It’s been a while since I posted to the site, I have really missed doing that. The reason for the short absence is that I have been working hard on a new project in the last 2 months. It is a website that promises to give a lot of valuable information to newbies looking to get into SAP.
You can check out the site here. SAP Unveiled

What will you get from  SAP Unveiled?

Let me give you some background information on why I started SAP Unveiled. I have been getting a lot of questions about how to get break into SAP as a newbie without experience. So I decided to do some research.

• I spoke to current SAP professionals to get their advice on getting your first SAP job.
• I also spoke to career experts on what it takes to get a job in an field where you have little or no experience.
• I have also done some in-depth reearch into the techniques you can use to secure SAP jobs.

What came out of these research have been explained in the articles and videos you will find on SAP Unveiled.

Please click over to SAP unveiled now to get a teaser of what you will get from the site. Make sure you remember to sign up for the series of articles with a valid email address and you will also get notified when SAP unveiled is launched.

I will still continue to provide free high-value tutorials on SAP Business Intelligence on this site
in case you are concerned that it will stop but I have seen two groups on this site, if you are looking
for tutorials on SAP business intelligence, this is where to be. But if you are looking for information
on SAP career guidance, SAP Unveiled will best serve you.

Click here to see the free articles that will be released before the site launches next week.

Thank you for your support, it has been a great motivator for me to continue to give you valuable
information.

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.

Imagine being the CEO of a small company that has just sold $3,000,000 dollars worth of products. Good times have come and they are here to stay. Now you are hoping to replicate or better yet top that success in the next year. What do you do? Use the same tactics as this year? Wrong. There is no guarantee that the same tactics used this year will provide you with the same tactics next year.

So what do you do? You analyze the data you have gathered this year, find out which areas of your business has been profitable and focus on them. The areas in which have been lagging will be improved upon or if they can’t be helped, thrown out altogether to be replaced by new vision.

Problem is you have terabytes of data spread amongst different platforms to look at. how do you make sense of it all?

Enter Business Intelligence.

What is business intelligence?

This is the practical solution that any business intelligence software should solve. SAP offers their software which is part of the Netweaver technology. SAP Business intelligence is just one among others like SAP Enterprise Portal and Web Application Server.

The features of SAP business intelligence are

1. Extraction of data from various platforms and importing them into one business warehouse database
2. Store this information in structures that are effective and easy to access
3. Access the data and present it as a visual representation that is more user-friendly
4. Present analysis tools that can be used to explore the data.

The benefits of using such software are not limited to

1. Making sound decisions from better analysis of large chunks of data
2. Able to take targeted actions

What background do I need to be a Business Intelligence consultant?

On the soft side, I recommend you have good analytical skills. Knowledge of databases will be very advantageous also. But in general, if you have a passion for modeling and understanding how business decisions are made, this is a good module to invest your career in.

SAP Business Intelligence is one of the new technologies that SAP rolled out as part of the Netweaver suite and boasts of about 12,000 installations. As more and more, companies embrace the cutting edge of SAP technology, then the demand for consultants in the field will only increase.

Demand

From the images below courtesy of itjobswatch.co.uk, the demand for SAP BI consultants has been rising steadily. There has been a sharp drop this year but hey, what hasn’t dropped this year. We all know the economy hasn’t been too great, to put it mildly. But in the words of Warren Buffet, you invest when there is blood on the streets. Invest in your education now so when the market picks up, you are better positioned to take up those jobs.

P.S I am starting a SAP Business intelligence course this weekend and I will posting my notes to people that are subscribed to my mailing list. If you want to also get the notes of the course for free, then enter you email address in the form on the right and there you will get in direct to your inbox

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.