Characteristics of good Functional Consultant

In my opinion, an ERP Consultant should have the following personality traits

1.       Listening Skills: The Key trait that separates a good consultant from an average consultant is his/her listening skills. A good listener will be able to pinpoint the issues being raised by the customer and thereby provide the solution to the real problems of the customer. A good listener will most often use the ‘Why’ words a lot. A consultant who is not a good listener will most often end up in providing generic solution rather than providing specific solution to the issues faced by the customer. An average consultant can be heard using phrase ‘This is how the Product works, you have to change the process.

2.       Closure Skills: Most of the average consultants will provide almost complete solution, but fail to close the issue. This will lead to festering issues which will come to haunt you in the most critical times. Most of the time the closure can be achieved with a simple three line minutes of the meeting. However, I am surprised at the number of consultants who lack closure skills. Lack of closure skills is related to the third aspect of good consultant, which are communication skills.

3.       Communication Skills: While listening skill plays a very important part in the initial stages of the project, this is only a part of the overall communication skills. There are three aspects to the communication skills. They are listening Skills, Presentation Skills and Idea Selling Skills. Presentation Skills can be oral and written presentation. The communication skills should not be confused with ability to talk confidently. Communication skills relate to the ability to separate data from information, coming to very common sense root causes, and finding innovative solutions and finally convincing the customer about the strength of your solution. I have seen many very good consultants fail in this aspect.

4.     People Skills: ERP Implementation is nothing but a people management process. In the beginning of the project you have skeptical and probably scared user from the customer side. It is the consultant’s duty to make the user confident in the product and the solution so that at the end of the day he/she can add significant value to the implementation. Many a consultant fails in this aspect since they do not put the necessary time and effort to understand the customer user.

5.     Business Knowledge: It is a no brainer that the implementation consultant should have the knowledge of business. What does this imply? It implies two aspects. First, Knowledge of business, industry, statutory regulations etc. and two, the detailed knowledge of customer’s business. Many a times the consultant goes thru a 10 months of implementation without having a clue on customer’s business or products. And that will lead to a bad implementation. I normally ask the following questions to understand the customers business. How many plants do youi have, which plant produces the most? What is the spread of production load between the plants? What product groups do you have? What is the most profitable product? Who is the most profitable customer? Who is the customer with most revenue for you? What are the raw materials? How do you do production planning? How do you manage inventory? The idea is to understand the key pain areas of a business and try to address those pains in your implementation.