The consulting market will have to change dramatically if it is to provide the strategic skills required within the new world of e-business.
With consulting around the implementation of enterprise business systems having formed a substantial portion of revenue in the past, management consultancies that focused primarily on systems integration are now having to rapidly reinvent themselves.
"Enterprise systems are today so sophisticated, and incorporate so much intelligence in terms of implementation and industry-specific functionality, that both the number and size of implementation teams have been considerably reduced," says Claas Kuehnemann, SAP Africa general manager: professional services.
"In addition, the nature of enterprise resource (ERP) applications is fast moving into the world of e-business, which requires a whole new set of strategic skills."
Prior to 2000, large and mid-sized consulting companies invested heavily in ERP skills, mainly in the systems integration area. This was a good investment as ERP systems had become highly stable, and could be implemented with comparative ease.
Today, however, the majority of larger organisations have stable ERP systems in place and are under increasing pressure to be innovative. The market is fast moving into new areas that are predominantly customer-centric and inter-enterprise focussed, such as customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) and effective e-procurement, especially business-to-business.
"A solid enterprise backbone undoubtedly provides a foundation on which to leverage these market opportunities," says Kuehnemann, adding that companies are now investing in strategic areas such as CRM and e-business as part of their integrated IT platform.
"However, the integration of new e-business applications and business processes requires careful strategic planning and highly specialised skills - this is forcing the traditional systems integrators to relook their organisations while top-end management consulting is once again in high demand."
Kuehnemann says SAP's expertise in the enterprise and consulting environments ensures it is ideally placed. "We not only have the experience but have always had vision. We focus on assisting companies to transform their strategies into business processes and systems that steadily evolve and adapt to realise continuous value. This enables companies to leverage off their existing foundation while implementing and capatalising on opportunities within the Internet economy.
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