News Article

There’s a phrase that comes up regularly in our SAP conversations: “We need someone with S/4HANA experience.”

But there’s a lot more to understand, because “S/4HANA experience” can cover may different things.

Someone may have worked on an implementation. Someone else may have supported a live S/4 environment. Another consultant may have led a migration from ECC. Someone else may have deep functional expertise but limited experience of the wider transformation programme.

All of them can legitimately say they have S/4HANA experience, but they won't necessarily be right for the same project.

S/4HANA isn't one skill

As more organisations move through their S/4HANA journeys, the requirement is becoming more specific.

Are you looking for someone who has:

• Led a migration?
• Worked on a greenfield implementation?
• Managed a brownfield or selective data transition?
• Functional expertise in FICO, SD, MM, BRIM or another area?
• Experience with SAP Cloud ERP?
• Worked across integration, data or testing?
• Led business stakeholders through transformation?
• Experience of a particular industry or operating model?
• Been through the difficult final stages of a programme and into go-live?

These distinctions are even more important when the project is under pressure.

The best person on paper isn't always the best person for the project

This is something we see regularly. A CV can look impressive because it contains all the right terminology.

✔️ S/4HANA.
✔️ Transformation.
✔️ Migration.
✔️ Cloud.
✔️ SAP.

But once you start asking questions about what that person actually did, the picture becomes much clearer.

What was their role?

What stage was the project at?

How complex was the landscape?

What did they personally own?

Were they making decisions or supporting someone else's?

Had they dealt with the business as well as the technology?

Those details can make the difference between someone who has worked around an S/4 project and someone who has the experience to make a meaningful difference to yours.

The brief needs to go further

This is why we spend time understanding the project behind the vacancy. If a client tells us they need an S/4 consultant, our job isn't simply to search for “S/4HANA” on a CV. It's to understand what the project actually needs.

The right person for an early stage transformation could be very different from the right person needed six weeks before a go-live.

The right person for a complex global rollout could be very different from someone supporting a smaller implementation.

And a technically brilliant consultant may not be the right choice if the project needs someone who can confidently manage difficult stakeholders and keep a programme moving.

What should you be asking for?

Rather than asking: “Does this person have S/4HANA experience?”, a better set of questions might be:

What kind of S/4HANA experience do they have?

What did they actually own?

Which stage of transformation have they worked through?

Have they dealt with the same level of complexity?

Can they operate in the environment this project requires?

And perhaps most importantly: What problem are we actually hiring them to solve?

That's where a good SAP shortlist starts to become more than a collection of impressive CVs. The terminology on the CVs may look increasingly similar, but the experience behind those words can be very different.

S/4HANA experience is a useful starting point. It just isn't a job description.