SAPCOOKBOOK

I’ve been a contractor for a while. And when you’ve been doing this as long as I have you tend to develop some hard and fast rules for yourself. You don’t compromise on your rate. You don’t compromise on your location preference.  Work to learn, don’t work to earn.  And as many times as I’ve cautioned my friends about payment terms — the moment you break you own rules is the moment you get burned. So, please heed this advice: if a contracting agency aka “pimp” calls asking you to accept net 30 terms with once monthly billing, hang up the phone.  I’ve seen this happening a bit more often in recent months.

I’ve had a couple of shops call asking about this, and – I admit, last year against my best judgement, I accepted one.

It. Did. Not. Turn. Out. Well.

Now I’m calling this the “Net 30 trap” …

02 February 2018

I’ve been working in SAP for a while now — 20 years to be exact.  And I’m proud that many of you have been my readers for a decade or more, and I want to thank you again for the valuable gift of your time and attention.

Many of you know that I have published the “SAP contract negotiation timeline” as a part of my Breaking into SAP program and I dedicate quite a bit of time teaching you how to manage recruiters and the different pitfalls you run into as a contractor – because my friends, there are many, and you need to be armed with information and advice if you want to survive and deal with recruiters on a level playing field.

But now to the purpose of this blog post. The recruiter files.

Over the years I’ve heard it all (and shared it with you). Recruiters not …

07 October 2016

I hate to be melodramatic, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in this business – it’s that you either interview or your die. And when I say “DIE” in the business of SAP I mean a number of things that all equate to death:

• Stay in the same job (learning nothing – skills stagnate)
• Stay in the same job (earn same wage – bank account stagnate)

And of course many of my students are looking to Break into SAP or move into new skill areas altogether, in that case this video applies doubly — so — Interview or die !

…

12 January 2016

Want to make immediate progress in your SAP Success Journey?

1. Watch the video below.
2. Understand a bit more about why I created BITSAP, and
3. Take this opportunity to join:

> Breaking into SAP 3.0

> Breaking into SAP Accelerated

What do you think about current training available in SAP? Everyone benefits when you comment below.…

23 November 2015

DICE.com published a pretty good article a while back,  and of course SAP tops the list of most highly compensated skills.  DICE lists HANA, which I think is interesting, and they also list some quirky skill areas, noted below:

• SAP HANA (especially with SAP CO-PA)
• SAP APO
• SAP CCM
• SAP FI – FSCM (Financial Supply Chain Management)
• SAP GTS (Global Trade Services)

I wouldn’t suggest trying to get a job in SAP SRM CCM — this is the out-dated catalog software for SRM.  And APO is a pretty specialized skill set. FI is a great area, but you’ll be working with many grandfathers of SAP.

I agree with DICE that these are some well-compensated skill areas, but that’s true for everything in SAP, and these skills are pretty quirky and non-mainstream. But I digress. I wanted to bring this article to your attention because I feel like it’s important to …

05 November 2015

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13 May 2015

One of the earliest lessons I’ve learned working in SAP — and I’ve worked in SAP now for nearly 20 years — You can make a good living as an employee in business data processing. As an employee, you’ll generally make more than just about everyone else in the company. That’s great, right?  Maybe the CIO will make more than you (but not by such a large margin as you might expect). Of course some sales people will make more.

But I wanted to tell you about what I’ve learned as a contractor in this business.

As a contractor you have the opportunity to make more than just about everyone in the world.

This is pretty serious stuff. A friend of mine is a doctor and he was telling me that on contract to the hospital he was getting $80/hr — and he thought that was pretty good.  And …

20 April 2015

To sum things up, 2014 was a great year to be in SAP. And 2015 shows much promise.  But like the world around us, things are changing quickly. Notice: when I say “change” there should be no positive or negative connotation attached to that word.  Change isn’t inherently good or bad – it just happens.  I will say this – when we consider the word “change” in the context of SAP and SAP jobs, it often means one thing: opportunity.  It’s important to note that you’re reading this post toward the end of November 2014. These four trends – nobody could have guessed or predicted these trends. But here we are and this is the market we have. So enjoy your new found freedom and prosperity that SAP work provides.

Important: I’m highlighting the trends I’m noticing in SAP hiring so you know what to expect. As always, arming yourself …

26 November 2014

I hesitate to state the obvious, but when you’re working in SAP, you are doing work with information. You’re adding value to businesses by creating and running business systems that are required so that a business may function.  In essence, you’re helping a business create information. Sometimes you’re setting up transaction processing systems that allow a company to capture and enforce rules about a process. You may also find yourself gathering and synthesizing information to help a business analyze and improve upon an already existing transaction processing system.  Rarely are you doing much of what I call “technology for technology’s sake” — Fiddling with (fine tuning) software and technology without any regard to business process. I want to challenge you to think a bit differently.

I’m writing this today because I want to remind you that work in SAP is fundamentally different than work that you may encounter in other …

02 September 2014

Here is the list of top skill sets in SAP by open number of jobs around the world.  This is by no means a comprehensive evaluation of the global SAP jobs market – local variations will be apparent – but over the years I have found my index to be a reasonably good proxy for the demand for SAP skills worldwide. Trends in technology are now global.  Following the chart below, I have included a brief discussion about your prospects in each skill category.

* SAP Mgt. means “SAP Project Manager”

SAP Basis

We’re seeing that more and more, a whole host of technical skill sets are being bucketed into the “SAP Basis ” category. Skills with the proxy …

22 February 2014