Homepage for SAP Professionals

If you don’t have a LinkedIn account yet, you may want to consider creating one and start Networking. In case you are already on LinkedIn, you may want to learn how to make the best out of your LinkedIn membership. Social Networking is essential, especially in the SAP Consulting business and often times it seems, if you are not on LinkedIn or similar professional networks, you don’t exist!

I am using LinkedIn as it has about 135 million users and it targets business professionals. It became my primary Professional Social Network as it has brought me back together with many people I have worked in the past and also generated new business opportunities. With LinkedIn I am on the know who is hiring, when someone of my contacts is promoted, change jobs. I am even able to give and receive recommandations. You may even find out what company is starting a new SAP project when they start to hire SAP Professionals.

LinkedIn helps you find valuable people and informs you of the mutual connections you have with them

If you are a business professional and you do not have a powerful presence on LinkedIn, you are undoubtedly missing valuable opportunities to connect and grow your business. For me, as I mentioned before, LinkedIn helped me to grow my own business. As your success is important to me, I spent some time to research and found a few complementary publications that can help you as well to make the best out of your LinkedIn membership.

Plese feel free to download the free publications below – Not sure how long these will be available for download, so download the ones you are interested in today!

 How to Build a Powerful Business Presence on LinkedIn
In HubSpot’s newest eBook, Learning LinkedIn from the Experts, five LinkedIn specialists provide key insight into how you can use LinkedIn to successfully grow your network and business.

I’m on LinkedIn–Now What???
With over 25 million members there is a lot of potential to find and develop relationships to help in your business and personal life, but many professionals find themselves wondering what to do once they signup. Learn the different benefits of the system and best practices so that you can get the most out of LinkedIn.

Learn LinkedIn: How to Build your Living Resume
In this manual, you will see how to set yourself up on LinkedIn (if you haven’t already), establish your account, and develop your “living resume” in an easy step by step process. This manual will also go over the must-know tips and information to ensure you don’t make any mistakes and will provide some new tricks for the more seasoned LinkedIn user. Also with this manual you will receive daily updates on new cool websites and programs in your email for free, courtesy of MakeUseOf.

30 Minutes to Maximizing LinkedIn
As the leading author and speaker on LinkedIn for business and professional networking, Neal Schaffer often gets asked for beginner tips to help people get started and find real value in using LinkedIn. While he can’t offer as much help here as he could by your reading his two books, he did want to offer a quick summary to help ensure that you don’t miss out on what LinkedIn has to offer and get started (or restarted) – in a 30 minute read.

Click here for more free publications!

by Simon Kirrage

How many times have you been asked by SAP recruiters “do you know anyone?” If you give a name, that person will get bombarded with emails and if you don’t, they will never know about the jobs that suit them, so you can either let your friend down or hand them to frenzied agents to chase. After all, give a consultants name to a non reputable agent and they will probably never speak with you again!

Agents ask because they have a bad combination going on – too lazy to search and too mean to pay – harsh but true. Consider contacting an agent and asking continue reading…

by ConsultantBox

The world of SAP consulting has some very inventive people involved in it, at every level, from consultants who can drag every last ounce of benefit from the SAP software solution to consulting houses who deliver excellent, fully functional solutions (beyond the definitions of the initial spec, while still bringing them in on time and under budget), and…….. then we have the SAP agents who have specialized in the art of lifting money from a customers budget, before it touches the consultants bank account and, to be fair, the latest generation of agents seem to be mastering their skills well.

During the late 1990’s the standard strategy, was to take a high commission by keeping the rate being offered secret from the consultant for as long as possible. 20-30% was the norm even then.
continue reading…

How much commission is a fair compensation for the work an agent does?

This question has been around since consultants were first hired on contracts in the industry, and has been addressed innumerable times, both in the past and currently, with people having very different views on the answer – however, it seems that many of the agents also have an opinion!

The days of agents charging what they want are long over – so why is it that today in 2011 there are agents for large companies charging upwards of 30% of a consultant’s charging rate – is that the agreed commission rate – is that even a defendable position given what role an agent has in the process? continue reading…

Given 5 minutes on the net, you can find out which plumber to contact, who wont rip you off or which insurance broker, which car salesman, doctor, dentist even which priest to bury your cat but take as long as you like and you wont find a single way of truly assessing an SAP consultant.

Odd really, when you consider that SAP consultants almost only work in high profile companies such as the fortune 100 – maybe the fact that there is no way of checking if a consultant is any good or not, is the reason the unprofessional consultants continue to find work at the cost of the many hard working SAP consultants out there.

Imagine if every SAP consultant was made accountable for their own actions, even their own reputation….. how would that work out for the unprofessional – would they work hard to become professional experts or would they hide behind the fact, that it is considered “unfair to stop people working” regardless if they are actually worth hiring in the first place? continue reading…

by SAP Reputation Blog

SAP is a product bought with the intention of success, by companies which, given the costs of SAP, have done well in their own market. In every market, quality control and market knowledge is a key factor to a secure future, so why are there so many SAP consultants and consultancies working in the market today who, to put it simply, suck at their jobs?

At this point, I should point out that most SAP consultants and consultancies offer fantastic knowledge and value when deploying SAP – these people work hard to get the most from the SAP solution for the customers – these consultants, consultancies and end-customers suffer at the hands of the terrible consultants, as they have to manage them and work with them on a day to day basis, but the ultimate losers are the customers themselves. continue reading…

by Consultant Box

When creating a team to deliver a complex solution such as SAP, there is a very real need to have the most suitable and experienced people working at the highest levels, to bring together both the SAP solution knowledge and the clients business engineers.

SAP under former chief executive Leo Apotheker, focused on the importance of quality consulting to ensure successful and viable delivery of the SAP product – the, now famous, off record quote from Apotheker caused offence to many consulting houses by shifting the blame from SAP itself to its two global vendors – IBM and Accenture.

When apportioning blame it should be considered that the SAP solution has been implemented in most environments and has fitted into most global legal and accounting systems – however there are a comparatively high number of cases, where SAP implementations have failed.

Senior SAP consultants are often the individuals who are at the sharp end of issues between the three parties – SAP, implementation partner and the end customer. To this end, many of the senior consultants are starting to consider what issues may arise, when accepting positions within complex or failing projects. continue reading…