Careers As an Enterprise Business Apps Professional

When things started to settle down after the dot-com bubble burst, one of the
most sought after career besides software development was that of an ERP
professional. During this period, most large enterprises were undergoing
phenomenal change and ERP as a career was in great demand both in India as well
as abroad. And it still remains a financially rewarding career option for
professionals to pursue. Enterprise Resource Planning or ERP for short, has
already proven its worth to organizations and become a backbone for them. Most
organizations have realized that they can't sustain simply by automating their
processes; the integration among different businesses and departments of an
organization is required for seamless functioning. Today not only large
enterprises, but small and medium organizations have also started to opt for ERP
implementations, and even major ERP solution providers are coming up with
packages specific to requirements of a particular industry. Thus, ERP
professionals are in much demand even during the current economic slowdown, as
companies look to adopt efficient Enterprise Business Applications (EBA) and
processes.

What's EBA?

There is no single solution or software package that can cater to all needs of
an enterprise. Therefore, besides ERP there are other enterprise business
applications that cater to various requirements of an enterprise. EBA is a
software that is used at the organization level for performing business
functions such as finance management, procurement, production planning and
execution, sales & distribution and includes applications like:

• Enterprise Resource Planning
• Supply Chain Management (SCM)
• Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)
• Master Data Management (MDM)
• Enterprise Portals
• Process Integration (PI)
• Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
• Business Intelligence (BI)
• Enterprise Content Management

Although the lines are blurring, EBA, as the name suggests includes all
applications used by a company to perform business. Additionally, businesses use
applications very specific to their industry. For example, retail companies use
'Point of sale' applications. Broadly speaking, ERP consists of back office,
supply chain and manufacturing applications. There are also CRM applications
that form part of business applications. The lines are blurring because ERP
vendors are trying to build or acquire industry-specific applications and other
complementary products. And even though, CRM and SCM are completely different
areas, the kind of educational requirement and business knowledge would be
similar to that of an ERP professional. There are various specializations area
under ERP and SCM, CRM, BI etc. are few of those. Vendors themselves are
providing applications that are either easy to integrate or are in a package
that would incorporate the different business processes of an enterprise. As ERP
packages are already the core of most enterprises, the demand for different
types of EBA solutions is only increasing, and so is the demand for
professionals who could help enterprises undertake such implementations.

A typical ERP professional has the option of transitioning his career across the organizational functions (from customer support to consulting to sales and business leadership) What all solutions does 'Enterprise Business Applications' incorporate, apart from ERP? Sushant Dwivedy Director, Microsoft Business Solutions, Microsoft India Enterprise business application is a generic term for applications which aid organizations to automate business processes and achieve business KRAs (key result areas). The examples may include better insight into organizational processes, real time information on inventory levels, effective understanding of customer behavior and buying patterns, better financial discipline, providing dashboard to top management on key business parameters thus enabling effective business decisions. ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. The resource planning essentially includes money, materials and manpower. ERP integrates the key business areas like finance, sales, purchase, inventory, supplier management etc. and provides the backbone for any further decision. Enterprise business applications encompasses ERP including SCM (Supply Chain management) & HRM (Human Resource Management), CRM (Customer Relationship Management), BI (Business Intelligence) and collaboration solutions. Functional knowledge is said to be a must for an ERP consultant. Please comment. What other job roles are there for an ERP professional? Functional knowledge is essential for functional track. Organizations need to map their business processes on ERP. It is vital for ERP functional consultant to know his business domain area, otherwise they cannot understand the customer's business comprehensively and map the processes correctly on business applications. The career in ERP can evolve for the ambitious professional. A typical ERP professional has the option of transitioning his career across the organizational functions (from customer support to consulting to service delivery mgmt to sales and business leadership).

Prerequisites for an ERP professional

An Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) professional of an organization is
responsible for facilitating the day-to-day management of the supply-demand
chain across various business processes of the organization. Therefore having an
understanding of business requirements of an organization becomes the most
important criteria for a professional before venturing into the ERP domain. It
is not mandatory that the professional should have technical knowledge before
entering ERP domain but having the business knowledge is essential. On the other
hand, IT professionals from software development or database or even network
administration can also enter this domain by acquiring the functional knowledge
of organizations' business processes.

PCQuest correspondent Isha Gakhar got an opportunity to interact with Sudhir Prabhu and Sudhindra Badami from L&T Infotech, to talk about the career opportunities in ERP and its scope. Here are excerpts from the interview. What are the different areas of specialization in the domain of Business Applications? There are several career options in this area. Opportunities exist for technical consultants, functional consultants, project managers, business process consultants, etc. ERP consultants could specialize in configuration, development, service delivery, solution architecting, consulting, and sales as also business leadership. One could specialize in business applications for a particular industry (Pharma, manufacturing etc) or in a particular function ('procure to pay', 'plan to manufacture') or in a particular ERP product (SAP, Oracle etc). But it is very important to understand the overall picture and technology trends. Sudhir Prabhu Global Head, Oracle Practice, L&T Infotech What are the career options for a professional to enter into ERP domain? What would you suggest a fresher to be an ERP professional? There are two broad streams in ERP —functional and technical. Functional stream requires domain knowledge to understand and implement ERP solutions. Technical stream offers multiple options like programmers, system administrators and database administrators. These profiles generally do not need any kind of functional experience to start with an ERP career. ERP consultants can also eventually grow and become business analysts, program managers, marketing managers and business heads. Fresh graduates can look forward to recruitment in organizations and get trained on ERP. However, an experience of couple of years or more in an industry (e.g. manufacturing) or in a business function (e.g. finance) would be very useful for a person entering the ERP domain. Keeping recession in mind, is EBA/ERP a lucrative option for professionals as acareer? Sudhindra Badami Global Head, SAP Practice, L&T Infotech Most of the large enterprises have migrated from home-grown disparate application landscape to EBA, and more and more SMBs are following that route. Since EBA is at the heart of the business, Keep the Lights On (KTLO) work will have to continue, irrespective of the economic environment. In reality, there are larger opportunities in downturn for professionals to improve business-to-IT connect and deliver more value from the investment (Every CXO is asking 'more for less'). Analyst community believes and recommends that slowdown is the time for companies to step up the pace of investment in enterprise applications. The key to sustain in the EBA domain is to ensure that professionals have the necessary business depth coupled with technical expertise to provide innovative solutions.

The ERP domain offers two types of job opportunities: functional and
technical. A professional with knowledge of business processes can become a
functional consultant; e.g, a production engineer can learn business solutions
and help in improving supply chain management, thus enhancing his vision on his
function, a finance manager can help in tighter business control and aid in the
business productivity of the organization. A technical person or one from an IT
background can become a technical consultant and help in implementation &
customization, design & development and for supporting ERP solutions in various
organizations. The knowledge of programming languages such as C++, .NET or Java
and RDBMS skills is the first step towards a glittering ERP career.
Organizations prefer to have candidates who have engineering background or those
with professional qualifications like an MBA, a CA or an ICWA, as these
candidates would already have business knowledge of the functional areas they
are working into. It depends on the candidate, what area of the EBA he wants to
specialize in and become an expert of. For instance, a production manager can
opt for SCM for specialization.

S. Manoharan, Vice President- Standard Software, Siemens Information Systems An ERP professional is like any other consultant who needs a rounded personality. The basic skills required include analytical and problem solving skills, an ability to articulate and communicate, customer management, team working and time management. Besides, some amount of leadership skills, planning, organizing and negotiation skills would be required as one grows to a higher role. However, one thing essential for all consultants is to be an avid reader and have knowledge about the trends & happenings in the industry. It is important to start an ERP career with about 3 to 4 years of work experience especially in the functional area. This helps the consultant to work faster and get accepted as a 'Good Consultant'. However, in case of technical stream, it is possible to start without prior work experience.

Career Path and opportunities

In order to get in to the enterprise business solutions as career path, one
needs to gain the skills in the respective software package. For instance, if a
professional wants to be the expert in CRM domain, then he must have the
knowledge of at least one CRM solution, it can be Microsoft's Dynamics or
Salesforce. A functional knowledge is not a must-have to be a consultant or
analyst, though it is a desired add-on. There are two ways of getting into EBA
domain:

Mr. Umashankar , Sr. Vice President Marketing, Four Soft A domain or user industry experienced person can make a switch to ERP, if he has basic IT knowledge. The career options are wide — it could be product management, functional consultancy, implementation consulting, programming, testing or evensales. It's immensely beneficial to have functional domain knowledge, but not a must have. Testing and programming profiles do not really require domain experience, and freshers can foray into these areas. In fact, too much of domain experience sometimes prove to be negative as that makes one get biased towards generalizing what he is experienced at. Also as most of the large corporations already having adopted one ERP or other, the focus is on deploying the lighter versions of ERPs in the SME sector for which cost is a critical criterion.

Top Down Approach: This is also called as Business to IT approach, and
is for professionals who have the business domain knowledge. If your
organization is planning to go on an enterprise business application roll-out,
you could well become an invaluable asset to your organization by gaining the
skills of that solution package. This is the functional consultancy stream where
domain knowledge is required to understand the requirements and implement the
EBA solutions. Senior professionals with people management and planning skills
can aspire to become project managers during the business application
implementation and development.

Bottom Up Approach: This approach, also know as IT to Business
approach, is generally for professionals who are into technical domain and wish
to be an ERP Consultant or Systems Business Analyst. This approach can also be
taken by freshers to enter the ERP arena. They can start as programmers to
design and develop the ERP specific custom software using their own programming
skills, or learning the ERP package's own language, like ABAP for SAP
customization. Freshers can foray into EBA domain with the programming and
testing profiles, as these do not require any business domain experience. This
is the ttechnical stream of the EBA scenario that also requires database and
system administrators for the EBA solution implementation and functioning.

The most popular growth areas for EBA are SAP and Oracle solutions. Domain
experts with good analytical skills can typically transition to the role of
Business Analysts. Considering the importance of this role in an organization,
many organizations conduct specific courses to develop Business Analysts. After
certain level of growth in ERP area, candidates can look at specialized
solutions like Supply Chain, Customer Relationship Management, Supplier
Relationship Management, Human Resources Management etc. ERP consultants can
also eventually grow and become Business Analysts, Program Managers, Marketing
Managers and Business Heads of their organization's ERP initiative -be it an
in-house implementation or a deployment at a client-side.

The ERP domain is an ever evolving domain, and is important for an ERP
professional to keep his skills updated, and also to know the latest
technologies. Business Intelligence is one such natural evolution out of ERP and
it is hot in the current market.

J S Shiv Kumar General Manager - HR, Ramco Systems. Functional knowledge is must since the consultant needs to advise client on business process to be adopted. Extensive & in-depth functional knowledge is a basic need of an ERP consultant. Awareness and knowledge of the function and the associated processes is must for him. Ability to understand how business systems and processes work across functions is required. Typical job responsibilities of a business analyst would be conducting study and documenting current business processes and proposing modified processes to the respective functional heads. Conducting user training and implementing solutions is also a responsibility of a business analyst. Besides being a consultant, an ERP professional can get into a development role, can become a project manager, program manager, process auditor and grew up to become a CIO as well.

Business Intelligence

The function of an ERP or business application is OLTP (online transaction
processing). This means that an application should be able to help an enterprise
carry out its business transactions in a secure, efficient and speedy manner.
Business Intelligence is the result of analyzing the ERP data to find business
trends or intelligent reports. BI applications provide a predictive view of
business operations based on historical data (internal) and market intelligence
(external) in a timely, relevant, accurate manner which drives better decision
making and impacts bottom line.

Therefore, a BI expert is expected to assimilate the key elements of the
business domain and understand the needs of the business managers. BI is
becoming increasingly important since ERP produces a lot of data and needs to be
reported in a way that will be available to managers to make important business
decisions.

Certifications

Before foraying into the arena of EBA, it's important for a professional to get
familiar with a certain ERP package related to his functional domain. ERP
certifications are provided by respective product vendors and their educational
partners in various areas. SAP's educational partner Siemens offers programs
such as 'Partner Academy', wherein both corporates and individuals can
participate to get themselves certified. Usually candidates can get certified in
one or more functional areas. Likewise certification Programs exist for
technical streams as well.

The technical certifications come under what is known as a 'NetWeaver'
platform. Similarly there are certifications available from Microsoft through
their online MSDN subscription as well as through training partners. The
candidates can appear for certifications through Prometric centers across India.
The following table shows various certifications for the ERP, CRM, etc., as well
as certifications for becoming Business Analysts.