The Heart of SAP Careers: Understand the Vital Role of an SAP Consultant

Let Me Show You What a Day in the Life of an SAP Consultant is Like

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Too long to read :

• SAP consultant is the most common and demand job in the market

• The SAP functional consultant daily journey

• What skills are required for the success of a SAP functional consultant

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Today you will join me on a journey to explore the exciting World of SAP Consulting.

Many people, especially fresh graduates tell me that they want a SAP job. 

The problem is that they don’t really know what they want, wether it fits their profile or not, whether they will be able to achieve it or not and whether they will enjoy it or not...

I know many categories of SAP jobs. Functional consultant, technical consultant, developer, analyst, trainer, project manager, project director etc. But the so far the most common and demanded SAP job in the market is the “SAP Consultant”. I will take you through the Functional SAP Consultant journey since it has been my life for a couple of years 😅

SAP functional consultant role description:

As a functional consultant your mission is to ensure the SAP customer* will be using the system in the right way to align with their business.

* SAP customer refers to the company who purchased an SAP solution from you or the company you are working for (SAP partner or integrator) and for whom you will be doing the SAP implementation project.

Your main tasks will be:

• Understand users’ requirements and document them in what we call blueprint. It needs to be validated together with the customer.

• Setup the business processes in the SAP system to match the requirements

• Train the users on the features needed to achieve their daily job and align with the customers' strategy.

• Analyse the gaps between the requirements and what SAP can do or cannot do. We call it gap analysis. Needs customer validation as well.

• Find and propose alternatives to be validated by the key users*. I would say this is the most critical part of the job since it impacts the project over the long term. And this is why we are called consultants. We always must be able to provide alternatives.

*A key user is someone from the customer’s company who knows well their business processes and will be consulted every time a decision needs to be taken. They will be trained in order to train the end users: their colleagues from the same department for example.

• Ensure customer's data is imported in SAP. This is called data migration and includes master data and transactional data.

• Prepare and run unit, functional and integration tests with the relevant users. This is about testing what has been set up to see if it gives the expected results. Most common scenarios must be included to identify potential issues.

• Ensure end users are trained by key users. Assist the key users for that. Document the training materials.

• Go-live assistance: support end users (onsite or remotely) during the 1st days/period of using the new SAP system in real life with real data. For instance most of the times, customers require assistance during the 1st financial closing. When the company does the 1st closing, it’s a great milestone, it means that the system has been setup correctly to be able to live with it.

• Punctual User assistance and change requests* management later on.

*Change requests refer to a change in the system required by the customer and that was not initially in the blueprint/gap analysis. It needs both parties validation and is a paid service in general. Depends on what has been agreed in the consulting contract.

What skills are required to be a successful SAP functional consultant?

As per my experience (but somebody else might tell you the opposite), you need to have and/or enhance 3 types of skills:

• Business process understanding. To me this is the most critical skill for this role! This will depend on which SAP module(s) or SAP solutions you will work on. For example understanding accounting or logistics or procurement etc. Note that in some small SAP solutions (like Business One) you might have to do the full end to end implementation, hence you’ll touch all the customer’s company’s business processes.

• Basic IT skills. Needed to know how to access the system, how to identify bugs and how to do basic troubleshooting. Can also be needed to modify certain functionalities or customise the system and create reports. trust me even in the SAP world, MS Excel is always needed :)

• Soft skills: To me this is the most difficult one because it depends on your personality and is key in your career path success or failure. You need to be able to understand what does your customer need. And if they are not able to express their requirement correctly you need to let them do it correctly otherwise you will be implementing wrong things. You need to stay calm when the customer is unhappy or when you don’t have immediate solutions or answers. Never give an answer on the spot if you don't know. Never commit if you are not sure, even under customer's pressure. This will make the difference between a good and bad consultant. To stay professional you should say: “I need to check and will get back to you/confirm by X hours/days/weeks etc.”

That’s all for today ❤️.