And why maybe you should too.
After a career in IT and owning a small international business, I woke up one day with the idea to combine the two. I was lucky to have been made aware by a friend of the existence of a SAP solution called Business ByDesign, which, as it turns out is a great start in the wondrous world of SAP business software.
Most SAP consultants, and particularly those new to the trade, are necessarily very specialized. For example, it would be pointless to consult on financial software without knowing both finance as a discipline and the software as a consultant. The same applies to Human Resources, Customer Relationship Management, and other fields such as Supply Chain Management.
As a businessman I have seen most aspects of business, so getting to know the tooling that supports business should be an easy ride, right?
Wrong – over the past year or so I realized that I had been very much in the professional services and real estate side of the world with no exposure at all to manufacturing, warehouses and supply chains. After COVID-19 I now humbly admit that (like millions of others) I have now personally experienced the importance of a well functioning supply chain. Remember lack of toilet paper in April 2020?
SAP Business ByDesign forced me, by way of certification, to really understand processes I was barely aware of before and this helps me become a better consultant even as my work does not involve ByDesign directly anymore. Working with RISE with SAP, S/4 HANA Cloud and the Business Technology Platform requires people with deep knowledge of each process and tool but, thankfully, also people with an overview to make sense of it all.
ByDesign is often overlooked as a best of breed cloud finance package but it is a well known trendsetter in the cloud ERP space. The Fiori user interface used in ByDesign has made it to S/4 HANA Cloud and that means that for an S/4 consultant there are few better places to start. Having prepared well for the ByD certification I found the jump to S/4HANA Public Cloud less daunting than I expected and it is a journey, whilst never easy, that I can certainly recommend.
Note that a version of this post first appeared on LinkedIn
