Hire SAP Functional Consultants

The most expensive decisions on an SAP programme are made before anyone writes code, and they are made by functional consultants. Whether a process is configured or extended, whether a site is modelled as a plant or a storage location, whether an approval is a release strategy or a workflow — each of these is cheap on a slide and structural in a live system.

What separates a good functional consultant from a certified one is what they do with a requirement that does not fit. The weak response is to log a gap and pass it to the technical team, which is how estates accumulate hundreds of enhancements nobody can upgrade past. The better response is to establish whether the business process is genuinely a business requirement or the way one person has always done it — and a surprising amount of the time it is the second, and the gap disappears.

The second thing that matters is the specification itself. “The system should allow the approver to reject” is not a requirement; it is the title of one. Who approves, on what basis, what happens to the document afterwards, what the next person in the chain sees, and what an auditor can reconstruct six months later — those are the requirement, and if the functional consultant does not write them down the developer will invent them.

We staff functional people to sit next to the technical ones rather than upstream of them. A specification that has never been read by the person building it is a document, not a design, and the difference shows up in the third week of testing.