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Careers As an Enterprise Business Apps Professional

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PANKAJ
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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.

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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
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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