Career Framework and Path for ERP Techno Functional Consultant
How to build career as a Techno Functional Consultant, how to gain functional skills for technical consultants and how to gain technical skills for functional consultant, we will try to do the fit-gap of these questions in this blog. Other questions that I have been asked are, I have a complete understanding of functional requirements of business and I am a technical engineer, how do I transition to technofunctional career path. Since I have both technical Skills and functional skills, I would like to become Techno functional Oracle E-Business Consultant, Please suggest me the ways to become a Techno functional Consultant. Please advice on the career path, what are some of the things or courses I need to learn to become a Techno functional Consultant.
Let’s first understand the definition of technical, functional and technofunctional consultants:
Definition of Technical Consultant:
Technical Consultants are the experts having knowledge of the code, coding standards and implementation life cycle. Technical Consultants need not be any domain specific like Finance, HR, Manufacturing, and Procure to Pay etc. Their main role is to do customizations, extensions, modifications, localizations or integrations to the existing product and develop reports. They have educational background and experience in computer science as IT Experts, Engineers or Software Developers. People with software development / technology knowledge are considered as Technical Experts and their main responsibility is to design the software based on the inputs given by functional/business experts.
Definition of Functional Consultant:
Functional Consultants are the experts having understanding of the business processes and data flow on one hand and has the capability to fit these business requirements in the vendor ERP product, analyzing gaps, if any. In any ERP Implementation (generally valid for most of the software product development organizations), there are two parties involved, one are the business users/experts who give the requirements/wish lists and understand how the business processes are conducted at present and how they want the future system to be. Then there are technical experts who are expert in various technologies and they can write code to meet those requirements. Functional Consultants take these requirements from business users and translate them to technical people so that they can understand in technical terms the business requirements. For example in case of any financial management software, functional experts having domain knowledge of Finance will give inputs on how the software should work.
Definition of Techno-functional Consultant:
Over a period of time, by the experience of working on a specific module Technical Experts tend to learn the business requirements and processes and acquire functional knowledge also and sometimes referred to as techno-functional resources. Similarly a person doing post-production support will pick the functionality, which is generally limited to that project/product, and gradually transition towards being a domain/ business/product expert. So understanding both the business processes and the underlying technology is the first step for transitioning towards techno-functional career path.
Top 10 Skills of Techno-Functional Consultant:
- Understanding the underlying ERP Technology
- Understanding the business processes
- Understanding the Functional Configuration of ERP
- Understanding the Coding and Developmental Standards
- Understanding the Implementation Methodology
- Understanding Project Management and Delivery Skills
- Understanding business requirements and translating them into ERP Solutions
- Understanding the business justification of the requirements
- Understanding good coding guidelines and how to write standard, reusable code
- Understanding the functional design as well as technical design and architecture.
