For a beginner who wants to be an SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement consultant, it is advisable to learn SAP as a user. He/she will become familiar with the nomenclature, screen flows, typical SAP transaction styles, and so on. Once he/she is familiar with the application, he/she can be introduced to customize the standard SAP interface and transactions to make the application specific to the user needs of the customer.
An SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement consultant needs to customize the SAP application as per customer needs and then train the end users so that they can use the customized application effectively. Tasks involved in the customization project includes requirement gathering of user needs for the application, making a blueprint of these needs, making necessary changes (customization) in the standard application, testing the application, and finally installing it at customer premises so that users can start using it. For all these activities, an SAP consultant needs to have expertise and experience so that he/she can be efficient in all these project activities.
Generally, a project team consists of a project manager and SAP consultants. For each module of SAP, there could be a module lead as well if the project is large. There could be a team of SAP consultants under the module lead. For instance, there could be a module lead for SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement and under him/her there could be a team of SAP S/4HANA Sourcing and Procurement consultants.
SAP projects can be categorized as follows:
- Implementation projects
- Support projects
- Roll-out projects
Support projects are the one in which SAP has been already
implemented by the customer and users have now started using it. These
users need technical support on a day-to-day basis. At the same time, for
enhancement or repair of defects, SAP technical skills are required. Similarly,
an older version of SAP implementation may need to be ported to a new version,
which also requires
SAP technical skills. All of these activities are taken
care of in support projects.
Most of SAP implementations are done in a phased manner. First, SAP is implemented at some divisions (legal entity) of any corporate entity where users are ready to use it. Later, other divisions also go for SAP. Implementations at these divisions are covered under roll-out projects. In these projects, the effort required for implementation is significantly lower than that required for SAP implementation at the initial corporate division. It is because, in roll-out projects, most of the features of SAP that are implemented at initial division are simply replicated.
An SAP consultant should know about the environment in which he/she is supposed to work. So, he/she should be aware of the differences among implementation, roll-out, and support projects. Skills required to work on these different kinds of projects also vary as it is evident from the explanation of these kinds of projects outlined above.
