Advice to a Young ERP Consultant Part 4

Learning at Levels

You (Young ERP Consultant) know you don't know things. The difference between a Young ERP Consultant and an Old ERP consultant isn't age, an Old ERP Consultant just knows more things.

So identify things to learn...and go learn them.

Learning is an ERP Consulting meta-skill. Modern ERP systems constantly release new features, customer needs will consistently outstrip your experience. Success as an ERP consultant (Young or Old) depends not on what you know now, but on your ability to efficiently learn new things and grow your domain of expertise.

One technique to efficiently learn new functionality is breaking it into levels.

What does that mean?

Advice Part 4: Learning At Levels

ERP understanding exists at High, Medium, and Low levels. Think of this as drilling deeper in our T-shaped learning approach.

• High level - UNDERSTAND THE BUSINESS NEEDS

Believe it or not, businesses don't implement ERP for fun. ERP solves business needs, but business needs exist independent of ERP systems. ERP consultants need to understand the business needs, abstracted from the system itself.

Take Accounts Payable as an example. "Accounts payable is about invoice journals and payment journals", is the wrong starting point. The high level need is "Businesses need to to pay their vendors". This leads to subsequent needs "Business need to know when and how to pay vendors", "Businesses need to verify vendors have fulfilled their obligations for payment", etc.

Upon investigation, business needs have fractal complexity, which is why ERP systems tend to be complex, which is why there is an industry for ERP consultants. Understand the business needs.

• Medium level - THE SALES DEMO HAPPY PATH

After understanding the business need, learn the steps to satisfy the business need in your ERP. This is the click-by-click process a potential customer would see during a sales demo. Remember, businesses don't implement ERP for fun, they implement ERP to satisfy business needs more efficiently or accurately than in a non-ERP world. While learning the clicks, be mindful of how what you do in the system improves on a system-less process. Put on your sales hat. How would a salesperson sell these benefits to a prospect?

• Low Level - IN THE WEEDS UNHAPPY PATH

Once you've mastered the sales demo, and how it satisfies the business need, drill into what happens when the process goes astray. How do you undo or reverse mistakes? What parameters need to be configured for the process to work? How does the process look from the perspective of different people in the company? It works for one transaction, does it work the same at scale? How do reporting and auditing work?

ERP Consultants should strive to build low level expertise, but need to understand topics at all three levels for successful customer engagements.