Prerequisites to work in BRF Plus

[Former Member]

Hi Gurus,

I am a SAP CRM Functional consultant with 5 years experience in CRM and I would like to switch to the BRF Plus Consultant role. So could you all please suggest me the following:

1. What are all the prerequisites to work as a BRF Plus Consultant.
2. Role of BRF Plus consultant in the ASAP Methodology.
3. What are the challenges a BRF Plus consultant face in a project.
4. In some technical training videos I have seen only two components - Constructing BRF Plus rule and integrating the BRF Plus rule to ABAP. So, please let me know if I have missed to view any other components that I should know to help me in this role.

Thanks in advance.

Regards,

Uma

[anindyaSAP · Accepted solution]

Hello Uma,

A BRF+ consultant needs to have a overall understanding of ABAP (and obviously BRF+ itself) . Knowledge of few applications (like CRM, TRM etc.) will be added benefit. 

As a BRF+ consultant you need to identify the business processes that can benefit from BRF+. For that, good understanding of the business scenario/processes is needed. Your task also will be to build rules and integrate the application with BRF+. ASAP concepts won't be different in BRF+.

Building and integrating rules are the core tasks. You will find many documents in SCN about different topics, like BRF+ and ABAP Workflow, BRF+ exits, application specific scenarios/examples etc. I suggest that you go through those documents as well.

Also consider learning DSM as this is being used by more and more customers.

Information on various related topics can be found here:

http://scn.sap.com/community/brm/blog/2014/04/10/april-2014-reader-s-digest-for-sap-netweaver-decisi...

BR,

Anindya

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi Anindya,

Thank you for your reply! It is really helpful.

Regards,

Uma

[christianlechne]

Hi Uma,

here are some answers from my point of view:

• ad 1): You should have a very deep understanding of BRFplus and the SAP Decision Management Service and the underlying concepts. This means you should definitly know in depth which options these frameworks offer (this includes also the usage of the API underneath). For sure you should also know ABAP and the extension and integration concepts (as these usually the places where you hook in your decision service).
  In addition to those technical aspects you should also have a understanding of the "theory" that stands behind the business rules and decision making in general.
• ad 2) ASAP is more or less waterfall.In case you want to support the customer in decision making this is not the best-fitting approach as the optimization cycle for rule should be much faster. This can be achieved with SAP Decison Service Management where you would be somewaht outside the ASAP procedure. With BRFplus there are some restrictions, nevertheless you approach in rule design should be more agile than the ASAP methodology
• ad 3) There are a lot, but they depend on how mature the customer is with respect to the usage of business rules in his compan. So there is no real exact answer to that question.
• ad 4) From a technical point of view you have three components
  • The BRFplus workbench: This is the modeling environment (-> Here you should also take into account the API)
  • The BRFplus rules engine: This is the part of BRFplus that you call in the ABAP backend and does the rules processing
  • The BRFplus rules repository: This is where the rules are stored. It is something that you do not directly "see" in your work but you should have understood the concepts of the different storage types, the versioning etc.

Up to now there is no certification for BRFplus/SAP Decision Service Management. But there will be (see discussion ). So this certification is for sure an additional topic you should take into account in order to show your qualification.

Hope that helps

BR

Christian

[Former Member]

Hi Christian,

Thank you for your reply! It is really helpful.

Regards,

Uma