Careers - Spoilt for choice

SAP has become the buzzword of the ’90s; the software package is widely seen as one which can change the global business processes of firms, their customers and their suppliers. What makes it so special, according Paul Witting head of SAP at KPMG, is that it is a multi-currency, multi-lingual application that is self-balancing (it can regulate itself and correct errors in the system). It is able to do what no other application can do and that is integrate different systems from manufacturing to human resources.

“It gives control over decision-making processes, so that people are driving the systems and have a greater degree of responsibility; that is a major culture shock for some companies,” says Witting. “Given the right information in the right form, firms can capitalise and improve bottom line.”

According to the major consultancy and systems implementation houses, SAP satisfies the demands of clients who are pushing for global standardisation.

As a result SAP consultants and implementors have become the most sought-after people on the market and this is a trend that looks set to escalate.

Large IT consultancy firms are vying with each other to recruit and keep their people. Price Waterhouse, which works on large-scale SAP implementation programmes for Fortune 200 firms, has 3,000 SAP consultants worldwide.

It aims to double the number of SAP consultants over the next two years.

Desperation for new people to train up in SAP skills led the firm to do a one-day recruitment campaign recently. Its advert, which reflects the shortage of skilled people on the market, said: “If you can work out the solution, we’ll hire you on the spot.”

Competitors including Druid, the SAP consulting firm, complained about the wording of the advert, which they feared could lead not only to a drop in the standard of SAP consultants, but also a series of large-scale poaching campaigns.

“I don’t want to steal firms’ staff because that cannibalises the market.

I’m in this to expand the supply of SAP consultants in reaction to our multinational clients,” says David Duray, partner in charge of Price Waterhouse’s SAP Consulting Group in the UK. “Although we have speeded up the interviewing process, we have not dropped the quality,” he added.

Duray says that the pressure to supply and recruit the right kind of consultants is taking Price Waterhouse outside Europe, to the US, India and South Africa.

What often fails to come across in SAP recruitment is that consultancies and end-user firms are not just looking for someone who is computer literate, but people who can understand and design business processes.

“Many of the big six firms are looking to grow their SAP divisions, but it is not growth at any cost; these days there is a requirement for business process knowledge, industry knowledge, best practice and industry experience, so there is a much wider brief, not just the technology,” says Paul Robinson, SAP UK practice leader at Deloitte & Touche.

Once firms have found these elusive consultants, talented in developing business processes, with industry knowledge and bags of industry experience, and put them on their standard six week SAP programme, they are keen to keep them on board, increasing incentives and putting up salaries.

The premium paid for a highly skilled consultant can be anything up to 25 per cent more than the average information technology consultant.

At the top end of the market, SAP consultants managing a whole SAP programme and team can earn around the #100,000 mark.

A survey by Hay Management Consultants on remuneration has found that premiums at the top end of SAP consulting hover around the 15 per cent mark. For the less experienced it is only a few per cent more.

The survey suggests that pay varies from firm to firm. It has also found that there is no clear market rate for top-end SAP consultants, with some being very highly paid and others below the SAP premium level.

“One of the interesting things in the survey is a marked variability at senior consultant levels,” says Iain Smith, head of IT consulting in the UK with Hay Management Consultants. “The wild cards are the top end of SAP consultancy, where programme managers and programme directors can get anything between #65,000 and #100,000,” he adds.

The roles that SAP consultants need to play vary from programme managers and directors of international roll-outs, to systems architects, ABAP analysts, technical support analysts and training consultants.

Employment opportunities abound, but although pound signs may flash before your eyes, as Smith points out, only certain types of SAP consultants are really in demand.

Of the 25 consultancies, service and industrial firms that Hay surveyed, the positions that firms had the most difficulty filling were those of the application consultants and configuration analysts. While 61 per cent said they had difficulty attracting these people for permanent positions, 50 per cent found it difficult to keep them.

Project managers also figured high on the list of needs for SAP, with 47 per cent of firms finding them difficult to attract, though less difficult to retain once they had found them (11.8 per cent).

“Configuration analysts and application consultants meet specific needs that the user company has, they are the people who would be at the centre of the programme and bring it all together,” says Smith. “They seem to be in particular demand because they understand how to achieve things with SAP in the business sense.”

SAP the firm, which has set up a training centre just to train its clients up on SAP R/3, and has encouraged a common certification standard among end-users, expects to see growth of between 60 and 70 per cent in the UK, and worldwide it is looking at 30 to 40 per cent.

To sustain that kind of growth, the firm aims to break into retailing.

“We are just about to sign the first three licences with retail customers,” says Petra Frenzel, managing director of SAP UK. “And we have a few customers and suppliers who have just gone live with our Internet Solution.”

The firm has also created an Internet integration tool. Andersen Consulting’s partner responsible for the SAP practice in the UK, Max Mosenthal, says the tool will change the way business is done and create a whole industry of paperless traders: customers, suppliers and end-users on the Web.

Mosenthal believes that the number of people trained in SAP skills will increase hugely over the next few years to deal with this breakthrough into the retail and Internet market.

“There are going to be great changes in the way people do business.

We are going to see transactions being initiated and completed over the Internet, from going to the wholesaler to putting the order onto the Web and paying through electronic transfer,” Mosenthal says.

According to Gartner Group’s senior analyst for enterprise applications, Joyce Boland, high recruitment levels will continue into the beginning of the next century if SAP can achieve over 30 per cent penetration in the retail and Internet markets and keep the competition from Baan, Oracle, PeopleSoft, or newer, quicker technologies at bay. “After the Year 2000, though, demand will start to level out,” she says.