Can a programmer go for a functional module of SAP course??

Question

Hi i am a software programmer having more than 2 years of professional experience in PHP/MySQL .But now i want to quit this job and want to do the functional module of SAP. Someone just told me that i cant do that because just doing a mere course wont let me anywhere unless and untill i have experience in that field.

Iam told that even after doing SAP-ABAP all i'll have to do is coding and all.Please guide me in this that what should i do?? Should i go for functional module or should i stay with SAP-ABAP ??

P.S. Please give your answera considering this thing in mind that i want to quit programming and want to do SAP-HR

Thanks!!

Answer 1

You can't just take a course or two in one domain covered by SAP (say, Payroll in HR), and expect to be a consultant in that domain. I agree with the fact that you have to possess some knowledge of the domain beforehand. SAP courses only show how a given concept (say, wagetype for our exemple in payroll) is managed by the ERP, and how you can customize it. Not what this concept is, nor how it is used in companies (independantly from SAP).

Also in SAP, HR is divided in a set of more specific field : Personnal Administration, Payroll, Time Management, Organizationnal Management, Competencies management... each with its own particularities, and adapted to customer's use differently.

If you possess (even part of) some of these knowledge, then you could get a job in a consulting company. However, this would probably be as a 'junior' consultant, 'standard' statut beeing given after a few years (depending on company).

As for the ABAP way, technical consultants (ie ABAP developper) tend to get a functionnal background quite quickly in the domain they develop for, and it is not uncommon to to able to change from technical to functionnal after two or three years. Please note that while ABAP is used in all SAP module, specific domain possess their own specificities to access the data. learning these specificities is what takes the longuest time, not learning ABAP. Payroll and Time management possess clusters (compressed data to hold the values for the calculated payrolls), personnal administration possess Infotype (specific data structure to hold personnal and administrative datas)... You can't just access the values in tables (if you can access the tables)

regards
Guillaume

Answer 2

I'm SAP architect for several years and I've seen many people who wanted to do the same, just take a course and then they wanted to act as a functional consultant for SAP modules. From my point of view, this doesn't make sense at all. You will never have the same experience like people who studied economics and after that they took a HR module course. In our current economic situation I doubt that there will be a feasible chance to enter the consulting business without the proper background and just a SAP course. The courses are usually very sketchy.

Same is with people who just take a ABAP programming course and didn't study computer science at all. Do you think they'll ever be succesfull? There are plenty of people outside who are experienced. If you really want to change the way, you should try to get a trainee employment, to learn things from ground up. Apart from that, my experience is, that good functional consultants also have learned to do some sort of ABAP development. Therefore it's really better to do ABAP development, stick to enhancements in a functional module you want to work in, so that you get more and more experience. But this process might take up several years.

Apart from that, if you're looking for something in the functional area of SAP, better choose a module which is not that common yet or one which is more technical related, e.g. BI or something new like SCM or SRM. Maybe the process infrastructure (PI) is also an interesting topic, it's more about designing interfaces and communicating than doing coding stuff. I think you should really check, whether module consulting is also really interesting for you, a lot of people complain, that the typical daily job, generating test data, testing reports, writing specification is not really interesting at all if you do it all day long. Apart from that, there is sure several kind of customizing involved. Better check first, if this is really interesting for you. I would not really like doing this kind of "consulting" business everyday.