SAP Tips: Explaining Your SAP Job to a Ten-Year Old Child
SAP Tips: Explaining Your SAP Job to a Ten-Year Old Child
“What do you do Daddy?”
Although my children are now much older, that’s a question I’ve had from them when they were ten. How to answer? The answer I gave them was hopelessly awful and within a minute of my explanation, as I was delving into what “ERP” meant, their eyes had already glazed over.
This taught me a lot. If I can’t explain what I do to a ten-year old, then how can I explain complex functionality to end users? I’ve now adapted this and frequently use this as a question in interviews for functional consultants:
“Explain SAP to me like I am a ten-year old.”
Unfair you may say, and you could be right. But this gives me a sense of how effective a communicator the interviewee is. As a result, it may be an important part of your arsenal when attending interviews for SAP positions.
So, with that in mind, how would you go about answering this question?
Firstly, you need to get the concept of ERP over to them. This can be challenging. Examples are essential to get this concept across. A good way to do this is to take them on an imaginary journey, perhaps to a retailer of your choice – a supermarket would be a good place to start.
Imagine we are walking around a supermarket. Some of the staff are stacking shelves with replenishment goods. Others are helping customers and others are working on the tills. What is it that allows all these people to know what to do when and how? That is the ERP system.
E = Enterprise. This represents the entire organisation of the supermarket and everyone who works for them, including all the offices, warehouses and factories and the systems they use.
R = Resources. This represents all the people and the tools they use to do their job.
P = Planning. This is the process of planning all the work carried out in the enterprise by the resources.
So, look at the member of staff stacking shelves. How does that person know to stack this particular shelf with that particular brand of cereal, bread or milk? The ERP system keeps track of the number of loaves of bread the supermarket has in stock on the shelf and in the warehouse. When the amount on the shelf runs low and goes below a given number, then the ERP system tells the shelf stacker to add more from the warehouse. When the warehouse runs low, the ERP system tells the buyer in the organisation to buy more loaves or tells the baker to bake more. This process is called Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and is central to all ERP systems.
Now, let’s look at the cashier working on the tills. How does the ERP system help them?
When they scan a barcode on a product, the ERP system reads that barcode and gives the cashier a price on their screen. All the prices are added up and any sales promotions are applied to give the overall amount due. The payment is then taken and passed to the ERP system.
What about all the people who work in the offices of the supermarket. What do they do?
Well, some of them make sure that the supermarket is making more money than it costs them to run the supermarket. This is important and the ERP system helps to do that by looking at all the sales money coming in and comparing it with the costs. This is called Finance and Controlling. By doing this, companies can understand which products make the most money and which products make the least. Also, by doing this, they can decide upon the layout of the shop, to ensure that the products which make the most money are the ones which are easiest to see – perhaps on a shelf in your line of sight.
Some other people working in the offices are deciding upon how they should advertise the supermarket to get more people to shop there. They can use information in the ERP system such as how many people shop on certain days and which products sell better at which time of year. For example, in the summer, it makes sense to advertise barbecues. The ERP system can help them decide what to advertise when, to whom and how, by providing lots of data about shoppers’ habits. This is called marketing.
Now, let’s not forget about how all the people get their jobs, how they get paid, keep track of the number of days off they are allowed and how we measure their performance to get them promoted and given pay rises. This is also tracked by the ERP system and is called Human Resources.
So, what is SAP?
SAP is the most successful ERP system in the world. Almost all money which is made by organisations in the world passes through an SAP system. To get the SAP system to work properly, it needs to be “configured” and “developed”. These are two different concepts:
1. Configuration – this is where people like me log in to the system and change the way it behaves. Imagine opening up your iphone and going to the Settings menu and making changes so that you get notifications only for certain apps. The configuration is the same, only more complicated. People like me can make configuration changes to the system to ensure that the right supermarket shelf is stocked with the right product, at the right time, by the right person. We also make changes to ensure that the right price is charged and the money is tracked properly.
2. Development – this is programming work, done when the configuration changes are not enough to make the ERP system do what we want it to do. In these cases, changes are made in the programs to change the behaviour of the system at certain times.
To work in SAP, you will be doing one of these two tasks.
In short, it’s no exaggeration to say that SAP touches every part of an organisation: from marketing to sales, finance, human resources, warehousing and manufacturing.
SAP, along with other ERP systems has changed quite a lot recently, although the same principles about buying, selling, stocking, finance and HR remain the same. The changes are in the way that the ERP systems work. Much more is done automatically by the ERP system now instead of manually by the user of the system.
Given the mind of a ten-year old, the above explanation should appeal to them. The use of examples is vital, but that is no different from speaking with adults too. Making your conceptual discussion “real” with examples will help your end users deal with difficult concepts such as MRP or financial accounting in SAP.
In summary, this exercise is designed to get you to think a certain way when discussing complex situations with your end users and stakeholders. Imagine they are ten-year olds asking the question and it will ground you a little more. As technologists, we are normally all too ready to launch off about our favourite application and its ability in AI, ML and predictive analytics. Remember, your end users and stakeholders do not care about that. What they care about is business outcomes – how will SAP make their life easier? What productivity savings might they realise as a result of the implementation? Dumb down your responses by removing all the technical jargon and before you know it, you will have a solution so simple, a ten-year old will be able to understand it.
I hope you find this useful. Stay tuned for another SAP Tip from Eursap next month.
Be sure to also check out Eursap’s SAP Blog for more in depth articles.
Author: Jon Simmonds, IT Director, Architecture
Get in touch with Eursap – Europe’s Specialist SAP Recruitment Agency