SAP Careers for Beginners

What is SAP?

SAP AG is a German multinational software corporation that makes enterprise software to manage business operations and customer relations. To understand the career opportunities possible in SAP, one needs to understand SAP as a software product. The SAP world also has its own lingo, which I shall try my best to explain, highlighting them in blue.

SAP Business Products - 

SAP ERP product is called SAP ECC (Enterprise central component). It is the most prominent SAP software as it serves the major functional needs of a company. ECC is the center of any SAP customer landscape. All major transactions happen in this system, like Finance (FI), Costing, HR, sales and distribution (SD), material management (MM), etc. 

Other SAP business products are peripheral to ECC and provide additional functionalities that are not directly provided by ECC are CRM, SRM, SCM, etc. 

SAP Functional Consultants are professionals who design and customize business processes in the above SAP products for the customers. Functional consultants are typically business domain experts of their respective fields. They have to go through intense training to understanding SAP functionality, processes, and how to configure SAP for a customer. To begin a career in SAP as a functional consultant you will need to have practical experience by working in one of these domains, also you need to be formally trained and certified.

SAP ABAP and BASIS are two technical skills needed for all SAP projects. These are 2 major skills with which most people begin their SAP technical career.

SAP ABAP - SAP is written in a programing language is called ABAP.  Every SAP customer has to develop additional programs or change existing programs in SAP products to meet their needs. Developers who code these changes are called  ABAP Constants or ABAPer.  There is no pre- qualification to be an ABAPer. Having prior software programming knowledge will help you get started in an ABAP developer career.

SAP BASIS - BASIS Constant is an SAP system administrator. Their primary job is to deploy infrastructure, install SAP systems and perform technical configurations needed to run SAP application. This role is suited for DBAs, Operating System, and/or Network Admins. 

Other Techno-Functional Roles

EP Constant  - SAP Enterprise Portal
If you have experience in JAVA, it will be easy for you to pick up this skill. 

BI Consultant -  SAP Business Intelligence 
One of the SAP best products and has always been a hot SAP skill. 

PI Consultant - SAP Process Integration
This is SAP's middle ware software which acts as a message broker between SAP systems and it also helps with communication with the Non SAP systems.