Rise with SAP is almost 18 months old and has gained substantial momentum as the intended market is now understanding the multiple benefits of Rise adoption. Signavio business process intelligence and the SAP Business Technology Platform are included in the transformation-as-a-service package. This means that businesses not only have a closely guided journey to cloud adoption and S/4HANA Cloud implementation, but also the ability to analyse and improve the business with Signavio during and after the implementation process, as well as the ability to extend those business processes where necessary in a way that is agile and scalable.
The combined effect of these advantages leads to businesses which can operate, expand and adapt: as the circumstances of their market determine, according to changes in the behaviour of the economy. This results in resilience, and businesses are now looking for SAP partners, consultancies and individual IT consultants who have the skills to implement, develop, and manage their adoption of Rise.
At SAP’s Sapphire Event in Orlando and online this year in May, Christian Klein gave an update on progress: citing over 2000 Rise customer adoptions, of which 60% were new, and SAP’s strong push to collaborate further with new and existing partners such as Accenture, Microsoft and IBM has greatly increased the public understanding of Rise with SAP.
The demand for IT consultants who are able to provide services which facilitate Rise adoption is only going up as more and more SAP customers seek to move to the cloud and to move to S/4HANA before the deadline.
So this week IgniteSAP is providing our community of SAP professionals with a closer look at what it means to study and become qualified as a Rise with SAP consultant.
SAP has conveniently provided Learning Journeys which list the courses and resources in which they are required to participate before taking the exams and other assessments necessary to gain SAP global Certification as a Rise with SAP application consultant or development consultant.
There are in fact 24 Learning Journeys which represent different routes for learning and qualifying as a Rise consultant. IgniteSAP has compared all of these in a spreadsheet in order to see how they are related to each other, but before we get into that we should explain why there are so many pathways to practice as a Rise consultant.
To put it as simply as possible: there are a huge variety of types of business, from multinational corporations to small businesses with very few employees, and SAP has put together Rise with SAP in such a way that it will be useful and appropriate for all of these.
The implementation for each of these businesses will be different. In the past this has required ERP systems to develop customisations and extensions of a core ERP solution. This resulted in a myriad of ways in which the various parts of an ERP system could fail to integrate correctly between the core system and satellite, third-party software, or even within one system.
SAP has created Rise as an all-in-one package providing cloud infrastructure, tools and services, a cloud database, a business network, business analytical tools and a technology platform, all under one name and one contract. All of these aspects of the package are designed to work together but some sections are made up of a huge number of extra modular components which can be implemented without fear of incompatibility.
The issue for SAP is how to educate their existing and new customers how these parts can be part of a seamless whole which can be scaled to meet business requirements as necessary. The issue for IT consultants seeking to become qualified as competent Rise with SAP professionals is how to educate themselves in the implementation, operation, extension and development of so many distinct software products.
The solution to the training of Rise with SAP Consultants is to organise the “curriculum” into Learning Journeys: each of which is geared towards providing prospective Rise consultants with a toolkit of skills specifically aimed at catering for an area of commerce or industry.
So that is why there are 24 Learning Journeys: they each end up at a destination in which the Rise consultant can specialise, corresponding to a type of business, or area of business operations.
What IgniteSAP has discovered during the course of our exploration of these Learning Journeys is that when they are listed in spreadsheet form with each of their respective modules and resulting qualifications alongside, it becomes apparent that many of the courses and “live sessions” required to achieve a qualification for a specific area of business, or type of industry, are shared with other Learning Journeys of a similar type.
It is not necessary to follow several Learning Journeys all the way through in order to become qualified in such a way that the IT consultant can diversify in their practice: to become employable in many contexts for Rise with SAP. The IT consultant can follow a core Learning Journey and then supplement this skill set with (sometimes) just one or two extra SAP courses to be fully qualified to apply their Rise skills in a complimentary area of business.
For example, the “Core Enablement to Become Competent and Certified” section of the Learning Journeys titled “RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Sourcing and Procurement” and “RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Supply Chain” are comprised of the same courses and live sessions, up to the point where an IT consultant can take one set of courses and participate in one set of live sessions but take two separate exams, resulting in two sets of complimentary qualifications: SAP Certified Application Associate in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Procurement Implementation, and SAP Certified Application Associate in SAP S/4HANA Cloud for Supply Chain Implementation.
This means that for the investment of time and money it takes the student of Rise with SAP to gain qualification in one area, for a minimal extra outlay, they can qualify in two: so that their employment prospects are doubled, and they can also use their S/4HANA knowledge gained in procurement to bolster and augment their work on projects as a S/4HANA supply chain specialist.
This just requires careful study of the set of Learning Journeys to know when one set of courses means you are eligible to take more than one set of exams, or when with a few extra courses, you can open up a whole new branch of SAP skills, and therefore can take up work in a variety of business areas.
While the previous example of two logistics-related Learning Journeys is fairly obviously linked, there are a few examples of more distantly related business areas in the list which are surprisingly quite easy to study in the same manner so that the student of one area of Rise with SAP can with a little ingenuity become qualified in much more diverse applications of Rise.
So, because many of the core Rise with SAP courses and live sessions are common requirements for taking exams resulting in qualification in a variety of areas of Rise with SAP, if you follow the Learning Journey called “RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Finance” and take all of the courses on this Learning Journey you will have covered the material required in order to take exams for the “Application Associate” qualifications for S/4HANA Cloud Finance (obviously), but also S/4HANA Cloud Asset Management, and others like S/4HANA Cloud Manufacturing, and S/4HANA Cloud for Sales and S/4HANA Cloud for Service Implementation.
While there are areas of the Rise with SAP Learning Journeys like Development and Project Management which have quite few extra courses in their Learning Journeys, the core courses of the Rise with SAP Learning Journeys are common to most, so if you are looking to practice as a Rise with SAP Specialist and want to get as many Rise with SAP qualifications as possible to multiply your potential career prospects and diversify your revenue streams as an independent consultant, then begin with the following Learning Journeys, taking their SAP Certification Exams, and you will find you only need to do one or two course and live sessions to be eligible to take exams in a wide variety of others.
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud (public) – Onboarding Fundamentals
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud (public) – Asset management
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Finance
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Manufacturing
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Project Management
This is a diverse list but you may prefer to find complimentary Learning Journeys which fit your existing skill set or professional profile. One combination might be around logistics:
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Sourcing and Procurement
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Supply Chain
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Transportation Management
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Warehouse Management
Another Learning Journey combination might be around development and extensions, but this would require more courses than other groups:
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – SAP Cloud SDK
RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud – SAP Fiori and Extensibility
The SAP Fiori and Extensibility Learning Journey actually already results in exams for a set of three qualifications, one as an application consultant and two as a development consultant, but if you do so then it only requires you to take the exam successfully for the SAP Cloud SDK Extensibility Developer application consultant in order to add that to your CV as well.
So, as we have seen, while it is possible to specialise as a particular type of Rise with SAP consultant, because so much of the core content of these Learning Journeys is common to all, with very little extra outlay in time and money it is possible to become a highly qualified Rise with SAP expert, and take advantage of the rapidly expanding market for IT consultants who are able to help implement instances of Rise with SAP: and to be able to practice your profession with confidence, no matter what form of Rise with SAP skills are required of you.
For your convenience we will provide a PDF of the 24 Rise with SAP Learning Journeys Comparison that we carried out. The document makes the advice we have given clear when you see that the majority of the columns contain courses that turn out on closer inspection, to be exactly the same core course, and so the graphical representation makes it easy to navigate your training as a Rise with SAP consultant, gaining eligibility to take several certification exams with only the addition of one or two extra courses.
Are you an SAP professional specialising in Rise with SAP or any other module of SAP? If you are looking to make the most of your investment in training and experience our team of dedicated SAP recruitment consultants can help find the right employment or contracts for you. Just get in touch with IgniteSAP.
