Job for Consultant: RE:[sap-career] IDES (SAP Demo system) experience only

mardi 26 juillet 2011

RE:[sap-career] IDES (SAP Demo system) experience only

Posted by Typewriter
on Jul 26 at 1:31 PM

Hi Bo,

Many thanks for your helpful post. I have marked it as helpful.
Roy suggested to frame and permanently display Thomas's above post in this forum, I think your post also should be done the same!

Could you please explain, some extracts of your post -
1. "Even if this person fully understand business and the SAP system it is the typical project execution that matters on a given project and functional assignment. I know business and SAP very well but I very rarely utilize this knowledge in my consulting engagements - I use this knowledge for my own amusement."

What would be an example of "typical project execution"? Why is it that SAP was used by you rarely in consulting engagements?

2. "Real life projects are usually under very tight time schedules and consultants have limited knowledge therefore it ..."

Please elaborate on consultants have limited knowledge.

My above questions are for helping me better understand the bigger picture that is - if a candidate has business & IT project related experience; business process clarity & accounting inclination; analytical thinking; then IDES can help in strengthening the "missing part" i.e. configuration & understanding of how the business processes are mapped in SAP.

Regards,
Typewriter

---------------Original Message---------------
From: Bo Gustavsson
Sent: Tuesday, July 26, 2011 12:39 PM
Subject: IDES (SAP Demo system) experience only

The biggest problem is to map the SAP terms and/or objects into business terms from the real world. If the person you are talking about is very experienced in business and have a degree of some kind (business, information or science) preferable also know accounting and bookeeping the IDES system can be of great value and a lot better than any project experience in fact. If the person doesn't have any business experience (not academic experience but execution of business process as well) and looking more from a technical point of view then it may be limited since it will be hard to imagine how a wrong business mapping (configuration and/or data) lead to custom requirements in a real life project situation.

The person will not learn how to do a wrong mapping and configuration then afterwards have to fix issues related to entering wrong configuration and data by adding more and more customization etc.

When looking for a functional job the issue will be a CV/resume which is all that matter when looking for a job and getting to the interview. Then, getting to the interview the person will not understand how a typical project is executed. I have done countless of projects and clients and know exactly what happens on a project which I can communicate clearly in the interview as well.
Even if this person fully understand business and the SAP system it is the typical project execution that matters on a given project and functional assignment. I know business and SAP very well but I very rarely utilize this knowledge in my consulting engagements - I use this knowledge for my own amusement. Real life projects are usually under very tight time schedules and consultants have limited knowledge therefore it becomes a evolution type process where things are getting fixed as you go along (adapt the system technically to current process or arbitrary starting point). This project environment is completely missing in the SAP IDES system itself of course.

If you understand business, logistics, accounting and can grasp normalization then the IDES can gain you powerful insights and it will be better to study IDES than being on a project where you will only learn all the wrong things, but you will be useless for a consulting assignment.

Not sure that this will help you.

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