What constitutes SAP consulting with lasting value:
The basic principles

When selecting SAP consultants, you should pay particular attention to the following

The SAP consultant who delivers sustainable, valuable SAP consulting for his customers, …

• uses all his creative power in particular and exclusively for the optimal use of the SAP standard (also beyond the industry plate edge) for the benefit of the customer – and does not waste it to develop solutions that do not meet the standard or to interpret the specifications of the project management.
• spends all his argumentative energy in particular on convincing the customer to use the SAP standard as best practice – and does not waste it in order to explain how he has already developed solutions for other customers that are not in line with the standard and how well they can also be used now.
• defines his area of responsibility according to the customer’s process landscape with a peripheral view of the SAP module affiliation of individual functions – and not himself and what he feels responsible for via an SAP module name, analogous to the sketch: Who is Currywurst? Me! (Note: the SAP modules only refer to a collection of functions compiled on the SAP side under one term and have nothing to do with the individual process landscape of the customer, who is king.)
• is aware of the exclusivity of the fee charged for him and thus also of the value of the time spent by him – and is therefore always anxious to use these times efficiently and purposefully (note: he must be capable of this, otherwise the amount of the fee charged for him would not be justified).
• is anxious to provide the client with a visible and noticeable economic benefit on a daily basis through the results of his consultancy work, which at least corresponds to the amount of the fee charged for him during this period – and is therefore very critical with regard to the integrative, indirect and long-term unwanted side effects of the recommendations made by him and subjects these to a structured analysis in each case.
• Even after many years of experience, he is aware of the limitations of his accidentally accumulated wealth of experience – and in particular verifies absolute statements regarding the limitations of the possibilities of the SAP standard on the basis of the documentation or finally with SAP itself before making them.
• carries out a structured and comprehensibly documented decision-making process (analogous to the procedure usually learned during his studies), involving and evaluating all alternatives (e.g. by means of a SWOT analysis) for important fundamental decisions in his area as objectively as possible – and renounces the procedure generally used in the consulting guild to think that the recommendation he shoots from the hip – perhaps even without being sure that he has grasped the problem correctly and completely – is the best recommendation for solving his client’s problem.This is also done in the knowledge of the limitations of one’s own wealth of experience and in the knowledge that no consultant, however experienced, can know all the functionality hidden in the SAP system, which is constantly being further developed; every consultant who claims to know everything disqualifies himself as a valuable consultant by this statement alone).
• is a reliable partner with regard to the agreements made with him and always fully and punctually complies with them and reports independently with results or time bottlenecks that prevent him from adhering to agreed deadlines because he has his time and activity management as well as his budgets under control – and need not (repeatedly) be reminded of the adherence to agreements made, whether in terms of time or content; in particular, he does not try to justify himself posthumously for not keeping his promises, because he has understood that this cannot be justified at all.
• continuously reads SAP’s newly released release notes on all modules relevant to his process area in order to keep up to date – and is not of the opinion that he has accumulated enough knowledge in his area at some point and can therefore stop continuing his education; which ultimately leads to him delighting his customers with antiquated solutions.
• masters all SAP standard tools and tools relevant for all SAP areas, which enable him to work more efficiently for his customers, such as (LSMW, Quickviewer, BTCI processing, profile generator, MASS processing, DUMP analyses, OSS use, simple ABAP trace etc.). (everything that does not require a developer key)) and continuously acquires the relevant knowledge about new tools – and does not believe that the handling and operation of these tools requires a developer.
• The customer does not mean that if he cannot solve something himself, SAP cannot; after all, his customer pays a not insignificant maintenance fee for the usability of SAP’s OSS, not to use it intensively, would therefore be an irresponsible use of the customer’s resources.
• The SAP OSS is an effort to guide the customer’s contact persons to independently analyze and develop solutions in the SAP standard – and therefore never explains functions in SAP without using the SAP documentation and thus introducing the customer to the use of the documentation or telling him where to read the explanations.
• is also aware of the value of the work initiated by others – and therefore creates specifications (especially for programming) completely and under consideration of all technically possible eventualities as well as all test conditions occurring in reality.
• is aware of the form of the contractual relationship and acknowledges that it is not any kind of artistic commitment – and therefore does what it is supposed to do according to the contract as well as it can and NOT THAT what it wants, as it likes at the moment.
• is always aware of the fact that the end users have to deal with the results of his work and are therefore his customers – and therefore always strives for pragmatic, easy to handle, transparent and robust solutions according to the motto “less is more”.
• uses all his talents to contribute to high-quality results for the benefit of the project as quickly as possible and with the least effort – and deliberately refrains from doing disproportionately long research instead of tapping into all the resources available to him in order to arrive at a solution.
• is thankful that the client and the project provide employment – and does not expect the client to be thankful for providing him with his unique skills.
• and quite a few thought that it was essentially the professional qualification that made the difference – but the others can also read (SAPdoku), google, chat or attend (SAP) trainings and thus easily acquire SAP knowledge … and would perhaps come even more thoroughly to more sustainable results instead of being advised by consultants who do not work according to the aforementioned principles.