Future positions in an ERP consulting

How will the future look like for a person working at an ERP consultancy in the future is a question I’ve gotten quite a few times lately and based on my believing that we will see huge changes in the future, especially going more standard and delivering “prebuild” solutions, here’s what I think will happen.

Consultants

Today most of the consultants are spending most of their time on doing analysis, setup, speaking to clients and lastly they are focusing a lot about the ERP solution as that’s their expertise instead of business optimizing.

In the future I think it’s more important for a consultant to focus on areas as process optimization, workflows, standardization of customers’ needs, and knowing all the “standard” tools that the consultancy decide to focus on, as this is where they can make a difference and help the customer to go standard. So I believe the consultants will be a very important part in the future and they can make a change in the environment if they are strong enough.

Developers

Today the developer is always too busy with making customizations for their customers, many of them even so complicated that it can be hard for another developer to take over in the middle of the process or at least takes a lot of time to explain the requirement and why it’s needed.

In the future I think we will see many developers working “internally” to ensure the solutions the partner is offering is up to date and build the right way so we can setup the solution instead of customizing it. There are lots of add-ons on the market today, but most of them have not been developed in a proper way, which in my terms is done with parameter setup and build in specific number series so they are much easier to upgrade. Therefore, I think the developers will have to work a lot internally to make that happen so we can upgrade a customer over night without facing any problems. This can ONLY be done if the add-ons are nicely made and ready for fast upgrades.

Project Managers

The project manager today is normally involved in a few projects at the time and having a huge project plan to control as the projects normally take quite a bit of time. They are normally a key to success if they are strong enough from a Change Management perspective, but many of the PM sitting at the partners today have been “upgraded” from being a consultant to a PM and therefore lacking the expertise in especially Change Management which is a huge risk for the customer.

In the future I believe the PM will have to be the one who create rapid implementation methodologies with a strong focus on Change Management as only then it’s possible to implement quick and precisely as you need to have the right methodology ready as else there’s too big a risk for failing. This is going to be an absolute key to success in the future which is why I see this as a very high priority from a consultancy perspective to educate the PM to be able to success.

Infrastructure

Today the infrastructure team spend quite a bit of time on looking into the customers’ existing setup (if they are NOT going to the cloud) and this will normally result in misunderstandings or adding additionally cost to the customer as they’ll have to buy new hardware etc.

In the future I foresee the consultancy will provide them with a cloud setup which is “prebuild” and therefore the infrastructure team again will have to focus a lot “internally” to ensure the package they are providing is up to date and can fulfill the requirements from all customers which will require a very strong team as this will be one of the keys to a successful experience from a customer perspective.