whats your job ?
- Thread starter garyfl
- Start date
Speaking specifically for SAP HCM (SAP is a huge ERP beast with products that pretty much span the entire administration of a business, finance, HR, sales, stock management, procurement, payroll etc):
HCM breaks down to Human Capital Management which is effectively HR for the business. That specific module in SAP is responsible for all personnel administration and organisational data. All your employee's personal information, the hierarchy of your business and all the processes in place to keep such information up to date. When you consider that the company I work for has over 100,000 employees, it becomes a process that really has a business of its own.
Typically people in my line of work are responsible for the development, upkeep and analysis of this data and the systems impacted. In my case that's pretty huge impact, they have self service here, which is like an intranet where as an employee you can maintain your personal information, look for internal jobs, view your payslip etc. They have automated online form processing; a manager might fill out a form that transfers an employee, that form is intelligent and interacts with SAP to aggregate and push data. On top of all this you're developing for a global business in many cases, which means that each country has it's own legislation, and that has to be followed when storing and using employee information. And of course as technology grows so does the demand for your information to be impacted, so it's a constantly evolving beast. There are many many other processes in place but the two mentioned are a couple of the big ones that consume a lot of time.
I'd say 40% of my time consists of writing blueprints, functional specifications, change requests and filling out detailed paperwork to document anything I am doing or plan on doing. Probably 30% of my time is programming/configuration, for which SAP has it's own programming language called ABAP which you use to extend and sometimes even make the product work as it should. The other 30% is politics, meetings, business planning and analysis (reporting, statistics etc).
Associate
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- 5 Jun 2012
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Online Marketing Enthusiast
Soldato
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- 11 Mar 2012
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- Canberra
Blasting engineer.
I've tried to write a better description than that Bristol provides to describe it but every single time I fail, so...
'This programme is strongly science-based, emphasising the interactions between the geosphere, biosphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere in developing and controlling the Earth’s environment. This dynamic Earth system is studied through the interactions between geology, biology, chemistry and physics, which together define conditions on the Earth and how these may be influenced by human activities.'
The only thing that doesn't really state is the fact that it's not entirely about global warming and the end of the world; we learn about climate history and how the earth has reacted to different situations, including the present one. Also study lots to do with water resources, oil and gas. It's a real mix of things with good job prospects at the end, and a lot of it (save the geology modules) is very interesting
It's a BSc and in the School of Earth Science alongside Geology which follows a very similar program in the first year; we arn't even linked to Geography!
Associate
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- 26 Jan 2006
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- 2,039
I am a liquid planner (brewery scheduler) for a drinks company.
EDIT: We use SAP quite heavily day to day
EDIT: We use SAP quite heavily day to day
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Usually down to the responsibility and the experience needed in a niche industry.
Only companies with big budgets will be running the software and as such a project failure can be hundreds of millions of quids. Having someone know what theyre doing is pennies in comparison to ensure it goes through.
I remember having to help restore access to a factory in switzerland and I think the email came through saying something along the lines of "For every day this factory is down, we lose ~£30m in revenue"
(Not that im on anything NEAR that much money, im 22)
The three year average cost of deploying SAP is around $14.5M. That puts things into perspective in terms of the pressure the PM is under.
I'd be expecting any decent IT PM to be getting £70-£80k and the premium for SAP skills is perfectly understandable.
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