Hot SAP Skills Advice to Advance Your Career Tips

Business Objects (BO) was a blockbuster SAP acquisition, especially given that SAP acquires very few companies. BO provides immediate opportunities for consultants who have BO (or Crystal Reports) skills to work with end users who are trying to achieve integration with SAP without waiting for the official SAP-BO product integration in 2010 or so. This practice is a niche area but, since so few good consultants are active in it, there’s a lot of opportunity for a select few for at least the next year and possibly longer.

BO consultants should think strategically. Stand alone, BI is pretty much dead; realistically, your choices are between working in SAP or Oracle BI environments. BO specialists should assume that the Crystal Reports functionality will be folded into SAP, because SAP’s BEx tool doesn’t have the same functionality or loyal following as Crystal Reports. As a long-term possibility, think about BO’s query tool, Polestar, as a source of an expanding SAP skills opportunity in the years to come.

Business Process Expert (BPX) is the latest certification direct from SAP. SAP is very, very selective about getting involved in certification, so you should sit up and take note of the importance of BPX. Currently, the certification walks consultants and other interested parties through the ins and outs of service-oriented architecture (SOAs) and elements of business process management (BPM) that apply to SAP products and environments. But that’s just a beginning. You can expect BPX to start adding in other curricular components soon, especially as SAP is itself increasing described as a business process enablement platform rather than a set of discrete ERP software tools.

In terms of middle- and long-term changes to jobs in SAP, process is where it’s at. If you’ve made it to wherever you are on the back of technical work, you’re on thin ice. Pretty soon, the tech stuff may be a commodity, and the real value will lie with people who understand how business processes work, and how SAP can support them.

Don’t think communication is a hot SAP skill? See how easy it is to find a consultant who doesn’t talk "consulting-speak," who can talk to clients in business terms, who is well-spoken, and who can write good documentation. A consultant is, in addition to being someone who configures products and implements methodologies, someone who talks and listens to end users. If you haven’t noticed, finding steady SAP consulting jobs is getting more and more difficult, and one of the last true lines of differentiation between consultants is how well they communicate.

The best communicators know how to listen, and they also know how to discuss complex matters without jargon. These skills don’t come easily or naturally. Very few people are empathetic, and even fewer people take the trouble to make their own language simple and explanatory. If you need help with this concept, just think of yourself as a doctor who needs to develop a good bedside manner with clients, and work with an SAP recruiter to get better. You are not on a job to toggle switches, but also to interact with clients. Communicate well for jobs in SAP, and they will love you.

FI/CO, or SAP Financials, is the bread and butter of ERP. There are sub-modules involved in this product, such as CO-PA and CO-PC, and some attending complexity because FI/CO ties into HR, manufacturing execution, and a number of systems. There’s also the undeniable fact that being steeped in the world of accounting and financials will make you more likely to turn FI-CO into a hot skill for you. In other words, don’t expect to be able to "pick up" FI/CO if you don’t have the necessary background, and aren’t willing to steep yourself in this product (particularly CO) deeply.

However, if you’re already a FI/CO person, know that this domain is going strong. Your next move might be to move up from the FI/CO team into FI/CO module leadership, a move with which an SAP recruiter can help you to make. FI/CO typically saves end users a lot of money, and it will look great on your resume to be able to claim achievements of that kind.

SAP Human Capital Management (HCM) is hot for a couple of reasons. Firstly, end users love this product, and adoption has been growing steadily for years. Secondly, becoming expert at SAP HCM is easier than becoming expert at SAP consulting jobs like FI/CO, which requires more deep functional expertise.

HCM has been unexpectedly strong, given that a lot of companies see HR as a cost center rather than a strategic opportunity. However, particularly for big companies, there are a lot of regulatory and legal issues pertaining to employee management that keep driving demand for HCM. There is also an increasing number of organizations that are using the opportunity provided by the downturn to focus on enhancing the skills and development of employees—who are, when you think about it, the last real competitive advantage a business can muster now that everything from IT to cost arbitrage is a commodity. That testifies to HCM’s staying power in the SAP universe.

Admittedly, “interfaces” isn’t a discrete skill, but it’s in this list to make you think about the vast (and largely untapped) potential of creating interfaces between SAP and other products, to say nothing of other platforms, such as mobile devices. Functionally-oriented consultants, and consultants who are more comfortable with processes than code, can skip this recommendation, which is also here to demonstrate that there is room in the marketplace for the technologically-oriented SAP consultant.

Coca-Cola is one of the many companies that is doing business with SAP in a way that combines various devices and platforms. There will be many other customers who go down this path, because everything is getting connected, more machines are talking to each other, and more people need to access and manipulate data in more media. That means plenty of opportunity for someone who understands good interfaces and how to build them—which is, right now, only a small and select group of people. In some cases, an interface expert can create his or her SAP consulting jobs out of thin air.

NetWeaver is SAP’s platform. It isn’t going away. However, lots of SAP customers still haven’t made the switchover to NetWeaver, creating long-term jobs in SAP in this domain. For example, NetWeaver is probably going to be the preferred platform for BI/BO integration, although some SAP customers may go with a Business Objects-only strategy in the absence of a working SAP PI environment.

NetWeaver is a platform, not a module. There’s a lot you can do with it, and a lot of specific focus areas for consultants. The trick is to examine NetWeaver to discover which aspects of it already resonate with your skills. Is it business intelligence? Is it pure integration? The more you learn about NetWeaver, the more likely it is that you can either turn an aspect of it with which you are already comfortable into a hot skill, or else make a decision to leap into NetWeaver. On a parting note, bear in mind that BI remains barely exploited by many companies, so any NetWeaver skill that ties into BI could be hot for years to come.

Production Planning (PP) is another one of those SAP modules that some observers expected not to be doing as well as it has done, at least in terms of paying fairly decent rates compared to other jobs in SAP. However, Production Planning is still around and going strong. SAP’s planning and optimization tool hasn’t cannibalized PP. To make this point is not to recommend that you should leap into PP out of the blue. It’s more of a suggestion that, if you have PP skills, you should be aggressive about exploiting them and not listen to the reports of PP’s demise. That said, you’d still be pretty smart to make some lateral moves into SD/MM, to say nothing of advanced planning and optimization, as a hedge against the day that PP does start to fade.

Remember that consultants try to be on the cutting edge while end users are, more often than not, further back on the curve. PP might be functionally superseded, but it still makes sense for a lot of less-sophisticated end users (and they're out there in droves) to implement it.

Solution Manager is one of those rare SAP products that does exactly what it sounds like it does. It manages SAP, all the way from implementation to post-live service requests (it makes sense to think of Solution Manager as part of the same conceptual package as the Run SAP methodology, by the way).

If you had an impression of Solution Manager as a commodity product that did boring monitoring work, you’re way off. The new Solution Manager is a dynamic product that provides deep and broad visibility into, and control over, SAP environments, allowing for all kinds of value-adds: smoother help requests, faster implementations, better diagnoses of problems, etc. In fact, if an end user doesn’t use Solution Manager properly, they might not even get a response to help queries—that’s how important Solution Manager is. The bottom line? Solution Manager is now strategic, and learning more about it could give you an edge in picking up SAP trainer jobs over those who haven't caught up yet.

There are a lot of product and functionality angles into the supply chain. There’s supply chain management (SCM), supply chain execution (SCE), warehouse management systems (WMS), optimization, logistics, integration with track-and-trace technology, etc. For that reason, only the very rare consultant can be called a “supply chain expert”; however, such consultants are worth their weight in gold.

For the rest of us, focusing in on a particular supply chain area within SAP is a good strategy, as the supply chain is always important. For example, in times of plenty, supply chain presents expanded logistics challenges, and in tougher economic times SCM can be used to squeeze costs out of the supply chain. Try the SD/MM combination to become a master of the extended supply chain functionality within SAP. Then look at supply chain optimization as a popular, and under-utilized, tool that can situate you right at the heart of supply chain strategy. Work with SAP recruiters to understand the module- and vertical-specific opportunities in this domain.