employees and newbies hang out. Join the SCN and take part in the forums, answer some questions, build your profile, be the person that is always willing to help.

After a while you will get noticed by people and when you decide to ask these people for a job, they will be happy to help. This is a strategy I am currently pursuing. It is a long term one, but if it takes 3 months to let my CV sit in a public database and wait for calls, I might as well get on networking site and build my profile in the same time.

Update: I just found this very interesting post from David Bann on how to find SAP jobs. There is a lot of useful information in that one post.

Wow, this post has ended up being longer than I expected. There were so many questions that came in and I am sorry if I haven’t highlighted yours here but I am sure I replied to every one personally. Thanks for sending them and please keep them coming. I will answer them if I can. We are in this journey together. You all are the reason why I do this and thank you for your support.

If you have any comments, please leave them below. I look forward to hearing them.

I got an email last week from Jim Stewart about his new book. For those who don’t know who Jim is let me give some background information. Jim is the author of a lot books in the Breaking into SAP series. His books are targeted to newbies in the SAP field and the books help to answer a lot of the questions that newcomers to SAP have.

So back to the new book. It is called SAP training and tutorials : Introduction and Basic skills I was very interested in this information so I went over to his website and bought the book. I would like to give a review and tell you what I think about it.

The introduction

I really like the introduction into the book. The author goes ahead to reveal some issues that newbies face when talking to current SAP professionals about getting training. They always come with a reluctance to release information.

Another issue spoken about in the introduction is the problem of getting initial work experience. Most people you talk to give you the advice of getting a company that will employ you and train you as a way of breaking into the SAP world but these so-called “I will train you” companies are nowhere to be found. The book highlights these issues and more which resonated with me.

SAP GUI Walkthrough

The book then goes into an introduction to SAP and then after that shows you how you can navigate through the SAP GUI which is SAP’s software portal to configure and implement SAP solutions.

I haven’t gone through the whole book yet but till now I am liking what I see. If you want to get the book, you can go over to the SAP Cookbook site. This is not an affiliate link and I am not getting any compensation for referring you. I am just sharing resources I am personally using to get my SAP training.

If you do ge the book, I would like to know your thoughts. Please come back and leave a comment. If you already have some books from Jim or the SAP cookbook site, let us know about your thoughts as well.

You have decided to start a career in SAP, you have heard how rewarding it can be. You have done some research to find out what it takes to become an SAP consultant, now you have discovered there are many career paths you can choose .   FICO, HR, MM, BI, CRM, SCM, SRM. There are too many 2/3 letter abbreviations that you can possibly process in your mind. Now you are faced with the task. How do I choose the best SAP module for me?

In this post I will give you some things to consider when choosing an SAP module for your career. After that I will use this tips to explain on how I chose SAP business intelligence for mine.

Why you must get it right at this stage

Simply because this is where the game is won or lost. You want to give yourself the best chance at succeeding. Some people base their choices solely on how much money they are likely to earn in the future. This is very wrong, why?

Simply because for you to earn good money, you have to be good at what you do, and to be good at what you do, you have to spend time practising and perfecting your skills. For you to want to spend hours in practising a task,  you have to like what you do or at least have an interest in it. So you see from this chain of occurrences, the money comes at the end. You are likely to fall by the way-side before you even get to the money.

Choose a SAP module that compliments your current expertise

Take a deep look at what you are doing now and choose an SAP module that will need those skills, if you are just graduating or have no experience, choose a field that you have an interest in.

If you are a developer, consider starting your career in ABAP, if you can develop in java, that means you already master half the skills necessary to develop in SAP’s web application server Web AS.

Are you are an accountant or studying finance? SAP Financials should be your first module to consider.

Why this is important is because you need to reduce the number of obstacles in your path where you can. You already have the obstacle of having to learn something by getting to know SAP, you do not want to add the other obstacle of learning what a general ledger is if you want to learn SAP Financials with no financial knowledge.

Choose a module in demand

You need to choose an SAP module that is demand. Remember the main goal of this post is to increase your chances of success at the initial stage. Face it, when you get on the job market, you will be competing with other consultants for the same jobs. If there is only one job in the marketplace, the odds are you won’t get that job. Now if there are 500 jobs on the market at that point in time, the odds are definitely better. It is all a numbers game.

SAP SRM has not been in demand and some people might argue that is better to be a specialist and thus your worth is more. I will say this to them, who can be a specialist without mastering the general skills? who can be a dentist without going to medical school?

You are just starting out in your SAP career, so get the basics down and when you are successful you can decide to increase your worth if you specialise in a more tightly focused areas like SAP security.

There are two ways to determine demand. One is to go through your local job board and see which SAP skills are being advertised for. If you are in the UK, you can use ITJobsWatch to determine demand.

Another way is to answer a fundamental question, which companies will need this module? Which departments will use this module.
If you can safely say that almost all companies implementing SAP can potentially make use of the module in question, then you can already determine demand.

Let me give an example SAP financials is a module that all companies can make use of. All companies large or medium sized have a financial department that SAP FI/CO can help optimise. Another good example is human resources, every company has a HR department and that is a reason why SAP HR is in demand

On the other end of the spectrum is SAP SRM which helps largely retailers with lots of suppliers and vendors and helps manage the relationship between the two. SAP Oil and Gas is an example of an industry specific module. The number of companies implementing these modules of SAP will pale compared to SAP Financials.

Why did I choose business intelligence.

I will now take you through the two points I made above and relate that to my choice of SAP business intelligence.

First of all, I am currently a software developer, I develop applications that help make day to day activities easier. I have worked in many industries and I decided for SAP business intelligence because I have a lot of the skills needed in BI. I have done a lot of database work which helps to understand the concepts of data warehousing better. I develop applications that display reports so I can also appreciate the background processing needed to create the reports that BI give you out of the box.

The second main consideration is, which companies can make use of business intelligence and my answer is almost all. BI is a component of SAP Netweaver which is the technology base of any new SAP installation.

Companies implementing FI/CO will need to determine which departments are profitable from the reports that BI produces, those implementing SAP sales and distribution will need to determine which products are lagging, those implementing HR will need to know how many employees are being recruited over time. And the list goes on and on.

Now you have my reasons for choosing SAP BI, please use these tips to choose a module that you can relate to and you can be sure that you can start your SAP career with the assurance that you have thought it out and have a better chance at succeeding at it. I would love to hear your comments on which SAP module you would like to pursue and how you chose it.

I have just completed my SAP BI (Business Intelligence) training. If you have been following my blog for a while now, you would have noticed that I have been posting my notes and I view this as a good way to learn.

I have also noticed that you have to do a lot of practice when learning SAP. If you learn how to play golf, you can get all theory you want, but if you don’t go out and hit some balls, you will never be good at it. Even after you have been on the job for a couple of years, you will still have to do some practice in you spare time to freshen up on the skills which you have not been in contact with on a day to day basis. The amount of knowledge you have to know to master SAP Business intelligence is vast. This should not discourage you from learning. You only have to master the basics and the rest is derived from it. By the basics, I mean reporting, modelling concepts, performance tuning concepts etc.

Apart from learning these basics, you also have to practice because developing BI solutions consists of a lot of hands-on work, which I like. To get hands-on experience in using the software you would need to get access to an SAP server. There are a lot of companies that offer SAP access and I want to give you list of the ones I have come across.

I currently have 6 months of SAP access from the training institute I did my training with but I intend to pay for server access after this 6 months are over. SAP server access is very important to anybody trying to break into SAP because you need to show that you have some initial experience. You don’t want to turn up on your first day and start looking lost.

Here is the list.

• SID members is more on the expensive side, they charge £99.00 per month and £1200.00 per year. They offer access to an ECC 6.0 system. I am not sure if they have BI installed though
• Rent Our Server offers SAP ECC 6.0 and SAP BI 7.0 for $99.00
• IDESAccess offers 3 months of access for $199
• Access to Micheal management’s SAP servers start at $99.00 per month

Update: 09/11/2008 While doing some more research I found another company based in Australia that offer SAP Access. At $49/per month, this is by far the cheapest solution I found.

You really do not need to pay for server access until you have gone through a training course and  you want to sharpen your skills.

If you have any experience with these sites, please let me know.

On a side note, I have redesigned the blog. I added a new header and more importantly I have a report for download. If you are already subscribed, I will send you the report by email and if you haven’t, please subscribe and you will receive the link to download the report.

Let me know what you think of the site redesign.

The architecture of business intelligence databases are not set up in the traditional way. I will explain how it is setup with the use

of a cool presentation platform I discovered. Really cool, but first let’s get the theory behind it.

The classic  star schema

In OLAP systems, multidimensional tables are used for analysis. This is more suitable for reporting purposes.

The classic star schema consists of

• A fact table that stores the data you want to measure.  For examples, the sales amount, sales revenue etc. This table is the only highly normalized table in the system.
• Multiple dimension tables, which store the attributes describing the facts. These tables are de-normalized, meaning they can have repetitive data.

The extended star schema

SAP Business Intelligence has adopted the classic star schema and enhanced it to fit its own needs. The dimensions are now called characteristics and the facts are called key figures.

Characteristics can have texts, attributes, and hierarchies. This concept is now embedded into the star schema.

You can access the customer dimension from the fact table and from there you will be able to access more information about the customer, in this case the text, which are the customer names, attributes like the age, and hierarchies like the department in the customer’s company.

I discovered a company Prezi with a very cool presentation platform. I made a presentation to illustrate the info in this blog post.

You can view the presentation here, Business Intelligence data architecture.

If you like this post and would like to get updates on the BI lessons, please subscribe to my newsletter.
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Today I will be writing about the architecture of SAP business intelligence and the differences between the way data is stored in traditional and BI systems. This is the second post in this series, you can view the first one in this business intelligence class series here

The BI system is modelled as a 3-tier architecture, the data warehouse, the BI platform and the reporting environment.

Data warehouse

The bottom and entry point is the data warehouse which is the interface to the source systems. This is where data is brought into the BI system from all the different data source type like Excel spreadsheets, Oracle databases or SAP R/3 systems.

BI platform

The middle layer is the BI platform, this is where all the data is stored and it is in a format that is suitable for analytical processing, the data is checked for integrity and successful loading.

Reporting environment

The top layer is the presentation layer, this is where all the tools are used to present meaningful information to the user. These tools are called the business explorer tools. Amongst them are the BEx query designer, BEx  Analyzer etc. These tools will be covered in a later lesson

OLAP vs. OLTP

Data in a BI system cannot be stored using traditional formats. Why? Because the traditional way of storing data in relational databases is meant for easy and fast access but not fast enough for analytical and reporting purposes. The traditional way of storing data is optimized for online transactional processing purposes (OLTP), while BI data is stored for online analytical purposes (OLAP).

What are the differences between these two?

Current vs. historical data

The data in OLTP database are up to date in real time while the data in OLAP is historical data since it is used for reporting.

High number of users vs. low traffic

Transactional databases are optimized for simultaneous multi-user access while analytical databases are optimized for large volume of data and lower number of concurrent users

Detailed vs. aggregated

The data in BI systems are aggregated because of their analytical nature. We need to compute maximum values or average values for example and do not need the detailed instantaneous values that transactional databases need.

Read-write operations vs. read only

The data in transactional database can be modified unlike in data warehouse scenarios where the data is being copied over from the source systems. BI data warehouses tend to have copies of online databases in a format optimized for analytical purposes.

Entity relationship vs. Multi-dimensional

The schema used to store transactional databases is the entity model where data is related in a top-down format. Business intelligence warehouses use the multi-dimensional star schema and SAP BI has it’s own version of the star schema which I will cover in another lesson.

That is it for lesson two in this series. The business intelligence topic is very wide and there is so much information I am discovering daily and it is really very interesting. If you like this series, please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

It is widely known that the customer is king, that is a no-brainer. If you want to run a business, the greatest asset your business will ever have is it’s customers. Products come and go, you can replace management, you can replace employees but without the customer, the company is nothing.

In this post, I will explain one of the modules of the SAP Business suite, SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management). You will understand what features it comes with, whether your personal background fits into this module and the salary received by CRM consultants.

What is customer relationship management?

This is the term given to strategies or software that is used to manage the contact between the company and its customers in an efficient way. Here are some of the features a good customer relationship package should have.

1. The company can look into its systems to see which customers bring in the most revenue.
2. What is the demographic of the current customers.
3. Be able to target these customers
4. Generate leads for the sales team
5. The customer should be able to access information on orders or offers that are coming up

SAP has put together a package that claims to take care of all theses needs and more. The software streamlines the tasks of customer  relationship from end-to-end. Here are some of the features that are present.

Accounts and contact management

Have you called your bank, given them your account number and the person on the phone said “Hello Mrs Major, I have all your details in front of me here”? That is a CRM system in action right there. The company can view a list of all customers and drill down with different parameter like age, country of origin, products purchased.

Activity Management

Like a company that supplies coffee machines to offices should know when the customers are running out of coffee and need a refill. The company can focus its energy on following up the customers that are willing to buy or need more supplies.

Service contract management

You also have received a call from you mobile phone company telling you that you contract is about to expire, come and renew it so we can  some more money off of you. This is where all the legal stuff goes on, maintaining service-level agreements, alerts when a contract is about to expire etc.

Is it a good fit for me?

Well as you can imagine, someone with a sales and marketing background will find themselves comfortable in the SAP CRM. But the barrier is lower to break into CRM because it can easily be learned. Imagine having to learn ledger transactions and stuff like the FI-CO (Financial) guys  to do. So don’t feel like it is not possible. This module and Sales and Distribution (SD) are one of easier modules to tackle on your way to becoming a SAP consultant.

Here are some images depicting the state of the CRM market in the UK. Courtesy of itjobswatch.co.uk

From the table you can see that SAP CRM consultants are very well paid. As this series goes along, we shall compare this to other SAP modules. Another factor to note is that the demand has been steady for SAP CRM consultants since 2007 and has actually risen between 2008 and 2009.

In the next post in this series, we shall be looking at other modules like SAP FI-CO, SAP SD (Sales and Distribution) and others. If you have a special request for a module, leave a comment and I can make it the next post.

I will give you three routes you can take to get SAP training. All these routes will lead to SAP certification if you are ready to put in the work required. Remember when you were in school and your teacher always told you  ”Go home and study, it doesn’t end here”…. that is the same thing here. Using any of these SAP training options available to you will not make you pass the certification, you have to put in some personal time as well.

SAP Education

The first way to get SAP training is through SAP directly. You can go to any SAP training partner and pay for a certification course. You will follow tons of courses most of them lasting months and the courses are very thorough. I know of a friend that was sponsored by his company to do a Business Intelligence certification. He was in the course for 6 months.

Here are the pros and cons.

Pros

1. Accredited courses recommended by SAP.
2. You get personal one-on-one Q&A sessions with the trainers
3. The courses are up-to-date with the latest modifications to the certification.

Cons

1. Expensive! If you have about $10,000 to burn go for this option. That is enough to put me off this option

Check out the SAP education website for more information.

Independent SAP training

The second way to get SAP training is through independent SAP training school. These are seminar/classes you can attend and they claim to give you the same SAP training you get directly from SAP but at a cheaper price.

Pros

1. Cheaper than SAP partner education
2. You also get one-on-one training and Q&A opportunities with the trainers

Cons

1. Some of these are really scams and you don’t find out you have been scammed until you get into the first class and you are being shown screenshot upon screenshot of a SAP configuration. That is all the training you get and I don’t know of any with a money back guarantee.

Online e-learning study guides

The third way to get SAP training is through online study guides. You can download these in e-book or presentation format and then do some self study. I will do more research and find out some good ones as this is the option I am planning to use. I will post my findings in a later post

Pros

1. Even cheaper than independent SAP training
2. The content can be referred to over and over again since you now own them.

Cons

1. There are some scams here as well, but you should be able to get through by asking for previews before you buy the product.

One more tip. Some trainers have schemes where you are placed in a company to do some initial projects. This is a good way of getting some experience under your belt. If the SAP training you are considering has a similar scheme, I would recommend that.

Let me know of any other methods you know of achieving SAP training. Leave a comment. Have a nice day!