How to Learn ERP

Yesterday, I chatted with a friend who worked in a state-owned enterprise. With a lot of emotion, the IT staff working in the State-owned Enterprise felt a little depressed and could not find a way out. As we get older, we feel more and more about learning new things. The question is where is the way out?

The chat result clearly makes me feel this phenomenon: As it staff, it is difficult to clearly define their own positioning, and it is more difficult to find a way out. I will talk about my own views on this issue. I hope you can add and discuss it more.

1. define your own Positioning
The ERP industry generally includes the following roles. As companies have some differences in the definition and positioning of consultants, the classification in this article only represents personal opinions.
Internal Factory:
1. ERP implementation consultant, responsible for internal implementation of ERP System
2. ERP Technical Support consultant, responsible for secondary development and system maintenance of ERP systems
3. ERP project manager, responsible for internal communication and coordination of various departments
Consultants
1. ERP sales, responsible for ERP product sales (I also include market work)
2. ERP presales consultant, working with ERP sales personnel to consult potential customers. Generally, ERP presales consultants should have good sales awareness and comprehensive and rich knowledge, and have a certain understanding of the functions of their products and different industries. Presales consultants are usually held by senior managers, senior sales personnel, and senior consultants of the consulting company.
3. ERP function consultant, responsible for the implementation of specific ERP products, requiring a certain module of the ERP product (if it is a small ERP system, it is the entire system) the specific configuration and debugging are quite familiar.
4. ERP Technical Consultant, responsible for ERP system installation, debugging, optimization and secondary development. The debugging and optimization mentioned here mainly refers to performance debugging and optimization, which is different from the business process debugging of function consultants.

With a simple understanding, I believe that many of my friends are clear about their goals. What is closer to reality is generally functional and technical consultants. Yes, many of my friends have the same goal in the near future. Only when a clear goal is set for doing things will there be a direction.
Ii. Differences between function consultants and Technical Consultants
In fact, many people have no difference in the requirements of functional consultants and technical consultants. Next I will briefly describe the different requirements of these two types of consultants.
Functional advisor requirements generally include:
1. Good communication. In the survey process, consultants need to communicate with each other. Many customers have low quality and they can talk about their own processes, what I can understand is something that is very close to physical processing. In this case, the consultant is required to describe the complicated and profound theories in simple words.
2. comprehension. As mentioned above, the customer will talk about the problem according to his own ideas, and the consultant's understanding becomes very important. What does he say you don't understand, or what will happen if there is an error?
3. Rich imagination and rigorous thinking. Back to the problem of communication, the customer's description is often incomplete and messy, which requires the consultant to be able to organize and analyze what the customer tells, and supplement the transactions not mentioned by the user.
4. Train the customer's abilities. Similar to the communication skills, the training also requires the experience of consultants. It is also critical to face the question of how many users can motivate them to attend lectures and explain the course content in an organized manner.

The requirements for technical consultants are completely different from those for functional consultants. In a formal consulting company, the requirements for modification and secondary development are generally raised by the function consultant. Even if many questions are raised by the customer, they must be explained by the function consultant. Because the problems raised by the customer often do not conform to the system logic, the technical consultant usually does not need to spend too much time directly facing the customer. The technical consultant should pay attention to the understanding of the internal structure of the system.
1. Understand the development tools of the ERP system and perform secondary development quickly.
2. Understand the internal data structure and data flow direction of the system and make quick adjustments.
3. Familiar with system installation and debugging in different environments.
Usually, technical consultants are transferred from developers, and their requirements are not too high. In many consulting companies, technical consultants are treated at a lower level than functional consultants.
As I am positioned at the pre-sales consultant level and close to the functional consultant, I will not describe the requirements for the technical consultant in this article.

3. How to Train yourself to become a qualified functional Consultant
Since it is in the factory, it is naturally different from that in the consulting company, but since it understands the consulting company's requirements for consultants, then it personnel can cultivate themselves with a focus and purpose. The following is a self-learning method based on my personal understanding.

1. Research and Research
What Will consultants do first after they reach the company? Do research!
When talking with friends, I asked him the following question: what is your company's business process. He used 5 ~ The six steps are described for me. However, I thought it was not enough to ask a very simple question: what is the sales process.
Yes, this is a simpler question. How many people can fully describe the process of sales in a certain range, and there are other processes beyond this range? Who approves the product and what departments approve the product. When the sales price is lower than a certain point, special processing is required ???
Have you noticed that when we think about problems, we always miss something. When we do things, we often only pay attention to the large process, but do not pay attention to small details? By the way, when working in the factory, we can try to organize and plan the details of the enterprise process, and cultivate our own quality of observation.

2. Communication and re-Communication
When talking about research, we can't help but talk about communication.
It is not good to interfere with others' work for no reason. In this case, you need to communicate with the staff of the business department.
The specific communication methods and details need to be refined by the individual, and I cannot provide simple and easy methods, but one thing is certain and I can say something different to different people.

3. Training and Retraining
It is very easy for people in the IT department to organize training. The training content can include the use of the office, sending and receiving emails-it doesn't matter what the training is, so that you can successfully attend the training and produce good training results. Even every new clerk can be assigned to the computer department for training.
The benefits of doing so are needless to say. The biggest beneficiaries are yourself.

4. Learn a set of ERP systems
It is much easier to learn other ERP systems with research results and documents. You can apply the existing enterprise processes in the ERP system, and plan and optimize the enterprise processes based on your own ideas.

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4. Correct the position and distinguish the situation
One of the most common problems for IT technicians is that they focus on technology. I often hear a friend tell me that he has developed an ERP system, which has much stronger system functions than UF and KD, and how many enterprises use it. I am also often asked by my friends, how is this system? What are the advantages and what are the advantages of the system. But in my eyes: these are not the focus.
In the process of communicating with friends, I often use such an example to illustrate the problem: for domestic enterprises, using the invoicing software can produce great benefits. In actual applications, few enterprises can accurately make production capabilities. This is not a technical issue. You spend a lot of time telling me what algorithms you use in this software, or even better than sap or Oracle? Can enterprises make good use of it?
ERP itself is a management rather than software technology.
Of course, learning software technology is also necessary. When the customer asks you how to make the system unable to open a bill when the sales amount exceeds 0.5 million, you can only say yes, but cannot really show it to him, he will also deny your abilities. Once the consultant is rejected by the customer, it is difficult for you to get up.
Several friends told me that they intend to focus on an industry and serve as industry consultants. A friend who once worked in a pharmaceutical factory was dug away by SAP's partners with a high salary. It is not because of his proficiency in SAP, but because of his deep understanding of the pharmaceutical industry. When SAP consultants communicate with customers or write solutions, they should not be able to make some low-level mistakes.
The ERP consulting industry emphasizes communication. Many times you have good ideas and good suggestions that need to be expressed in a good way or tone. Many problems can even be solved through simple words.
The ERP consulting industry is also an industry that emphasizes process transformation. For customers, process optimization is far more important than operation simplification-data input personnel are only the bottom-layer personnel of the company, and their benefits are far less than that of the leadership.

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