What does an SAP consultant do?

SAP consultants help organisations run their core operations — finance, procurement, manufacturing, sales, HR — on SAP software. The job title covers a wide range of work, but almost all of it comes down to one thing: translating how a business works into how its SAP system works, and keeping the two in sync.

The day-to-day work

• Understanding the business process. Before anything is configured or coded, a consultant works out how the organisation actually buys, builds, sells, pays and reports — and where the SAP system should support or change that.
• Configuring the system. Much of SAP's power is in configuration ("customizing"): shaping the standard software to a company's processes without writing code. This is the heart of functional consulting in areas like Finance, Procurement or Sales.
• Building and integrating. Where standard configuration isn't enough, technical consultants and developers extend the system — classically with ABAP, increasingly on SAP BTP — and connect it to the rest of the company's landscape.
• Testing, training and go-live. Consultants prepare test cases with the business, train key users, migrate data and support the nervous weeks around a go-live.
• Running and improving. After go-live, AMS and support consultants keep the system healthy, while ongoing projects roll out new countries, new processes and new SAP products.

One title, many roles

"SAP consultant" is an umbrella. Underneath it sit functional and technical consultants, solution and enterprise architects, developers, Basis and security specialists, project and delivery managers. The career-paths guide walks through the whole role landscape, and the modules guide covers the functional areas they specialise in.

Who does an SAP consultant work with day to day?

Mostly with people who are not SAP consultants. On the client side there are the process owners who decide how the business should work, the key users who know how it actually works today and will test everything, and the IT department that owns the landscape after the project leaves. Inside the project there is a project manager holding the plan, a solution architect holding the overall design, developers and an integration team building what configuration cannot, and Basis keeping the systems and transports moving. A consultant's week is spent translating between those groups: turning a process owner's decision into configuration, turning a defect a key user found into a question for a developer, and turning both back into plain language for a steering committee. That is why the role is judged on communication at least as much as on system knowledge.

Where do SAP consultants work?

Consultants work at systems integrators and consultancies, as independent freelancers, and in-house at companies that run SAP. The mix varies a lot by country and city — you can see how the community is distributed on the SAP World Map.