10 Essential Skills as an SAP Consultant

SAP consulting involves intricate business procedures, code, and data. You need more than technical knowledge to navigate this environment and become a successful consultant. The secret sauce that makes you stand out, develops relationships of trust with clients and produces successful projects is a special combination of hard and soft abilities. Below are the ten essential skills every SAP consultant needs to master in 2024:

1. Effective client management

SAP consultants must quickly adjust to the business users they will collaborate with on each new assignment. They are supposed to take the lead in ensuring that a client’s business processes are mapped into SAP and that the client’s expectations about what can and cannot be done with the system are in line.

2. Time management

Time management is a fundamental yet vital ability for an SAP expert. As a consultant, you will likely be managing several projects at once. You must ensure that every project receives the proper amount of time. As a result, you will become a more productive and effective SAP consultant. Regarding long-term time management, you can use tools like workback schedules and applications like Focus-on.

3. Project management skills

As one advances in SAP consulting, there is a greater likelihood of assuming management or supervisory responsibilities on projects. These positions could involve managing several SAP projects, determining the projects’ profitability, conducting review meetings, and so on. You can differentiate yourself as a professional by improving your project management abilities.

4. Knowledge of latest trends

Considering how quickly SAP is creating new products and services, is one of the most important success factors for an SAP consultant is staying current on relevant sectors of interest and even looking into and utilizing the latent or hidden aspects of existing SAP systems.

5. Cross component integration knowledge

An SAP consultant with cross-component functional knowledge and experience may swiftly determine and direct procedures that fall under the purview of other SAP components. For instance, in SAP Ariba, the procurement process concludes with payment to a vendor for delivered products; this falls under the purview of SAP Financial Accounting. In a similar vein, after a customer’s payment has been handled which is handled by SAP.

In financial accounting, processing sales orders in SAP Sales and Distribution is deemed finished. Due to their cross-component knowledge, an SAP consultant can offer visibility into end-to-end business processes.

6. Problem-solving and technical skills

There will always be low-hanging fruit, change requests, and downsides with projects. Research indicates that, occasionally, this can lead to discord and disagreements in the project’s closing stages. One of the most important skills for the SAP consultant is the ability to debate, disagree, and dispute when necessary.

7. Good documentation skills

When a client has to evaluate a choice made and agreed upon, an SAP consultant with strong project documentation abilities benefits from this. Recording early judgments could make them clearer.

8. Pitching

Proficiency in both written and oral communication is essential for SAP consultants. It is crucial to deliver an excellent pitch that includes all the details required by stakeholders to support you. During your SAP consulting journey, you might be asked to pitch SAP goods to potential customers or, at the absolute least, justify your module’s value to stakeholders.

9. Teamwork

Collaboration is necessary since only some consultants can comprehend every business process and module inside the SAP ecosystem. Consultants for SAP don’t operate in silos. An SAP consultant’s daily work includes frequent cooperation with business users, other consultants, SMEs, etc.

10. Integrity

Unexpectedly, businesses that are implementing SAP systems to prevent internal or external fraud and improve visibility into their processes sometimes seek consultants to suggest immoral or legally illegal solutions. This can involve asking the system to manage under-invoicing to avoid paying customs fees or charging and billing clients a higher price for a product but providing a subpar one.

As a database system, SAP records every transaction and activity that is subsequently available for auditors to review. As such, there is no way for a consultant to mislead or conceal information from auditors. Instead, the consultant must help customers match their expectations.

Conclusion

The ten essential skills every SAP consultant needs to master in 2024 are mentioned above. Working as an SAP consultant can be lucrative yet difficult. Clients differ in strategy, and work culture. Your talents must be regularly refined to stay ahead of the game, win over potential clients, and establish yourself as a professional.

Take the first step towards a rewarding career in the world of SAP. Explore the various certification courses available at ExC Academy, choose a module that aligns with your interests, and embark on a journey towards a successful future.