Why are SAP consultants highly paid?

Hi

Most of the candidates who are looking for a job want to get SAP certification because it provides a fantastic salary. SAP ERP system is currently the most widely used ERP due to which an SAP consultant gets lots of opportunities. The high use of SAP in large organizations has offered a bright future for the SAP consultants. As compared to the other IT professionals SAP consultants are paid higher salary due to different reasons:

1. The growing demand of SAP experts: Even though there are numerous SAP experts available in the market, but still there is a lack of trained, skilled and qualified SAP professionals which in turn increases the demand of the SAP professionals. Because of this reason, the companies are eager to hire qualified SAP professionals at the highest salary packages.

2. Demand-Supply ratio: The all-pervasive dynamics of demand and supply shows that if the supply is high, then the demand is low and vice versa. In the case of SAP, the supply of SAP experts is decidedly less from the perspective of an enterprise. This, in turn, increases the demand for trained SAP professionals in the market. Thus, employers are ready to pay the extra to achieve the need for highly trained SAP employees.

3. Growing ROI of Companies: The companies are paying a higher salary to SAP consultant so that their Return on Investment, i.e., ROI increases over the time frame and the expense can be handled with intensified performance.

4. The challenging task: Well, the SAP consultant has to perform quite challenging tasks which refine their learning and enhances growth rate, as this is the primary person of any organization. SAP consultant has to take care of all the critical tasks because a small error will result in billions of wastage. Due to this reason, the career of the SAP consultant is gratifying.

5. Implementation of SAP in high budget companies: SAP’s implementation is usually carried out in enterprises with high budgets or large-scale enterprises as compared to the smaller enterprises. The large companies are capable of paying their employees with a massive salary package as compared to the small scale companies. Due to this reason, the SAP consultants are getting an attractive salary package than the other IT fields.

6. Employee’s Education: A modern study shows that the qualification and education level matters a lot in the employee’s salary increment. But it would be an added advantage

SAP ERP is a highly integrated but complex system. This was an analogy I read once: think of the dashboard in the cockpit of an airplane, with all those different buttons and displays. SAP is like that, except the dashboard is the size of a football field!

While this implies a long learning curve, experience is equally important.

For a programmer in SAP, writing new code is easy. The tougher thing is to debug, fix and/or enhance existing code (which is what they do much of the time). The most challenging is the standard code that is delivered by SAP – these programs are very long and complex. A programmer with some experience learns to recognize some patterns in the code and develops some shortcuts and insights which make him/her more productive. Thus the more experienced you are, the more productive you tend to be.

For a functional consultant, it is important to know the configuration options in his/her functional area e.g. sales, inventory, purchasing, production planning, quality management, but it is also important to understand the business. This is more so for the financial modules. So you cannot just learn SAP configuration and expect to become a productive consultant.

Now while real-world experience is best, you can also learn a lot from practice. That’s the other problem. You cannot just open notepad, type something and run it in the browser. You cannot even simply install some freeware to your laptop and practice from there. You need access to an SAP server, like IDES, which is fairly well configured and stocked with some good data, to start learning. This is free if you are an SAP customer – otherwise it costs a lot of money. Plus though you could install this on a good laptop if its fairly high-end, you would not want to install it on your main work machine because it would slow everything down.

So in short, there is a long learning period and significant investment involved in becoming a productive SAP consultant.

SAP have both functional as well as non functional module…but everything is belongs to you only…if you wanna move on technical means Choose ABAP,BASIS..and if you like to move non technical means Choose SF,FICO,SD,MM and SF is a highly paid Module…and its a update of SAP HR.

And moreover in india people’s not aware of SAP BPC..and its a unique and highly paid module in SAP..it launched by SAP before 8 months…but still the people’s in india not updated on this information.

It’s all about the experience a (good) consultant bring from projects they did in the past. SAP is so flexible (either through customizing or even worse, development) that rarely does a single configuration work well for everyone.

A consultant with solid experience already implemented (either successfully or maybe more importantly, unsuccessfully) a solution somewhere else, and he can save you a lot of time (and money, and perhaps even ) by directing you to a solution that works in practice.

Also, the good consultant sees the process from end-to-end, as almost any change you would want to implement impacts several modules, or at least, several sub-processes. One of the most common mistakes junior consultants make, is implement a processes which breaks other processes or does not integrate well with other modules.