Technical SAP consultant vs. functional SAP consultant

Technical SAP consultant vs. functional SAP consultant

What is the difference between a functional and a technical SAP consultant?

    Requires Free Membership to View

    When you register, you will start receiving targeted emails from my award-winning team of editorial writers. Our goal is to keep you informed on the hottest topics and biggest challenges faced by SAP professionals today.

    Hannah Smalltree, Editorial Director

    By submitting your registration information to SearchSAP.com you agree to receive email communications from TechTarget and TechTarget partners. We encourage you to read our Privacy Policy which contains important disclosures about how we collect and use your registration and other information. If you reside outside of the United States, by submitting this registration information you consent to having your personal data transferred to and processed in the United States. Your use of SearchSAP.com is governed by our Terms of Use. You may contact us at webmaster@TechTarget.com.

This is a basic question but an important one if you are looking at careers in SAP. Technical SAP consultants are generally either programmers or systems administrators, whereas functional consultants bring value by combining particular business process knowledge, such as financial knowledge, with the "know-how" of configuring the aspect of SAP that pertains to that process knowledge. So for example, a functional SAP FI consultant generally has a financials background, and understands how to configure the FI tables in accordance with a user's business processes.

This was first published in May 2005