Jon Reed: Welcome to our first-ever SAP Consulting Trends Podcast with Jon Reed and Brian Trout, brought to you by JonERP.com. We’ve got Brian on the phone today to talk about what I consider to be almost--I don’t want to say a "revolution," but a pretty massive shift in the trends affecting SAP consultants in today’s market. Brian is the SAP Practice Manager at B2B Workforce. Brian, welcome to the podcast.

Brian Trout: Thank you, Jon. It’s good to be here.

Reed: Brian, for a number of years now, we have been advising consultants that the core ERP skills in areas like FI/CO and HR were kind of getting a bit commoditized. We were telling them, "Look ahead to CRM and APO (what was at one point called the New Dimension product line) for opportunities that might be a little more expansive down the road." But what we’re seeing with these upgrade scenarios to ECC 5.0 and 6.0 seems to imply almost the reverse of what we used to advise. Most of the hottest areas in SAP seem to be centered around the core.

Meanwhile, some of these much-hyped mySAP Business Suite products, as they’re now called, such as APO/SCM especially, or even Supplier Relationship Management, just don’t seem to have the same level of consulting demand as some of these core areas that are being driven by these "enforced upgrades." I wonder if you agree with that assessment.

Trout: I agree, Jon. There’s really an overall trend of looking to go global with SAP. Companies running on SAP often have separate instances of SAP running on a global basis and now they want to unify them into one global instance. So they’re looking to do that, and that means they are looking at the core ERP functions and how to get those consolidated. So, the demand has remained strong across all segments in Supply Chain, HR, and Financials - all relative to the ERP product.

Reed: So Brian, what areas are you seeing now that are hottest, and which areas seem a bit sluggish in terms of consulting demand?

Trout: The best way to answer that question, Jon, is really to compartmentalize some of SAP’s products. The product ecosystem from SAP is so diverse and far-reaching at this point that a question like that is difficult to encapsulate in a very short answer.

But if you look at the core ERP applications from SAP, the ECC-level applications, there is strong demand across all of the major segments in Financials, Supply Chain, and HR. In the FI space, there is a lot of interest around the new GL functionality.

SAP has taken a very concerted effort to address prior release concerns in terms of lack of global continuity with the Financials applications. SAP has also incorporated additional functionality to address supply chain demands relative to financial applications, dispute management, and credit management. You can now have case resolution procedures within SAP for customers that have disputes about their accounts payable process flows and things of that nature. There’s a lot of interesting things that SAP has done, just in the core ERP side of the Financials arena, and that has definitely driven demand for experienced consultants.

Of course, the push toward BI and the Business Suite product elements are also strong in a lot of places, especially as they tie into the core ERP level applications. Now, in the supply chain space, very much the same type of thing is going on out in the SAP market from our observation. There is still a considerable amount of demand for handling supply chain issues at the transactional ERP level.

For example, there’s a lot of interest in the Global Trade Solution (what was formerly SD Foreign Trade). Another related area of demand involves the Discreet Manufacturing Process Solution, or DEMP as it’s referred to, which is a "roll up" of a number of industry solutions that are now part of the DEMP solution. And of course the demand for core, base-level SAP configuration in the logistics areas of SD, MM, and PP remains strong.

However, the one thing you would definitely say across the board is, "It’s not the consulting market of the ’90s". Customers don’t just want the module expertise. They want consultants who have specific industry background and the latest release expertise to go with that.

Reed: Brian, tell us about the B2B Workforce SAP Practice and how you are serving the needs of this changing market right now.

Trout: Sure, Jon. At B2B Workforce, our primary service line is the staff augmentation and temporary staffing line in SAP consulting and really, in a broader space, all ERP product lines. But our main practice is SAP, and that constitutes a 60-65 million dollar service operation that has grown since 2000.

B2B is a preferred partner of most of the primary systems integrators in the US market. So when you talk about Accenture, IBM, Deloitte, Bearing Point, and even SAP itself, B2B Workforce enjoys a prime vendor status with all of those players. It gives us a unique vantage point to monitor SAP market trends. By having access to all those vendors, our perspective is informed by a very large segment of the firms that have prime responsibility for SAP’s corporate customers.

Reed: So when a Tier 1 vendor is scrambling for the right SAP expert, they’re going to turn to your firm for that support?

Trout: That’s certainly been the case. It may sound surprising to think that SAP’s top integration partners would need to turn to an expert supplier like B2B Workforce to provide key skills at the team leadership or subject matter expert level - skills that can make or break an implementation - but that’s our role in the market. It speaks to the demand that continues to exist on the resource side of this market, not just on the ERP level, but in terms of the NetWeaver technical skills base we haven’t gotten into yet in this discussion.

Reed: I’m glad you brought-up NetWeaver, because I wanted to ask you if you think there is some confusion in the SAP market about this stuff. I have spent the better part of the last few months trying to sort out, in my own mind, the differences between NetWeaver 2004, 2004S, how those releases are connected to 5.0, 6.0, and how the NetWeaver releases connect to mySAP ERP 2004 and 2005. I’m starting to get some vague idea of how it all relates. I just wondered if I’m the only one that’s confused and everyone else is a bit more clear.

Trout: Well, Jon, in the many years I’ve known you, I’ve not known you to be someone who is easily confused. So that confusion certainly speaks to a trend that is probably out there with a lot of folks in the market. I certainly will confess that in my own right, it is almost a daily task to continue to understand the inner workings of SAP’s product architecture and the interoperability that goes therein.

But, what I would say is that SAP has obviously looked to ease a lot of this confusion. In my view, the real confusion with SAP and its product architecture started with the transition that happened in the late ‘90’s, when SAP was still labeled traditionally as an ERP vendor.

Reed: Right.

Trout: Obviously, at that point, SAP looked to shed that skin and move into more of an e-Business type of product with the introduction of the SAP Portals business here in the US. Which ultimately, as we know, evolved into a broader technology platform. The good news is that the confusion is starting to mitigate itself. Customers still have to work through the issues of service pack releases, kernel issues at the operating system level, and other upgrade issues.

But when you look at the introduction of the Business Suite and the use of NetWeaver technology, which is getting more and more of a foothold everyday, we’re seeing the clarification of the new platform and release schedule. With the SAP service marketplace for your Basis resources out there, you can get a handle on how to navigate that environment, and you can look for and follow the upgrade paths that are necessary to take a customer from release A to release B. That information is largely there - you just have to know how to find it and know how to execute against it.