What will be more valuable in future SAP skill market ?

Often I see consultants are  worried that experience on which phase of the project life cycle will be more valuable in future .Whether there will be more demand for consultants  who has experience in implementation project or testing and/or support  assignments.

Personally, I see demand for everyone in coming days and there is no dearth of any specific genre of projects. Few people believes that as all the big organizations have already implemented ERP there will be scarcity of implementation projects in future  and only support projects will  have majority share. I don’t think that will be the exact scenario and the reason I beg to differ from it are as follows

• Entrepreneurs      & new companies: Every day new companies are coming into existence      with all new intuitive business models.       These companies will grow in future and will need IT solutions to      operate efficiently. So, always there will be projects involving      implementation of new applications in these organizations.

• SAP      By Design & Business One – There are millions of Small and Medium      scale Enterprises (SME) operating on non-integrated IT solutions. SAP’s      fantastic offerings, By Design and Business One, provide SME an      opportunity to leverage SAP’s potential. Implementations in these small      and medium scale companies have just started to accelerate and there will      be huge number of assignments in this area.

• Merger      & Acquisitions: As the time passes, economy becomes more mature and      survival of the fittest becomes more and more pertinent. In such a      scenario there will mergers and acquisitions which will trigger      re-implementation and convergence projects.

• Changing      Business Processes – Globalization has enforced the organizations to      develop ground breaking business models and smart processes. Companies      need to evolve there processes to maintain there position in market.  In such a case implementation based on five      year old business processes may not be relevant with time.  Hence, companies will have to fathom the      delta change and re-implement there applications in case of major change      in business models/processes .

• Testing      assignments coupled with Implementation – Testing and implementation are      inseparable. With every implementation project there are rounds of unit,      integration and user acceptance testing phase. With good flow of      implementation project  I don’t see      any scarcity of testing assignments.

Disclaimer : The views mentioned are my own and  does not represent the thoughts, intentions, plans or strategies of my employer