Becoming an SAP Consultant: The Book

I just remembered that I read Becoming an SAP Consultant a while ago.
Although it's an old book which refers to old SAP versions, I t good for beginners because it give them an overview of the SAP world. I've read this book in the first weeks of my first implementation and I got some good advices on various topics: from how to behave in some circumstances to what is ABAP. I definitely recommend this book as a must read for a junior SAP consultant.

Skills of a good SAP Consultant III

3) Presentation skills
SAP is a new life for an enterprise. SAP reorganize the old business processes and makes them better. In order to have a smoth SAP implementation you have to transfer knowledge to customer team. Depends on your teaching and presentation skills if the customer team understand the new SAP processes and helps you to implement them or not. So in order to win the customer team for your side you have to have excelent presention skills and make them understand the SAP processes and make them view how their processes will run with SAP.
It doesn't matter what tool you use to make your presentation. It matters if at the end of the presentation you've met your goal: people to understand what you have just presented.
For how to make a very good presentation I recommend you this book: Beyond Bullet Points by Cliff Atkinson .

Skills of a good SAP Consultant II

Today I will focus on:
2) Programming skills

SAP is an application developed in ABAP. I think is the only software that you can see it's source code. This is way you can see how things works behinde the scenes and you can debug the software to see where the error is coming from. I think that every SAP consultant must know a little of programming and database.

What to know about databases:
- what a table is
- what a primary key is
- how the tables are link with each other
- how to see the content of a table (SE16)

What to know about programming (ABAP):
- how to define variables
- how to define an internal tables
- how to fill an internal table
- some SQL to manipulate data
- how to debug a program

You may say that for ABAP there are ABAP consultants, but as a functional consultant you can resolve some minor issues in configuration for example if you know some abap or some debuging techniques.

Next time: 3)Presentation skills.

SAP IS-U Consultants

Are there any SAP IS-U Consultants who are reading my blog? I would like them to contact me at danieltoba@yahoo.com to discuss about ISU, because I have some Billing issues.

SAP Top Sites

In my net surfing I just discovered this site: http://www.saptopsites.com/ which it seems to be a collection of SAP sites. You can vote my blog here.

Skills of a good SAP Consultant I

What are the skills of a GOOD SAP Consultant? Well, this is a hard to answer question but I'm willing to take the risk ans propose an answer. I hope others will come with theirs opinions to compile a GOOD SAP Consultant Profile. Today I will focus on comunication skills.

1) Comunication Skills.
A GOOD SAP Consultant must know how to comunicate with other parties involved in the implementation: customer employees, customer team members, coleagues, management team, other vendors.
A GOOD SAP Consultant must adjust it's comunication skills to the level of whom he/she needs to comunicate, so he/she must know when to speak and when to listen, when to jump into a conclusion, when to have a hard tone or a soft one. I think all this skills comes after years of experience (I have 5 years of ERP consulting) and I still learn from my comunication experiences.
Also, it is important to know the language in which you comunicate. I think that all the SAP consultants must know English and also German, because there are a huge part of SAP which is documented in German. (From my experinece, the IS-U module has it's function modules documentation mostly in German).

Other comments anyone?
Next time will introduce other skill: Programming knowledge.