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Addressing the SAP Talent Shortage Without Risking Your Infrastructure

Global hiring managers find themselves in a perfect storm with an aging workforce, increasing specialty IT skills, the aftermath of the Great Resignation, and a growing skills gap. The SAP talent shortage is even greater as fewer people than ever deeply understand the esoteric coding, architecture, and tables of the German-language SAP back-end.

 

Looking for ways to de-risk your SAP support infrastructure can include leveraging packaged integration processes to speed connecting SAP data to front-end systems, looking to citizen integrators to supplement existing IT infrastructure, accelerating digital transformation projects, when possible, to maximize existing knowledge bases, and more.

 

What Specific SAP Talent Shortage Challenges Do IT Leaders Face?

 According to a 2022 SAP Insiders Executive Forum survey, keeping up with technology and hiring and retaining staff are two of the top priorities. But training, motivating & inspiring staff also make the top 10 challenges list–with training jumping from being a negligible challenge in 2021.

It’s clear that attracting and retaining top talent is key–but so is training that next generation of SAP experts and that requires, focus, time, and resources.

 

S/4HANA Migration Intensifies the SAP Talent Shortage

In 2022, ASUG (Americas’ SAP Users’ Group) research indicated more than a quarter of organizations saw skills in supporting, developing, and upgrading SAP as their greatest challenge. The ever-present and resource-intensive move to S/4HANA has made SAP talent even harder to find as enterprises, integrators, and SAP ecosystem vendors all vie for the same employees. 

 

An ERP migration, the likes of ECC-to-S/4HANA, requires companies to assess their own SAP IT talent readiness, but also those of their SIs, consultants, and other technology partners. After all, it’s one thing if your homegrown quoting tool starts generating data errors but it’s a whole other problem if your core SAP ERP has any issues now–or during transition to S/4.

 

The Peril of Home Grown Solutions…Coming Home to Roost

In the not-so-distant-past it was common for enterprises to develop custom front-end solutions based on business needs. Everything from B2B commerce portals to quoting solutions and beyond were possible with in-house resources. Now, these homegrown systems are prone to downtime, data integrity issues, and even system failure as the data they once relied on in SAP ECC is transformed in the move to S/4HANA–and the original builders of the software are nowhere in sight. These systems were often built before cloud-based resources were commonplace, making them vulnerable to server failures, downtime for patching and updating, and more.

 

Best-in-breed front-end solutions now exist for nearly any challenge a business can face, but integrating those systems with SAP require deep in-house SAP knowledge or, nimble PIP-based technology partners who can virtualize SAP data, real time, directly into Salesforce, ServiceNow, MuleSoft-connected iPaaS solutions, and more.

Talk to enosix about how packaged integration processes (PIPs) can help you address the SAP talent shortage with leveraging pre-built, pre-tested integrations.

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