With experience in sourcing and e-sourcing, where do I fit into a SAP SRM career?

With experience in sourcing and e-sourcing, where do I fit into a SAP SRM career?

I have 2.5 years of sourcing experience and six months of e-sourcing experience using Iasta. I would like to learn SAP SRM, but I don't know where to start. Do you have any suggestions regarding books or Web sites that will aid me as a beginner?

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I think the background you have in sourcing and e-sourcing makes you a perfect fit for the SAP sourcing and e-sourcing applications.

As you might be aware, SAP recently bought Frictionless to build on their e-sourcing solution offering. This puts SAP and SAP consultants in a new domain that they have not experienced before. This means that technically everyone is new to SAP e-sourcing. The folks that were experienced with Frictionless sourcing are now new to SAP SRM vice versa.

This is a good time for you to jump into learning this new toolset and capitalize on your knowledge from your previous sourcing experience.

Unfortunately, there is not much collateral on the SAP e-sourcing solution yet. Wait for another month or so and you'll find some on the SAP service marketplace. If you don't have an account yet, try to create one at service.sap.com. This will provide you a host of content on SAP and SRM. Once you have an account jump to: service.sap.com/srm Here you can check out the SRM detail collateral on SRM 6.0. You should be able to get a good amount of information there. Another site to check out is help.sap.com and search under "business solutions" > SRM.

SAP currently does not offer a formal SAP E-Sourcing training class. There have been a couple of internal training classes and some restricted partner classes, but that's it for now. Once the SAP e-sourcing solution begins to ramp-up in Q3 of 2007 there might be some.

To answer your book query, there are none that are focused on e-sourcing. I have authored a book "Enhancing Procurement with mySAP SRM" that will be published by SAP Press in Q3 of 2007. The goal for my book is to be a consultant's handbook with deep knowledge in all areas of SRM along with integration to finance, human resources, portals and BI. So until it is out use the other sources I mentioned above.

This was first published in June 2007