“The roles and responsibilities of a SAP ABAP Consultant vary depending on the requirement the company has for a project.”
SAP ABAP Consultants provide consulting and programming services to the clients. They will understand the client’s requirements, transform it to business requirements, design and implement solutions based on SAP technology and merge it with the existing system. Apart from these, they are also responsible for supporting the existing SAP systems, and that includes creating appropriate documentation.
Based on the responsibilities, SAP ABAP Consultants can be broadly divided into
- Functional Consultants
- Technical Consultants
- Support
A Functional SAP ABAP consultant has an end-to-end role and responsibility in the SAP business.
- Understanding Requirements: The Functional Consultant deals with the client end of the business cycle. He connects the abstract business needs of the client to the logical functional solutions from the system. His main task starts with him carving out the use cases by customizing the respective business area and ensuring that the system reacts in an expected way.
- Documentation: Functional SAP ABAP consultant responsibilities are
- Make documents with proper guidelines, which allow the technical consultants to actually work on the requirement to provide the solution which caters to the customers’ needs.
- To generate a knowledge base about the current business process and business flow design, the set-up information and its complication. He also prepares the flow diagrams and DFD in Visio.
- Everything configured on the SAP system has to be documented as per their modules in the form of predefined templates. These documents will then need approvals from their reporting heads.
- To set-up DFD/ERD documentation, this is obtained from Mapping and GAP analysis done on each SAP ABAP module.
- To prepare end user manuals
- Training: A functional consultant is also responsible for knowledge transfer. He educates the users of the system through training programs.
- Testing: A SAP ABAP Functional consultant may also have to prepare test scripts for testing the configured scenarios. Analyze the error generated if any.
- Support – A SAP ABAP Functional consultant should support the technical team by testing the behavior of the system. He supports in designing solutions for the gaps identified in the testing. After go live he guarantees that the procedures remain usable and consistent in a real live situation and proposes enhancements. He should support all the problems in Clients SAP Systems.
- To be the client-business interface: Once the project is tested and guaranteed to fulfill the client’s requirement, it is the responsibility of the functional consultant to transfer exterior savoir faire to the client.
SAP ABAP Technical Consultants provide their services for software deployment and integrations.
- Technical Specification Design: Work on technical specification design by referring to the functional specification you received from the functional consultants’ team. Experience will aid you through this process. Team leader approves the technical specification.
- Develop and Implement: Develop and implement program objects using ABAP workbench tools. It can be a report program or an online program. Technical consultants help in designing interfaces and customizations in SAP. He should also help in configuring the SAP R3 installation. They are also responsible for the migration of data from the legacy system to the latest SAP implementation.
- Perform unit testing: Perform the unit test cases on the developed objects and record the results in a document. Support other types of testing.
A SAP ABAP support consultant supports the SAP problems the client faces. He also assists through the different processes by being an interface which will ensure the prompt solution to the client’s problem. Depending on the various roles a support consultant plays, he handles various responsibilities like
- Basic Support – When the customer comes up with a problem, the support consultant analyzes. He analyzes the problem, conducts defect analysis and performs necessary fixes and enhancements. If enhancements, additions of user exits/reports/forms and other enhancements are required for a program object, he works it out with the functional team. Basically, he does trouble shooting for the customer and supports him throughout the project.
- Development support – He helps in identifying the issues raised by the customer in customized programs, debugging the issue and fixing it. He also supports the functional team in the development of requirements and specifications. He should be able to manage operational support, and should provide on call support as required by the team. Troubleshoot production problems in a timely manner.
- Be an Interface: He also engages with other teams whenever necessary after seeking permissions from the team lead to ensure that incidents/issues are appropriately resolved. He should interface with the Production support team and provide feedback to the Production Support Manager on technical development processes.
- Provide Customer Support – support the customer on-site during upgrade and installation of SAP system. He also supports the customer being a subject matter expert and helps in optimizing programs or performance of the customers’ SAP business processes.
The roles and responsibilities of a SAP ABAP Consultant vary depending on the requirement of the company has for a project. Sometimes, the SAP ABAP Consultant may work as a Functional Consultant or a Technical consultant or a Techno-Functional Consultant. He assumes roles and takes up responsibilities of the implementation process and creates value for SAP clients through the development of the client business functionality and complete system performance
