Three Growth Opportunities for Sales & Distribution (SD) consultants

[Kartik_Dua]

New year’s is about resolutions and new beginnings. And if one of your resolutions is to grow your career or at least start off the journey, then you are on the right blog page. I am hopeful that by reading this blog article you will have a good idea and/or a roadmap as to how you can grow your expertise beyond your current skills.

So, I come from a typical Sales & Distribution (SD) background with multiple certifications and trainings. I worked as a consultant for many years helping various clients and successfully completing numerous implementation, support, and upgrade projects. Around 6 years ago I felt a void in my career. Things were getting monotonous, and I wanted to challenge myself, but I didn’t know where to start. If you have ever had this feeling or are going through these emotions now, don’t worry, because at the end of this blog article I promise you will feel better. Some time in 2015, I decided to move away from consulting and work for a product company and boy was that a good move. I was exposed to opportunities to not only grow vertically but horizontally too.

Here are the top 3 skills/modules I learnt which I feel are straightforward for an SD consultant to master and grow (with a little bit of hard work and dedication).

Resource Related Billing (RRB) – Our company offers professional services to our clients, so RRB is one of the key components within the SAP landscape. At a high level how it works is, when a consultant provides support to our clients, his/her hours and expenses are recorded against a project in SAP. These hours & expenses become a part of the SAP sales order to RRB to billing process. To know more about RRB, please refer to this SAP RRB link.

SAP Concur – SAP Concur was a perfect supplement to RRB for me. Consultants record time in Clarity which is sent over to SAP via cat2 and expenses are entered through SAP Concur. Example – if customer books travel to provide onsite consulting, his/her expenses for air ticket, meals etc. are entered in Concur which flow over to SAP to complete the RRB expense process. Moreover, our company uses Concur for internal Travel and Expense purposes too. With a little bit of research, trainings and playing around in the test instance, I was able to learn Concur quickly. To know more about SAP Concur, please refer to this blog article from a fellow Concur expert.

Revenue Accounting & Reporting (RAR) – I will confess this was a tough one to begin with, but like they say once you learn how to swim you can conquer oceans. We moved from traditional Rev Rec (VF44) to RAR in 2017. I was a fly on the wall when the implementation happened but believe it or not now I am the first point of contact for RAR issues. It took months of dedication, smart work and a lot of proactive research and getting feet wet in the test system to reach where I am today. RAR is very doable for any consultant who has good sense of the business process. To know more about RAR, please refer to this blog article written by Sanil Bhandari who works for SAP Labs and is a RAR and S/4 Hana pro.

Review links & blogs referenced in the blog article and comment below to let me know your initial thoughts. Hopefully these skills are a value add in your career and/or the project you are working on. I am sure there are other skills you guys may have learnt on different engagements. Please comment about those too and let’s chat about them.