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
Functional knowledge is said to be a must for an ERP consultant. |
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
What are the career options for a professional to enter into ERP Keeping recession in mind, is EBA/ERP a lucrative option for
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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.
An ERP professional is like any other consultant who needs a rounded |
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:
A domain or user industry experienced person can make a switch to ERP, if |
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.
Functional knowledge is must since the consultant needs to advise client |
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.