FSN: Microsoft redoubles efforts to train enough Dynamics ERP consultants

Microsoft redoubles efforts to train enough Dynamics ERP consultants

1st May 2006
Microsoft's efforts to recruit additional Dynamics ERP consultants across the EMEA region have been rewarded with an additional 2200 consultants in the last nine months. As part of a concerted effort involving universities, government agencies and the partner network the software giant is trying to secure its future by increasing the throughput of trained consultants. But in its haste to certify consultants, is Microsoft confusing technical excellence with business experience and will end users be misled by grandly titled qualifications? FSN investigates.

The real battle in the scramble to grow market share in mid-market ERP is to win the hearts and minds of partners and resellers. Oracle, SAP and Microsoft are all committing considerable resources into persuading resellers to adopt their products and develop specialised industry functionality around them.

One of the foremost factors that will shape resellers' thinking around whether to jump ship from existing relationships to one of the super-vendors is the availability of expert resources, training and implementation skills; for appropriately skilled resources are in short supply and training them in-house is a costly and long term proposition.

Furnishing the European, Middle East and African (EMEA) mid-market, (which SAP estimates is around 65,000 companies with 100-2,500 employees), with suitably qualified implementation resources is a substantial undertaking and the availability of consulting resource to implement new systems and upgrades is becoming rapidly the limiting factor for all of the ERP vendors and their reseller networks.

In its quest to satisfy a burgeoning market and win market share, Microsoft is employing a variety of techniques to identify and train more consultants. The software giant said last week that it has certified in excess of 2200 new consultants across the EMEA region in the past nine months. The demand, says Microsoft, is for Microsoft Dynamics ERP expertise in Navision (NAV), Axapta (AX) and GreatPlains (GP) as well as the CRM product.

Donal Madden, Head of Channel at competitor, SAP told FSN, “2,200 consultants in nine months may sound like a lot but it has to be seen in the context of three major ERP products and the customer relationship management software as well. Re-sellers are not going to sell all three ERP products; so the key question is where is the training effort being targeted?” SAP of course is also stepping up its recruitment efforts and, for example, in the UK , Madden expects an increase of 90% in the number of qualified resources in the 2006.

In its drive to attract new talent, Microsoft is targeting universities and government agencies as well as leveraging more traditional sources of certified training and education providers to shoulder some of the training burden. Governments eager to boost employment, particularly amongst the young are responding keenly to the opportunity. For example, in Spain and Denmark local government and Microsoft business partners are working together to train new consultants and similarly in Belgium the Flemish Employment Agency (VDAB) is working with a Microsoft partner to provide Microsoft Dynamics NAV certification to potential recruits, providing them with skills that would secure their future employment.

The skills shortage combined with the sheer demand for resources is forcing Microsoft to look creatively at different ways of mustering resource. Across the region it is helping to fund new university degrees, summer schools, fast track training and on-line training.

But Cesar Cernuda, senior director, MBS Sales and Services, Microsoft EMEA is under no illusion about the scale of the undertaking. He told FSN, “Our approach to training and developing consulting resource has occupied an enormous amount of management time. What we are trying to do is to offer a range of training opportunities but with the same ultimate goal of professionally certifying consultants through examination and standards that will be applied consistently across the region.” Whist Cernuda acknowledges that the recruitment plan is driven by business targets he knows that delivering the right number of new consultants is not an end in itself. “We have to deliver customer satisfaction as well,” he told FSN and that means delivering quality. "With such high-quality training based on both theory and practical application we are able to ensure that customers who employ Microsoft Dynamics certified consultants can rely on their depth of knowledge to maximise the impact of their Microsoft Dynamics products," he added.

Nevertheless, in the light of the pan-European skills shortage, is the Microsoft plan too ambitious? Can it really recruit so many candidates yet maintain quality standards. Cerunda, thinks it can through a rigorous training and examination programme that will ultimately produce certified professionals that he says will have the technical and business skills to support customers and reduce the risks associated with implementation.

But others are not convinced and it is the initiatives with Universities that is attracting most concern. For example in the UK , Microsoft has entered into a partnership with Sheffield Hallam University to deliver the first Microsoft Dynamics MBA and MSc courses. These qualifications, which will begin in September 2006, are according to the University's web page “aimed at fast-tracking the development of both technical and business-oriented professionals into the enterprise systems arena.”

However, Ian Caswell, MD of Sapphire Systems, one of the most successful SAP and Systems Union re-sellers, whilst welcoming the development, questioned the rigour and depth of the qualifications. Stressing the importance of using experienced professionals in support and consulting roles, he told FSN, “I welcome the addition of a degree course which is relevant and practical but it's not going to create experts. This only comes from experience. Once the graduates have gone through seven or eight product lifecycles they may be useful but I'm concerned that a qualification that labels them Microsoft Certified Professional could be misleading for the public if they are positioned as experts.”

Pressed on whether he would recruit graduates from courses such as Sheffield Hallam's Caswell told FSN, “I would not recruit graduates fresh from a course like this. We work in a highly competitive market and it is very common for companies to change their provider because the people manning hot line support know less about the products than the client. We took the decision several years ago to use only experienced consultants in a support role.”

Allister Kitchen, Operations Director of SystemsAccountants added to the concerns. He told FSN, “As a company specialising in finance systems recruitment, our consultants regularly get calls from candidates seeking advice on qualifications and potential training options available specific to advancing their careers within the finance and ERP space. Beyond the core CCAB professional finance qualifications and mainstream IT accreditations such as MCSE we often struggle to recommend appropriate alternatives that are relevant.

“Against this backdrop, Microsoft's announcement to add extra accreditation into the finance systems candidate marketplace seems a positive move. However, we would advise caution – namely that without prior in depth finance/ business backgrounds and core IT skill sets, then these qualifications may be of limited value to end-user clients who require a solid understanding of business processes and a technical grounding in finance to enable them to deliver business objectives. In our experience, most end users see qualifications and accreditations as of additional value only if accompanied by a track record of business systems project delivery,” added Kitchen.

Chris Bates, the course leader and developer of the Masters programme at Sheffield Hallam hopes his course will overcome concerns about lack of project experience. One of the aims of the course is to provide practical experience as well as a more formal grounding, with the added benefit that students can earn a wage while they are studying. He told FSN, “The first 4 months of the one year Masters course is taught face to face whereas the remainder is distance learning and work placement, probably with a Microsoft accredited partner. There is a common set of modules and then students on the MSc. will be able to take 10 day specialist courses in Microsoft Dynamics AX (Axapta) or Microsoft Dynamics Navision (Nav).” However, Bates conceded that the qualification will not make the students experts.

“The Masters course is aimed at technical configuration of the package based on systems analysis and design done by someone else,” he told FSN. “They are not going to be consultants and are not expected to be talking to customers,” he added.

Candidates taking the MBA option will probably have a consulting role in their sights. “The candidates will have a more relevant first degree in say computing, business and management and this course will also be a mixture of face to face learning and work placement,” said Bates.

Students graduating from the courses will, according to Chris Bates, be called, “Master Certified Application Consultants” or Master Certified Development Professionals” depending on the degree course and modules chosen. It is this certification that worries experienced re-sellers like Sapphire's Caswell who consider that the public may be confused by the certificate's grandiose title and misled into thinking that people are more experienced than they are. “I am concerned that the public will read more into the qualification than is warranted or that they get the qualification too easily and that the daily rates that customers end up paying are too high,” he said.

“I think that practically based courses are a good idea and the old polytechnics are probably better at it, but there is a lot more to configuring complex business software than setting a few software parameters. With complex ERP systems you have to understand business processes in detail and it takes years of experience to get it right.”

SAP also nurtures university courses and has an established programme but critically this is aimed at informing business courses about ERP concepts and the importance of information technology in business processes but is not geared to certification. SAP's Donal Madden, told FSN, " Our efforts are aimed at enabling students to put classroom theory into practice through demonstrations, exercises and problem-solving, case studies, and research programs rather than certification on our products which we believe is prohibitively narrow.”

Regardless of the debate about the worthiness of Microsoft's scheme, it is at least an earnest attempt to plug the skills shortage in the EMEA region. Additionally, Microsoft has been successful in the past in pioneering professional grade exams for Microsoft engineers which are well regarded in the IT industry and have successfully raised standards. The big difference this time around is that many of the skills required for systems implementation do not have a technical or engineering bias which can be learnt from a manual. Implementation, even in the mid-market (perhaps especially in the mid-market) requires business acumen, a good grasp of accounting, knowledge of business processes and change management. Whilst Microsoft clearly recognises the need, there are practical limitations on what can be achieved in accelerated timescales. The question is; has Microsoft done enough?

It will be several years before the answer is known, but ultimately, no matter how clever Microsoft's product strategy and technology, its success will be judged on its ability to deliver successful projects. The stakes could not be higher.

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