Careers As an Enterprise Business Apps Professional

ERP has become an important application for enterprises, and in today's 'age of integration' acts as the complete business solution for an organization. Here we look at opportunities before a budding ERP professional as well as opportunities in other Enterprise Business App areas

Sunday, February 01, 2009

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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.

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

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.

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. Page(s)   1  2