Hopefully you have enjoyed the SAP HANA Career Guide so far, which kicked off with Part 1, Overview. This piece focusses in on the first specialty: the business consultant.
The Business Consultant
Business consultants analyse the needs of the business and create a strategy to transform businesses, or line of businesses. The essence and principle of this doesn?t change with SAP HANA ? indeed it is much of the same. They listen to the needs of the business and the ways in which it must change, and then apply technology concepts against that to create a technology strategy.
For instance I have a customer who has a problem with fraud prevention. The business consultants came up with a solution that enables the business to reduce customer fraud.
Why does SAP HANA change this?
That?s just it: SAP HANA doesn?t change the needs of the business consultant. Instead, it changes the envelope. Let me illustrate how the technology changes the envelope.
I have a customer where we used SAP HANA to accelerate sales order reports within ERP. The approach was to read a bunch of sales order headers, get detail from within, cross reference them against various attributes and exclude a bunch of orders, to produce a report. This requires between 10-20 thousand questions, that SAP asks and takes 30-60 minutes to produce a report.
Now, SAP HANA performs the same as any other database to answer 10-20k small questions. But, with some small changes, we changed 10-20k small questions into one huge question. What happens now? SAP HANA responds in a few short seconds.
Why does that matter?
The answer is, in itself, it doesn?t. However, now we can give these repots to sales execs on the road and they can access them on a mobile device in seconds, giving information about past spend, profitability and other key elements. But even that doesn?t pull the real power of SAP HANA.
The real power is when we move this thinking to whats happening in the moment ? let?s take automotive as an example. We can collaborate with a customer to create a quotation with them ? price that quotation against very complex pricing structures that exist in complex business models. Even calculating margin on the fly against a car with 10,000 parts. Looking at upstream supply chain visibility to see that removing an option for an automatic gearbox changes the delivery date from 4 months to 1 month. Discounting on the fly based on available stock and the desire to sell particular options.
In this case, the customer experience becomes collaborative and communicative and you can close the deal in the moment, rather than having to come back with a quote the next day and an estimate for delivery 3 weeks later. It?s real, and customers will buy it.
SAP HANA Use Cases
The first thing the business consultant needs to do is to read about SAP HANA use cases and consume them for their industry. They are available for public consumption at Experience SAP HANA and this will begin to cultivate a HANA State of Mind.
The HANA State of Mind
I have written about this before and I see this change in consultants who get immersed in SAP HANA. Once you see the capabilities, you will be able to apply ?HANA Thinking? to everyday live. You will see the business possibilities where producing a particular report can reduce costs by millions of dollars a month. Only you thought it wasn?t possible.
Education and Training
Here?s the kicker with SAP HANA Business Consultants ? I?m not sure that it can be taught. You have to combine existing Line of Business and Industry expertise with the knowledge of how SAP HANA can disrupt businesses. If you?re good at business consulting already, all you have to do is to understand how SAP HANA can help.
Perhaps I?m wrong here and I?d like to be challenged. Perhaps there is a ?Power of SAP HANA? set of webinars, videos or instructional content. What do you think? Is it just a question of repeating a few business scenarios where SAP HANA makes a difference, and business consultants will just ?get it?? Let me know.
Like this:
Be the first to like this.
rueben randle mike trout ryan broyles jerel worthy alshon jeffery miami heat bulls
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.