What is a Senior Consultant ?

Did you ever thought about what a senior consultant is, when ever you needed one? I thought many times about it, when I needed a professional expert behalf on my side.

There is not a clear definition, what a senior consultant really means. Different persons have different opinions what a senior consultant might be, but there is at least this minimum consensus: the number of years working on a certain topic is positively correlated with the number of experiences on it. In other words, to become an expert on an issue needs time! To know the best way and avoid the repetition of mistakes is therefore also very much correlated with the age and life experience of a consultant.

But how is it possible, that young and dynamic university graduates are already called and sold as seniors after 2 years of working in a consulting company?

The answer is easy: because the customers are buying the name of the consultancy company (trade mark effect of the big) and not the best and experienced of the consultants by itself. Please keep in mind, that the capabilities and the experience of a person you hire are much more interesting for you, than the reputation of the consulting company offering you the person!

Our understanding of a senior consultant:  a senior is able to listen and is able to understand the specific requirement of his/her customers. The senior is a fair (sparring) partner of the customer, has a clear opinion in the area of his/her competence and stands for it also in inconvenient situations.  A senior is self-confident and honestly as well to inform the customer immediately in cases of  risks and gaps. A senior consultant is always self-motivated to achieve the best possible solution.

Why we have to pay more attention to your satisfaction?

Did you ever thought about why a self employed consultant, must pay much more attention on customer satisfaction than an employee on the payroll of a consulting company must do? I am thinking on it around the clock, because we all earn our money directly by satisfaction of customer needs on a contract basis and not by a fixed salary. No contract, no money! It is just simple as that!

Please remember these kind of secrets, when you are going to make the next contract for a consultant!

How SAP R/3 Projects could become more successfully?

Did you ever thought, how SAP R/3 projects could become more successfully? We always thing on it! Some of the small hints we like to give you already here are:

Have a long term master plan for your IT-Projects.

Think about your key success factors of your business and clarify what you want to control for what purpose! Clarify your reporting requirements based on these factors already at the end of your rough design phase and highlight them for your project team members over all modules!

Establish formal problem escalation and decision meetings with interdisciplinary team members; provide a fixed agenda at least one week ahead to all participants. Start never a meeting without a moderator and time schedule. Document the results of your meetings already in the meeting with choosing the right media visible for all.

Try not to use high sophisticated project management tools!

Try to make a detailed table of content for your end-user-documentations (simply a word document by module) at the very beginning of the detailed design phase of your project. This document can also help you to measure your team progress. If you can not close a chapter or a topic by fixing it in the documentation, then it seams to be an open topic to be clarified!

Do not accept changes on agreed and committed business processes after rough and/or detailed design phases. There might be some exceptions in the case of obvious errors in business process flows which have to go over your problem escalation and decision making teams!

Try not to accept own developments and programming requests by the user departments, if they do not sign up as responsible for the development and as well for the maintenance cost for the whole live time of the system! Every needed own development should be formally requested and confirmed.

Integrate one or two people of your IT-maintenance department in project work and train your IT maintenance people as they where key users at the end of your project. The process know how they will get will be enormous valuable for your company. Do never the mistake to buy extra consultancy capacity for end-user trainings at the end of a project only. Nobody can train your organization at the end of a project without knowing your business your processes and your project history? The provided training can only be a general one.

Usually the implementation of any ERP software is forcing a higher degree of integration of your business processes. With the introduction of a system you are obligated to rethink your business processes and their integration aspects and impacts to your business and organization. However there are some business process groups, which usually do not appear important in the first view.
If you look closer to your business processes, then you will find a huge number of processes which are critical on time, critical on cost, critical on quality. If you further analyze  the group of processes for master data maintenance, then you will find beside the above mentioned obvious criterion a big number of processes with an enormous impact to all other business areas and finally to the total business performance.
Take as an example the material master maintenance process, where usually a huge number of master data fields have to be maintained correctly. You will discover, that these kind of processes are more important for your business performance then they appear in the first view. Errors or duplication of master data records for physically unique materials will cause additional efforts in the handling in almost all other areas. E.g. unnecessarily maintenance of production data, like bill of materials, unnecessarily efforts in product costing and in stock monitoring, in material requirements planning, sales planning and sales processing.
We recommend to put the necessary effort on the analysis and design of such processes. Analyze e.g. the whole lifecycle of a material, starting from the questions: who or what is triggering the creation of a material master? Who in your organization can maintain which parts of the master data, in which sequences? Is a centralized or decentralized maintenance process more applicable? ...
Please keep in mind: your business processes can only be as smooth as the quality of your relevant master data.

Last but not least, if possible do not start with the last available release of any ERP software. It is the same as with all new products. They have a lot of errors and mistakes at the beginning. With "one step behind strategy" you can minimize efforts and save time and money.

Lets see, what we can do for you ... or  Let us introduce some of our consultants

Stand: 07. November 2008