How relevant is SAP today?

Are you stuck with some these questions floating around in your mind? If yes, then this small article will enlighten you to the path of career in SAP.

It is one of the two biggest players in the ERP software market. Other than Oracle ERP, there are not many ERP solutions that can threaten SAP, not even Microsoft’s ERP solution. The number of companies that have implemented SAP solutions is very hard to figure out and there are new companies signing up every day.

The number of modules SAP provides and supports are increasing with every year. Each business has a number of different modules such as Material Management (MM), Project System (PS), Sales and Distribution (SD),Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO),Quality Management (QM) etc. With time, they have differentiated some larger modules into several smaller ones such as MM into Plant Maintenance (PM), Production Planning (PP) etc. There are different modules for different enterprises depending on nature and size of the business. This has opened up new job opportunities for people and allowed them to become consultants in the line of work they are most comfortable in.

SAP is on its way to become the top-notch in terms of services and number of users, so the company keeps rolling out new tools and products every now and then. The best example should the SAP HANA: A cloud based in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system that speeds up the processes dramatically. It is a solution that provides a huge cache for database which speeds up the processes amazingly. It is cloud based solution which can be used as a standalone application platform as well and able to handle the big data. People have started to train themselves in HANA and soon it will create large job opportunities.

SAP solution manager is also a good option for you to try.

The technical consultants or ABAP developers constantly have new tools and techniques to play with. All the new solutions coming out from the stable of SAP mean that there is no chance of redundancy anytime in the future as far as the technical consultants are concerned. Older more experienced ABAP-ers can learn new techniques and move on to new career opportunities while fresh batches of developers take their place. It is an ongoing endeavour.Now, we have a brighter and clearer picture of potential and job opportunities SAP has. So, you can pursue a career in SAP.

If you plan to work in Fortune 500 companies, then SAP would be valuable since most of them are using it. But keep in mind that it’s old software, especially the ERP. To be valuable in current and future market, it’s better to study latest innovations from them such as in memory technology (HANA), mobility, analytics and cloud platform as it is certain that SAP would like to migrate all OLAP and OLTP applications to HANA. Analytics and Business Intelligence tools stand to reap tremendous benefits switching over to HANA.

Full disclosure, I work for SAP, so I am biased.

The fact is over 85% of transactions happened everyday passed through an SAP system (note, it does not mean all other companies combined only have 15%, some transactions can pass through multiple systems).

Over 90% of world top 1000 (actually it does not matter how you rank it, by revenue, profit, employees, etc) uses SAP.

Now, if you look into the future, if you realize most of the jobs will be replaced by AI, you would know SAP probably will be among the latest to be replaced- because most business are the driving force behind AI replacing jobs, and businesses still need something to run on, and that something has been SAP and it is unlikely they will need to change.

Here is the reason – large corporations are very complex. Unlike sample abstract companies you learn in business school, real companies have so much aspects that need to be balanced to maintain profit, it’s extremely hard to to get “simple financial reports” in time.

SAP is not only managing the customers information like financials, manufacturing, warehouse, Human Resources, etc, — lots of other softwares can manage some aspect of information for businesses. What SAP is really different is its ability to manage complexity. That’s why the new motto of SAP is “Simple”, SAP take care of the complexity of the information and relational complexity of business information process and flow.

Arguably, it will be come harder and harder to do business as the concentration of spending conflicts with the distribution of consuming. The more complicated businesses navigate profitability, likely the more relevant SAP would be.