August, 2008

Who’s majoring in SAP this semester?

My car and I moved at a slow crawl along the Massachusetts Turnpike on my commute home the other day, much of the road clogged by students heading through Newton, Mass. back to the many Boston colleges.

Between marveling at how much a college kid can fit into a Civic and punching the radio station buttons in an effort to keep my mind off the gridlock, I thought about, of all things, the SAP skills shortage.

The shortage made its way back into the news this week with a new AMR Research report .The report raised the idea that the shortage could present a competitive edge for Oracle and Microsoft. Small and mid-market AMR Research clients have been rating “availability of resources,” higher and higher on their ERP selection criteria, and, because SAP skills are in short supply, SAP’s losing out, the author reasons.

One of SAP’s plans to solve this shortage is its University Alliances program. SAP is training college professors so that they can teach computer science, engineering and business students to use, run and develop SAP software.

I wondered if any of these University Alliances programs were in place here - in college-rich Massachusetts, home to prestigious MIT, and a $1 billion project of Gov. Deval Patrick’s aimed at making Massachusetts the country’s leading biotechnology state. There are currently 573 open SAP jobs here, at least according to Monster.com.

Turns out, there’s three SAP partnerships at three good schools here -Suffolk University in Boston, Western New England College in Springfield and Bentley College in Waltham.

To be honest, I’d hoped for more. But three isn’t a bad start out of the 900 SAP has worldwide. SAP plans to increase this count by 200 over the next few years, and I for one hope that it chooses to form more partnerships here in the Bay State, and in other states like Michigan and Illinois, where the shortage is so severe.

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor

SAP implementation/upgrade tips

Implementing or upgrading SAP can make or break not only a CIO’s career but also impact the financial position of a company. This is a major issue going into TechEd 2008, where plenty of discussion will be devoted to the finer points of ensuring a successful SAP implementation or upgrade. We looked back through the SearchSAP archive to find five particularly helpful pointers on this topic. Whether you’re a CIO, an SAP consultant, or a member of an SAP project team, studying this content will give you a leg up on understanding — and avoiding — the pitfalls while executing on the best practices.

Important points for planning an R/3 upgrade project: These 10 tips, ranging from the big picture (understanding your system landscape) to important details (dealing obsolete ABAP statements) offer a conceptual foundation for SAP R/3 upgrades.

Ten critical steps when undertaking an SAP upgrade: This high-level overview of the SAP upgrade process gives you tips on everything from how to prepare your organization to how to handle the SAP graphical user interface front-end.

SAP consulting versus SAP support for upgrades: Partners are one of the most important success factors in an SAP upgrade or implementation. This article will clue you in to the distinct services you can expect from SAP consulting and SAP support.

SAP implementation challenges, potential pitfalls: SAP end user Rosenthal USA achieved a successful SAP implementation by avoiding common pitfalls and adopting best practices. As a smaller company, Rosenthal USA offers helpful tips for negotiating with VARs and other strategies for driving down the price of an SAP implementation or upgrade.

Podcast: Run SAP and Solution Manager. Implementing or upgrading SAP is only half the battle. In order to keep your business running, and to optimize your SAP ROI, you have to learn how to run your SAP solutions in the most efficient possible. Fortunately, SAP can help you do this with the Run SAP methodology and the Solution Manager tool.

If you have follow-up questions generated by this content, don’t hesitate to leave your comments below.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Learn SAP without spending all your money

Editor’s Note: Last month, SearchSAP Expert Axel Angeli offered his take on how to get into SAP Basis. A reader responded by asking Axel how, when SAP prices for individual Basis access start at 2,000 euros, aspiring SAP functional consultants and technology consultants in Central and Eastern Europe could afford to get into Basis. This blog post is Axel’s response, which contains valuable information for anyone who wants to learn SAP without spending too much money.

Axel Angeli: In my earlier response, I just pointed out what the official SAP price is to get the software in your hands. Of course, there are many commercial training offers out there in the market, delivered by companies who have SAP licenses and can set prices at their own discretion. [Online SAP training is also available--Editor]

Regarding pricing, you have to understand that even the consultants from Eastern countries (such as Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Romania) stream into Western Europe (mainly Germany) and work there for rates that are between 500-800 euros per day. Educated Basis consultants do not really compete with low-wage workers in Poland but offer themselves as cheaper alternatives to the local German, French and British consultants. Even in Poland, an SAP consultant gets paid 400 euros per day and more, so we have to think in price ranges of a week’s freelance tariff.

Remember that you are free to share the SAP training investment with other students. In Germany, for example, there is the DSAK (Deutsche SAP Arbeitskreis), in which over 100 members share a single SAP instance. So the individual cost for acquiring SAP licenses is negligible. Your logical path here is to find as many peers as possible, start a union that wants to learn SAP — like an “Association of Polish SAP Consultants” — and share the costs of the SAP license, hardware and administration of the system.

For a low-budget quick start, you can also try out the essentials of Basis admin by using the SAP Miniwas ABAP Trial. This is free to download and use on a single PC by a single user. It has all Basis components installed, but lacks configuration features such as choosing a database and defining your own variations of creating an instance. But, generally, it has all features built in. Check out SAP SDN’s download section to find it.

Axel Angeli, SearchSAP Expert

Enterprise Support reveals a continental divide among SAP user groups

When a warranty runs out on a car, you don’t typically opt for a more expensive warranty, or even extend it. You undergo the obligatory maintenance and when the car starts running really badly and breaks down, you put a lot of thought, and money, into outright replacing it. You then purchase a new warranty to cover maintenance on the new car.

SAP users attending a webinar Tuesday seem to be equating  SAP’s new, more expensive Enterprise Support with paying for a warranty on a 2009 model when you’re driving a 1999.

During Tuesday’s webcast, the first of a four-part series, two SAP executives gave an overview of the Enterprise Support features, and promised that using the tools and strategies would help a customer lower their total cost of ownership.

ASUG’s response to SAP’s new maintenance plan is remarkably different from the rally cry heard from other against this new support model. While ASUG is inviting members onto calls to convince them of the value of Enterprise Support, other user groups, specifically in the Ireland and the UK, are encouraging customers to tell SAP to reconsider this mandate. SAP customers paying 17% of net licensing fees for maintenance and support will move to a 22% structure over the next four years.

There’s little doubt Enterprise Support is an enhanced offering. Analysts have said it could in fact lower the total cost of ownership for larger customers. SAP said repeatedly that using the tools correctly, specifically the enhanced version of solution manager, would lead to quicker response time when problems arose and therefore, smoother operation.

But, as Forrester Research analyst Ray Wang often brings up, most customers aren’t using their current maintenance and support that often. One caller posed that quandary particularly well.

“We’re a smaller business with little technological complexity, how will this benefit us?,” the participant  asked.

Which leads to a very good question asked via a live chat room during the call, but not answered, “What release do I have to be on to get the most value from Enterprise Support?”

The head of the rebelling UK and Ireland user group told ZDNet’s Dennis Howlett, that there is more value in Enterprise Support for companies running the latest version of SAP. During yesterday’s call, SAP stressed its enhancement package strategy –downloadable upgrades and new functionality for customers on the NetWeaver platform — as part of the value in Enterprise Support.

Do you think Enterprise Support is another push toward an upgrade? Is its advent another thing pushing your company toward one?

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor

How to get started in SAP

The demand for SAP technology and functional consultants is near an all-time high. However, if you don’t already have an SAP job, building an SAP career remains a difficult undertaking.

SAP certification and training is one way to prepare yourself for an SAP job, but recently readers are asking us how to choose between the various options available. One way to begin is by taking two classes directly from SAP:

SAP NetWeaver is SAP’s technological foundation and the core of all SAP foundations. As such, it’s a good investment to take SAPNW and SAPTEC classes directly from SAP. SAPNW is a three-day course, offered in dozens of countries, that will introduce you not only to the NetWeaver interface and fundamentals, but also to SAP’s service-oriented architecture, exchange infrastructure (XI), portal infrastructure (PI), enterprise portal, application server, Run SAP and business intelligence (BI). Aspiring SAP consultants who take this course might find that their classmates are actual SAP end users, so there is an opportunity to network.

After taking SAPNW, sign up for SAPTEC, a three-day course that digs more deeply into the SAP NetWeaver Application Server (SAP NetWeaverAS). Perhaps the most valuable part of this course is it overview of the SAP development process, an indispensable skill in the SAP world.

Together, these courses are comparable in cost to the money third-party SAP certification providers are charging for certificates in countries such as India, and add more value to an SAP job seeker’s resume.

Once you’ve caught up on NetWeaver, whether on the basis of SAP training or self-study, don’t forget to ask us your more targeted questions about developing an SAP NetWeaver career in particular or an SAP career in general.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Solving IDoc problems

IDoc is the SAP format in which data pertaining to business transactions gets exchanged.  SAP end users and consultants specializing in supplier relationship management (SRM), procurement, and even application development are frequently exposed to IDocs, which can pose all kinds of technical problems for end users.Recently, we’ve received a lot of expert tips that can help you solve IDoc problems.

For example, here’s a way to send advanced vendor details using IDoc that can help you when you need to go beyond sending address details to a trading partner. If that tip isn’t enough, ask our resident SRM expert, Sachin Sethi, follow-up questions.

Some of you have been wondering how to generate an IDoc after you delete a purchase order. There is a way to do this, but it may well be illegal because of regulatory and compliance laws, so proceed with caution. By the way, this tip illustrates why business managers should carefully train SAP end users on the risk management implications of altering business documents.

Another common query is how to find user exits in idoc_input_orders. Resident SAP NetWeaver expert Axel Angeli explains how to do this, and also addresses the issue of user exits in IDoc with a detailed code sample.

Finally, the issue of data error tables is foundational for IDoc users. Axel explains how to populate error tables automatically from IDoc.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

Are your business intelligence users smarter than a high schooler?

Having a tough time getting business executives to do their own business intelligence?

Well, at The Thacher School, a 119-year-old boarding high school in California, students and parents are conducting analysis on their own, using Xcelsius Present, a new application that converts Excel spreadsheets into BI tools, to calculate and plan for the cost of college, executive Marge Breya said at the Business Objects Influencer Summit in Boston this week.

The scenario was meant to serve as an example of SAP’s goal to bring BI to a desk near you, and how easy the tools are to use. As Business Objects executive Sanjay Poonen put it, “from the boardroom to every single clerk.”

“Unlike some of our competitors, we have seen Business Objects as a way of moving into business-users,” Poonen said.

Actually, BI vendors have been pitching the BI for the masses line for years — Hyperion/Oracle, Microsoft, and others, including Business Objects prior to being purchased by SAP in October of 2007 have all trumpeted the value of extending BI from the “power users” to the “casual users.”

But some questions remain. Five years later, we’re still hearing the same message. What will it take to get casual users to actually use BI and is it really worth the expense in the first place?

Business Objects is offering one answer. Down the road, executives said they see BI being sold like SAP’s ERP Business Suite — BI for manufacturing, BI for retail. The vision is of a tool that’s “not about feature and function, but about industry-specific scenarios,” Poonen said.

“I think, three to five years from now, this entire space will have a flavor that’s…industry specific,” Poonen said. “It’s a natural evolution. I think that’s where this is headed.”

Why not BI for college financial planning? Do you like the sound of that?

Web Dynpro: A surging SAP career opportunity

SAP’s resident NetWeaver expert, Axel Angeli, has answered a flurry of reader questions lately, and one of the emerging themes is the strength of Web Dynpro as an SAP career skill. Web Dynpro lies within NetWeaver and is the programming model for Web-based business applications. Axel sees a strong market for it, even though some readers have the mistaken impression that SAP’s Business Server Pages (BSP) is going to replace Web Dynpro. However, Axel points out that learning Web Dynpro can be essential to SAP job success in NetWeaver (click on the link to see what he has to say about BSP).

There are two flavors of Web Dynpro: Web Dynpro Java and Web Dynpro ABAP. Axel has a strong preference for one of these two based on what he sees in the market, and what he considers the strategic direction of SAP. While you should read Axel’s tip to learn more, we won’t be giving anything away by reminding you that Axel was happy to see Java supporter Shai Agassi leave SAP.

If your interest is piqued in Web Dynpro, there are further actions you should take. Begin by discovering what is Web Dynpro, according to SAP itself, and learn how and where you can get training in Web Dynpro if you are interested in taking the next step. If you want to know why Axel argues that Web Dynpro for ABAP is a superior career path, read the ABAP versus Java white paper and also get the Java perspective from consultant Lynton Grice.

Finally, bear in mind that SAP’s commitment to service-oriented architecture (SOA) is further transforming the career skills required to excel in NetWeaver. Stay ahead of the curve by learning more about SAP and SOA.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor

SAP’s Bill McDermott offers growth clues

Are there acquisitions in SAP’s future?

SAP’s Bill McDermott told SearchSAP.com last week that “…there are many ways that we can grow with our existing accounts.”

The president and CEO of SAP global field operations said SAP can still sell customers more of the SAP suite — such as CRM and SCM, as well as third-party partner products like Duet or Adobe forms.

He also pointed to a recent acquisition this quarter, “Visiprise, which is a small company that essentially provides what we call the perfect plant, how do you make a manufacturing plant more efficient and effective at the operating floor level?” McDermott said. “So these are all ways that we can grow existing accounts.”

It’s the potential acquisitions that have some people talking.

AMR’s Bruce Richardson, brought it up in his First Thing Monday newsletter. SAP’s move to fill top roles with field executives, not developers, signals that SAP will buy more companies rather than trying to develop everything internally, he wrote.

Forrester Research’s Paul Hamerman shared similar thoughts with SearchSAP.com in a previous interview about ERP market share growth.

“It’s a very possible strategy for them to get into the underdeveloped markets,” he said. “China is a very interesting market and one that would lend itself to some acquisitions.”

With regard to the top management, McDermott told SearchSAP.com that they model their management team after the markets they want to compete in.

“What we try to do is have a very diverse management team. So their cultural priorities look a lot like the markets in which we compete,” he said. “And I think that makes a difference, instead of a command-and-control style coming from one state, in one country.”

Will you be buying more from SAP, or will SAP be buying more companies?

Courtney Bjorlin, News Editor

Want an SAP job? Build your SAP intelligence

The most popular SAP-related question we see is, “How do I get into SAP?” The promise of a rewarding career with the world’s largest enterprise applications company attracts a lot of interest from university graduates, IT professionals seeking to switch fields and consultants eager for recurring engagements.

There is no single answer to the question of how to get into SAP. However, if you want a long-term SAP job, one thing is for certain: you have to educate yourself about the various business and technical contexts in which SAP operates. The more you learn, the more you’ll learn which part of SAP appeals to you, or even whether SAP is right for you in the first place.

Thus, instead of being guided solely by reports of how much money you can make, build your SAP intelligence. It’s an investment that may not only get you into the SAP door but also keep paying off, as you will acquire the habit of staying up to date with SAP developments even after you get an SAP job.

An excellent resource to help you build your SAP intelligence is our back catalog of podcasts. Many of these podcasts contain valuable information, advice and direction for SAP job seekers. If you don’t have the time to listen to them immediately, download them and listen to them on a commute to work or on a plane. Podcasts offer detail and context that often can’t be provided in a short article, and will easily repay the time you put into listening to them.

Here are notable recent podcasts for SAP job seekers:

SAP and SOA: Want to know how SOA is changing the SAP careers field? Listen to SAP expert Rabi Jay explain how SOA is changing SAP’s product set and rewarding particular skills over others.

The SAP skills shortage: What it means for you. The good news for SAP job seekers is that SAP demand is higher than qualified supply. Some areas of SAP are more open than others. In this podcast, David Foote explains which SAP areas are paying the most and which areas are not as hot.

SAP explains its certification program: SAP offers three levels of certification. Learn what the levels are, why SAP thinks certification is important for hiring managers and why getting certified by SAP partners instead of by SAP may be pointless.

How can ABAP developers survive in a NetWeaver era?: ABAP is SAP’s proprietary development language, but recent moves towards SOA (particularly in NetWeaver) have offset the once-unchallengeable status of ABAP. Developers should listen to this podcast to learn how to polish their skills for the SAP jobs of tomorrow.

We hope these podcasts build your SAP intelligence! If there’s any topic you’d like to see covered in our upcoming podcasts, please don’t hesitate to let us know.

Demir Barlas, Site Editor