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Over the past three months there has been a lot of uncertainty in the workplace, and although IT changes and evolves constantly, the current situation has impacted how we work and when we start and complete projects.

SAP has been changing rapidly over the past few years. From R2, R3, ECC5, ECC6 and now S4 HANA, the industry adapts regularly as it needs to. So, what have been some of the trends in SAP we’ve noticed, what’s slowing down and what’s going strong? Let’s take a look.

Broader skills

We are currently seeing a trend for broader skills such as BA’s and Functional Consultants who have more generalised skills and less SAP specific skills. Why? This is due to Clients working leaner, which means using less people to do the same amount of work and as a result saving on costs. If the contractor has more skills, they can be utilised to capacity and skills are not going to waste.

However, it’s also a reflection on how IT/ SAP has changed over the years. Once, skilled functional consultants who specialised in one specific module were the talk of the town. For quite a few years now, cross-modular skills that can work a whole business process rather than a small part of that business process are now demanding.

SuccessFactors is still going strong

We have seen an increased need for testers, test managers, SF, BA’s and SF Consultants. Since SAP bought SuccessFactors, they have really pushed on a sales front and that is evident from the huge uptake of it. There has been a significant demand is SAP SF resources for the last 3 years or so, and this boom has continued due to multiple release dates in the project, the complexity of some implementations (especially if they are implementing SF ECP) and also to budgets being released intermittently.

Obviously, the life cycle of the project will dictate when the specific skill will be in demand (testers, trainers, etc), hence there is a continuous stream of different SF skills required as each project progresses.

S4 Hana skills

There has been a drop in the requirement for S4 HANA skilled consultants recently. However, the need for strong S4 HANA resources who can adapt to a fast paced project are still needed.

When S4 HANA first appeared on the scene, it looked like there was going to be a BOOM! of S4 HANA implementations. Clients were focussed on securing consultants with previous S4 experience but this was a bit tricky. Most consultants with this experience had gained it overseas and were most likely without Australian PR or citizenship.

However, moving forward, the brand new S4 HANA projects were quite limited and the implementations that took off saw clients securing good quality SAP Consultants who may not have had the S4 exposure, but had enough project experience, business know-how and technical SAP skills to adapt to the changes and practices in this ‘new’ technology.

Customer focussed roles

The world of Analytics has changed. SAP BW is becoming more and more a thing of the past from the information we’ve gathered. SAP BW resources are still required, but it’s ‘the new breed’ who are in demand. They’ve realised the client is becoming very customer-focussed and therefore data is vital in a company in order to improve their customer service in a more competitive market.

We are seeing clients take up AI technologies, Predictive Analytics and SAC (SAP Analytics Cloud). All of these products give businesses a great insight into the minds of the consumer, therefore giving the customer more of what they want. The need to turn to ‘online’ sales and resources has also given these roles a much needed boost.

The wrap up

There is a lot of unknown’s when it comes to the current market. Things are changing on a weekly basis. We have seen many large scale and small projects put on hold, yet this is a sign that things are only temporary and these projects are likely to restart once companies resume ‘normal’ trading.

With the slowing of business comes a time where companies are using their resources to improve business process, write business cases and prepare for a influx of work once everything returns to normal. When that will be though? No-one really knows.

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