SAP Boom is Here to Stay (Part Two)

By Sam Sliman
President, Optimal Solutions Integration

The SAP consulting industry is doing well and there are a multitude of factors sustaining the robust environment. In Part One of this four-part article, I examined SAP’s solid fiscal performance, growing market leadership, and the large volume of pending SAP ERP upgrades. In this second installment, I examine another key reason why the SAP boom is here to stay: An SAP Implementation Never Really Ends.

Before SAP customers choke on that statement, let me explain. SAP customers rarely deploy the entire SAP suite to all employees in a big-bang approach. Yet, regardless of the initial scope, improved operational efficiency, reduced costs and discernable ROI are immediate upon implementation. Any experienced SAP professional will attest to the fact that implementation is just the beginning of an SAP journey. Realizing the full value of an SAP investment is an iterative process that plays out over the long term.

This is not to say that an SAP implementation fails to deliver value. To the contrary: implementation proves the value of the SAP platform and leaves SAP customers wanting for more. And the dynamic nature of business-evolving technologies, heterogeneous IT landscapes, globalization and M&A activity-necessitates that changes in the business be reflected in the backbone that enables them – the SAP suite.

Continuous Business Process Innovation

“Continuous business process innovation” is now and will continue to be SAP’s mantra. Unquestionably, the vast majority of process innovation happens after mission-critical infrastructure-such as SAP ERP-has been installed and configured. Today and for the foreseeable future, realizing maximum value on an SAP investment necessitates mapping out a sustainable evolutionary path of process improvement.

With the core of SAP ERP stable through 2010 and SAP’s new upgrade practice of issuing multiple, tightly focused functional enhancement packages firmly in place, SAP customers have unprecedented visibility and stability, which quickens the pace of process innovation and frees SAP customers to innovate without fear of obsolescence.

Integrating multiple enterprise applications and various internal and external users into a new or improved process constitutes the heart of nearly all business process improvement initiatives. SAP pros with technical and functional skills in SAP modules such as FI, BW, HR, MM, and SD, among others, will remain in high-demand over the next several years as companies strive to unleash the full potential of the data stored in these core applications.

While the scope of business processes well suited for streamlining and innovation is virtually unlimited, processes particularly ripe for improvement include those that are dynamic and complex and involve a variety of people across different business units and functional departments. Tackling this complexity requires consultants with a mastery of both enterprise technology architecture and global business process design and execution.

Dubbed Business Process Experts (BPX) by SAP, these individuals effectively straddle both the IT and business worlds, combining business insight and IT know-how to bring business process innovation to fruition quickly and routinely. The SAP BPX community is presently 100,000 members strong, and it is safe to assume that SAP consultants with proven business process expertise will have little difficulty finding work on choice SAP projects for many years to come.

When one considers the inevitable wave of migration to service oriented architecture, and to SAP’s particular flavor of service-oriented architecture, called Enterprise Services Architecture (ESA), the argument for a sustained robust environment for SAP consultants grows exponentially stronger.

SAP’s has long been at the forefront of the SOA wave, and today virtually all SAP applications run on the SOA-ready NetWeaver platform. I will examine SOA’s contribution to the SAP boom in greater detail in the next installment of this four-part article, but for now, suffice it to say that SAP pros with demonstrable NetWeaver experience will fare particularly well over the next decade as SAP’s SOA game plan takes hold.

Lastly, because business process innovation hinges heavily on the effective use of quality data, and because today’s highly dynamic business environment replete with frenzied M&A activity creates a virtually unending need for the integration, consolidation and simplification of increasingly heterogeneous IT landscapes, SAP consultants with master data management (MDM) experience and systems integration expertise can expect to remain in strong demand for some time.