difference between technical and functional consultant

[Former Member]

Hi guys

I was wondering if anyone could define the difference between being a functional CRM consultant and a technical one. could you please explain the difference in daily activities if you can-thanks

[former_member187506 · Accepted solution]

Back in the early days of SAP, a functional consultant was one who interpreted business processes, wrote specs, and did configuration. The functional consultant was typically the person that configured the system to reflect business requirements.

A technical consultant was typically a programmer or basis person. The former was a person who developed programs specified by functional people to fill gaps between business processes and SAP. The basis people made sure the lights stayed on and the system worked.

Today, these roles are merging, increasingly to survive in the world of SAP you need to be both, functional and technical. Its not good enough to be one or the other. This is particularly true with CRM.

[Former Member]

As said by fellow ppl said functional consultant work involves understanding client requirements

and writing functional specs and doing base customizing whereas technical involves more ABAP

CODING.

techno-functional is definetly more in demand.

hope it helps .

Thanks.

[Former Member]

Hi Guys, This is Dnyanes !!

Many peoples are comming here through their gud Knoledge of SAP, its really nice towords learning approch.

The thing which I feel the difference in beetween SAP technical consultant & functional one is that

SAP Technical Consultant / Basis Consultants are the people who are technicaly sound people who is responcible for managing SAP Basis system right from hardware sizing to performance tunning of System, & application developement.

Where as Functional Consultant are functionaly expertise people in their own Domain, they have very gud knowlege

of their work area, work process,& configuration items. they design application module as per clients requirement and submit to technical consultant for developement in SAP System.

[Former Member]

I think this line is getting more blurred when you see things in EhP1 where the functional person can use wizards in the application to create tables, data fields and the table values. I have been trying to build a case why a functional person could need a developers key that traditionally has been limited to a developer in most SAP organizations. Even in the 7.0 web ui a dev key is required to create a new Z field.

[former_member927251]

Hi Sunil,

Functional Consultant :

1. Gathers requirements from the client

2. Translates the requirements into functional specification.

3. Needs to know CRM Base Customizing and Business Terms

Technical Consultant :

1. Needs to understand the functional requirement from the functional specs.

2. Translates functional specs into technical specs.

3. Does the coding as per the technical specs.

4. Needs to know basic ABAP

5. Needs to know basic business processes(optional).

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[former_member204995]

Good to know.  Thanks

[Former Member]

Hi,

A functional consultant is the one who interacts with the client and understands the client requirements.

He configures the system according to the client needs. Its always good to have a functional consultant with the industry experience as it helps him to understand the client pain areas..

A technical consultant is an programmer (ABAP, JAVA) who helps the functional consultant to alter the system in few areas to meet the specific client business needs.

As the fellow SDN rightly mentioned, the current trend is towards being a techno functional; one who understands the business and the technical part of SAP.

Hope that answers your question.

Regards,

Tanveer.

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