High-Demand SAP Skills

By Gary Hart
Vice President of Operations, Optimal Solutions Integration, Inc.

In today’s challenging and competitive SAP consulting market, top-paying opportunities abound for SAP consultants with the right blend of experience and skills. But exactly which SAP skills are in the highest demand? And what are the technology and business trends driving the demand for these specialized skills?

According to a report from Foote Partners LLC, SAP pros with skills related to Web-enabled analytics, management apps and radio frequency identification technology are seeing some of the most lucrative jobs. Foote Partners maintains that a current spike in innovation initiatives, ROI imperatives and compliance mandates is compelling more companies to seek out experts in specific SAP modules rather than general ABAP developers or Basis administrators.

To be sure, a strong focus (and documented experience) on a hot SAP module holds far greater market value than general SAP skills, and SAP consultants are well advised to continually sharpen their specialized skills with ongoing education and cutting-edge projects.

But to help keep themselves in the hot zone, SAP consultants also should have a good understanding of the technology and business trends shaping the market. For example, the high-stakes battle currently being waged between SAP and Oracle speaks volumes about what technologies businesses are spending on and, consequently, what areas of SAP expertise are likely to be in high demand over the next several years.

AMR Research predicts the enterprise applications market to grow from $47.8 billion in 2004 to $64.8 billion by 2009. In the same report AMR also notes that SAP and Oracle-- the undisputed ERP heavyweights--have steadily bitten off market share positions in Customer Relationship Management and Supply Chain Management.

The overall CRM market is clearly on the rebound, and SAP's CRM product is becoming progressively more sophisticated. Oracle, on the other hand, needs time to integrate the Siebel product into the Oracle Suite. This gives SAP a great opportunity to consolidate and increase its CRM market share, and affords SAP CRM consultants a ‘high-demand’ market advantage.

Any area of supply chain management is on fire right now as companies try to get their global supply chains updated, online and synched with customers, partners and suppliers. SAP and Oracle continue to dominate the large enterprise supply chain management market. But whereas SAP’s SCM product has evolved and matured organically to include advanced components such as Auto-ID infrastructure and Advanced Planning Optimization, Oracle’s SCM offering is an as yet unsolidified cobbling of three distinct SCM products--PeopleSoft, J.D. Edwards, Oracle--designed by three different companies to address three fundamentally different SCM challenges. The upshot for SAP SCM consultants? Safe passage to future earnings while Oracle customers tire of waiting for the outcome of project ‘con-Fusion.’

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