Whether your business was negatively affected by the economy or you simply want to streamline the projects your company is working on, hiring a project management consultant is a good investment. Almost everyone is fighting for a significantly small pool of customers. Making sure your company is lean and efficient enough to make it through these tough times can contribute to its long term success. Although there are probably many people in your company who would be an excellent choice for this job, there are a number of advantages to hiring an outsider to do project management consulting.

Access to Additional Resources: Most project management consulting experts will have access to additional resources your company can use to improve its business processes. For example, they can suggest software which will make it easier to communicate with your sales people on the road or automatically get updates on their sales numbers. This can help with the scheduling of production of units. Getting an expert opinion about the tools you need to help your company run better can save you time and money. You will be less likely to buy useless products and the consultant can assist with getting the tools implemented in your business.

Laser Focus on One Thing: The project management consulting expert will be focused on streamlining your projects, improving their performance, and developing strategies for making them profitable for you. If you have someone in your company try to take on this task, their attention will be torn between completing it and their work. An outsider can apply all of their energy to this one task which will make the process go faster and smoother. Additionally, the consultant will often have insights into your business that can only be seen through the eyes of an outsider who has not become immune to inefficiencies in your business processes.

Depersonalization: As difficult as it may be, the project management consulting expert may recommend unpopular changes be made to the company in order to boost its performance. This may include reassigning key personnel or even letting go of people. It might be easier to have a third party make these recommendations and implement them in order to avoid hard feelings developing between your company and the remaining employees. It may also prevent upper management from being sentimental and resistant to making hard changes that must be made in order for the company to survive.

Constructing brand new buildings requires you to definitely check into quite a few elements prior to beginning with the construction. Working with a construction consultant, can certainly help eliminate your concerns in your project. Talk with these specialists and understand a little more about constructing brand new buildings and also the dangers associated with them.

If you plan to build a new house or maybe a large facility, you undergo a long process. From the preparing process towards the turnover of your house, you need to always keep important things on watch. You generally need to be beside your constructor to make sure all things are in their proper locations. When you forget to accomplish this, you can put your investment to waste. You could ask yourself how you can shield your investment if you don’t know anything about engineering. A construction consultant can really help direct you in this process. They are specialists in construction and are graduates of engineering. They may come to your aid and help explain to you the basics.

A construction consultant provides you with a few solutions. Below are a few of them.

Project Planning

These types of specialists can guide you from the start of your project. They suggest designs and supplies to use so you know your new house or facility is of high quality. They help make a budget for you so you will spend based on the finances you’ve got. This may be a problem for a few people who don’t get help and advice from an authority. They have a tendency to overspend on needless additions to their facility.

Consultants also assist in overseeing the current progress. Through this procedure, they help identify possible hazards and present methods to them in case they occur.

Safety

You might need to go through construction safety programs to ensure your site will likely be free from danger. The lessons you study from these courses will lessen the number of incidents on-site. You’ll learn a little more about using safety gears contractors ought to wear at all times within the area. Diverse signs must also be present in a few corners of the site to help remind employees. Almost all personnel have to go through these programs just before they start. Among the first few regulations in development sites is the restriction from outsiders. Construction safety programs not only make an effort to guard the employees in the area. It also presents precautionary measures for many who reside close to the site.

Forensic work

Sadly, many buildings might not be as strong and durable on account of specific elements. The whole construction could collapse if troubles are not determined rapidly. Your consultant can really help point out the issue so the developer can find a solution for it. It can be a weak spot on the floorboards or a problem with the foundation. They will try to figure out the root cause and plan steps to prevent the problem from happening.

What is an SAP CRM Consultant?

An SAP CRM (Customer Relationship Management) Consultant provides comprehensive solutions for managing customer’s relations with a company. It supports all customer focused business areas, from marketing to sales & services, as well as customer interaction channels like Interaction centre, the internet, and mobile clients.

SAP CRM can be independently implemented in a company, it is however increasingly being integrated with ERP to enable the company to better leverage its resources and offer great customer experience by quickly reacting to customer’s demands and other factors. The three main sub-modules of CRM are Sales, Services and Marketing.

While CRM SAP mobile and web solutions are in greater demand, SAP CRM Billing solution offers a niche where there is still tremendous room for growth before saturation sets in.

Job Functions

It is required from an SAP CRM Consultant to comprehensively educate and help the client understand the benefits which an organization can leverage from implementing a fully integrated CRM solution. You will be expected to plan the delivery of CRM solutions and to estimate the effort related to such solutions. This effort is further divided into one or more of the following focus areas:

- Service: Service Orders and Contracts, Case Management, Installed Bases, Warranty Management and Resource Planning.

- Marketing: Campaign and Lead Management, Segmentation and Lists, Real Time Offers and also Marketing Resource Management.

- Sales: Sales Planning and Forecasting, Sales Performance Management, Territory Management, Opportunity & Contact Management, Pricing & Contracts, Incentive & Commissions.

You will also be involved in business process mapping, requirements gathering, design and implementation of CRM Modules particularly Marketing, Sales, and Service. Experience in CRM Web Ui Configuration, Interaction Centre on CRM 7.0 is expected to have significant value addition to client’s business processes.

In addition to above, part of the responsibility also includes attending to the role of:

- Engagement Manager: Manage engagement risk with the customer, keeping track of project financials like planning and budgeting, to manage accounts receivable from customers, defines deliverables as well as ensure that clients’ sell-in to proposed solutions.

- Business Development: All aspects of business development like maintaining contact with decision makers at clients, organizes and leads teams pursing various prospects, proposal development for prospects and also contributes to proposal pricing.

- Practice Development: To develop solutions and methodologies, develop ‘thought-ware’ as well as ‘point of view’ literature, conduct seminars and public speaking and contribute to publication in industry and trade journals.

- People Development: To counsel and coach as well as to provide guidance and input to the firm’s staffing process and be integral part of staff recruitment and retention policies and activities.

The career of SAP CRM Consultant can be highly rewarding and financially satisfying, given the fact they had been able to help translate client’s business goals into tangible outcome by putting in place a world-class system (SAP CRM) where the customers find it highly intuitive and engaging to do business with. The client benefit from having satisfied customers, whom it is able to pro-actively attend, be it the quick placement of sales order, a complaint, an inquiry or payment options available. Given the pace with which mobile technologies and even web has penetrated in everyday’s life, SAP CRM will continue to the first choice for companies and therefore offers a stable career to SAP CRM Consultant.

Formal Education and Work Experience

- Possesses a BA degree or higher in Sales & Marketing

- SAP SD Certified

- SAP CRM certification preferred

- At least 5 years experience in SAP CRM module with extensive knowledge of various offerings and integration points of SAP CRM with SAP ERP

- At least 2 years experience in SAP CRM 2007 development experience using SAP standard tools

- At least 3 years experience in SAP CRM analysis, detailed design and corresponding documentation skills

- Be able to manage the detailed customization in the relevant CRM modules

- Be able to work independently, demonstrate initiative and mobility

- Positive team player with excellent communication skills

- Commercial insight and attitude and very strong customer focus

- Well versed with advanced Ms Excel features, Ms PowerPoint, Ms Project and Ms Visio

Having a business means hard work and no time to many people. In fact, some see that as a badge of honor. The problem with this, is that you cannot do everything well.

Enter the Consultant Marketer ready to help you get more business, more loyal customers, and believe it or not…more friends. That’s right…more friends.

Consultant Marketers help business owners get more business by marketing the owner’s skills as if the owner was a consultant. Just about every main street business owner answers customers’ questions, but many do not realize the importance of answering them BEFORE the questions are asked!

We can illustrate this with a short story and yes, it will work for your business too! (See, I answered a question before you asked it).

Dave has a hardware store in a small city of about 50,000 people. He is down the street from an Ace Hardware in one direction, and a Lowes in the other direction. At first glance it is a wonder that Dave can even STAY in business much less succeed!

Here is Dave’s secret. He thinks of himself as a hardware consultant, not a hardware store owner. He absolutely loves talking with customers but hates the tedious work of running a business. Sound familiar?

A few years ago, Dave was approached by an individual who claimed he could help him succeed by working on his local online marketing strategy. Dave was highly skeptical as both Lowes and Ace Hardware were taking his customers right and left, literally.

Dave listened to the concept of Consultant Marketing and the importance of a local online marketing plan. Not only did he listen, he decided to implement it and has never looked back.

You see, some people in the city knew Dave. He was highly respected and knew his stuff about the hardware business. Unfortunately, his customers really don’t care about the hardware business. They care about solving their current problem the fastest way with the least amount of effort.

Dave used to focus on selling his items to his customers. Steve, a Consultant Marketer, helped Dave boost his business, have more fun, and focus on helping customers, not trying to sell them stuff. The art of marketing is to make selling superfluous and this really applies. In other words, after helping people, the sale is automatic.

So How Did Steve Help Dave?

The first thing he did was to make Dave’s business “local friendly”. He revamped Dave’s poor website with articles and content that his customers wanted to read. Steve helped Dave deliver this information to his customers before they asked. For that and several other new ideas, Dave was handsomely rewarded with the business and a ton of word-of-mouth referrals.

Steve helped Dave focus on a niche that the two other stores were not filling. The best way to explain this is to answer the “why” factor. As people wander through a store they see many things that they have absolutely no idea what they are used for. Let’s look at a few examples:

Customer number 1 comes into the store to find a way to hang a towel rack in the bathroom. SHE is tired of waiting for someone in the house to fix it (can you guess who?). When she goes down the aisle with the bolts, nuts, and fasteners guess what…Dave has a display that shows how some of these fasteners are used. One of these is a towel rack hanging on a piece of sheetrock or wallboard.

The display shows five different ways to fasten the towel rack to the wall and has a small card next to each explained the pros and cons of each. Steve (Dave’s Consultant Marketer) helped him write up some small cards explaining how each fastener worked next to each example. Steve also put these on Dave’s website with a short article or video narrated by Dave about how each of these work. There was also a card next to the display with Dave’s website name and where to find the video.

Here we see Steve helping Dave with the concept of Circular Marketing. Circular Marketing is where one marketing or helpful solution references another two or three marketing solutions. In this case the card referenced not only how to fasten the towel rack, but also the following:

1. The in-store display Dave had set up.

2. The website where Dave shows how to hang it or links to another video showing how to do it.

3. The short article that Dave has on his website and his recommendations on towel racks.

4. The towel racks he has in his store.

That is just a short list of the items referenced by this simple display, but let’s look at the benefit to the customer and ultimately to Dave.

The customer is impressed with the display and the ease to find her answers on how to hang the towel rack. In turn, she purchases not only the hardware to hang the towel rack, but a new towel rack to hang in another area.

A week later, the customer is visiting a friend’s house and notices a loose towel rack. She immediately mentions Dave’s website and Dave gets another customer and another friend. Of course he makes a couple of new sales as well.

Businesses always claim that their most important asset is their people. Employees, their level of engagement, their skills, and their enthusiasm help elevate a company above its competitors. Yet in spite of that, companies are often hesitant to invest in their employees. Whether an organization wants to help current leaders improve job performance, or to identify and train future organizational leaders, they will find that executive consulting is a great way of investing in current employees. Companies that have never hired an executive coach will find helpful background information within this article.

In the past, coaching has been viewed in the business realm as a way to correct underperformance, but today it serves more as a way to support organizational leaders. Having a third-party professional available for leaders to speak to allows them to work their way through problems that they might otherwise be hesitant to share with other organizational leaders. In essence, a manager who is having trouble organizing his team might not want to consult with someone within the organization, because doing so could mean that they are taken off of the project. With an executive coach available to help them work through a problem, leaders will spend less time worrying about their own interests and more time worrying about doing what is best for the company.

On the other side, organizational leaders are also hesitant to give feedback once employees have reached the executive level. They believe that these leaders will not benefit from feedback, as they have been doing things a certain way for so many years, and once again leaders are afraid to ask for it as they think it shows weakness. An impartial executive coach will be able to analyze performance without letting personal feelings and interests get in the way of an assessment, and then make recommendations for improvements.

Newer executives will also benefit quite a bit from having an executive coach around. When an employee is promoted, he or she might be expected to take care of duties that they do not have any experience with. Rather than stressing about the best way to manage conflicts between employees, or how to efficiently delegate tasks, these leaders will be able to turn to their coach to fill in those knowledge gaps.

Executive consulting is also a powerful tool when a company wishes to identify future leaders. Consultants can evaluate the company’s existing procedures for identifying future superstars, make recommendations for improvement, or even start from scratch to create a completely new program for developing future leaders. These consultants are valuable because of their years of experience within the industry; years spent putting in place for other companies the same types of programs your company is looking for.

Conclusion

It is always a good idea for a company to invest in its employees. Whether a company is turning to executive consulting to put in place a leadership-training program, or simply providing executive coaches for leaders to gain feedback from, making such an investment will pay dividends.