Open the SAP Talent Bottleneck

"The resume looks FANTASTIC!! Great job!"
-- Greg Futrelle, EntryPoint Consulting

Okay, so let’s suppose you’re a large U.S.-based multinational looking to integrate your trading partners in China and across South Asia. You make robotic controls integrating hardware produced in Singapore and Vietnam with software made in California and India. Your goal: to increase market share among the rapidly growing numbers of Chinese small manufacturers.

So you need to add three key people to your SAP team. First, you need an import-export guru as your SAP project manager. Second, you need a couple of SAP technical experts fluent in Chinese and English. One should be a CRM specialist and the other a manufacturing specialist, preferably with lots of experience with small Chinese companies.

Here, then, are three candidates:

• For the project manager: www.SCXprofile.com/futrelle
• For the CRM specialist: www.SCXprofile.com/ang
• For the manufacturing specialist: www.SCXprofile.com/chen

I just referred three excellent candidates. Notice anything special about how I did it? First, I didn’t send you their resumes. In fact I may not even have their resumes, just their names. (People referring people without a resume — now, there’s an innovation!)

Second, if you look at their profiles, you’ll notice they are all easily scanable and comparable based on your selection criteria. It only takes seconds to see whether someone belongs on your short list. And if you do want their resumes, either a PDF or Word version is available.
Until there is a master database of SAP talent that is searchable by skill, industry and other key criteria, this is the next best thing. (Yes, I know that content-based resume search engines exist. They’re just not that helpful when it comes to finding people with, say, six years SD experience, three of which were in the auto industry and who also speak Chinese.)

A standard open profile makes career information like this much more transparent. Both parties benefit. The candidate benefits because he or she can get information into people’s hands (and heads) with a simple phone call or text message. The company benefits because when they do get that phone call or text message, the information is actionable — no translation needed — and no recruiter needed to translate.

That doesn’t just open a talent bottleneck. It opens a career bottleneck.

For more information on these and other SAP career services, check out the SAP Consulting Exchange (http://www.sapconsultingexchange.com).

SCX Appeal

"We help SAP consultants enhance their professional skills, reputations and business opportunities."
--The SAP Consulting Exchange

No, I haven’t gone out of business or stopped blogging. I’ve been temporarily absent here because an old friend called to ask if I would help him launch a new business — one that’s creating quite a buzz in the world of enterprise resource planning.

The business is called the SAP Consulting Exchange (SCX for short). I’ve been involved with the project since its inception, consulting on site architecture and branding materials, and writing virtually 100% of the web copy. I’m also helping my friend — his name is Herbert Goertz — launch several “endorsed services” the site will offer, including sales training and resume writing. (Guess who’s writing the resumes.)



Back in the day, Herbert launched the first SAP consulting practices in North and South America. He and I met when I wrote the original KPMG (now BearingPoint) SAP practice brochure.

SCX is two things. One is a sort of online support group for SAP consultants, providing things like SAP software access and the above-mentioned endorsed services — pretty much whatever will help consultants move forward faster in their careers. But SCX is also the foundation of something bigger — a sort of virtual consultancy — modeled very much like a peer-to-peer task-sharing network computing architecture. Rather than rely on large centralized hiring bureaucracies, the SCX will give consultants and clients the tools they need to connect with each other. In SAP parlance, every consultant moves up to “tier-1” — meaning they get to keep a lot more of what they make.

It’s interesting how challenging economic times inspire people to become highly creative. I’m currently working with some other interesting “behind the scenes” initiatives as well and I look forward to blogging about those soon too.