An investment in the future
Solar trains SAP specialists
It can be hard to find the employees you need. An analysis by the Confederation of Danish Industry from June 2022 (article in Danish) shows that half of its members have had to give up filling a vacancy within the last three months, compared to only a third one year ago.
Competition for SAP personnel is fierce. The typical SAP specialist is aged 50-55, which means there will be a severe shortage in the market within a few years.
The Solar SAP trainee programme
Pia Søndergaard Pedersen is Director for SAP at Solar Group IT. She says: "We need a new generation in SAP, and Solar has therefore set up trainee courses as pilot programmes aimed specifically at relieving the shortage of SAP experts. It's an investment in the future."
In consultation with the SAP recruitment bureau IT Optimiser, Solar has set up a 9-month trainee programme which alternates between the classroom and practical learning. In addition, Solar has set up an internal 3-year trainee course tailored to the individual. Each trainee will be allocated a mentor in the form of a senior specialist from Solar's SAP department and will learn the processes from a business perspective. The course ends with certification. The candidate will then be guaranteed a job as a Junior SAP Specialist.
Pia explains: "We recruit our SAP trainees from within our own organisation, as we believe it's important to have candidates who know our own processes. They will typically be our 'superusers', who have the basic knowledge on which we then build in a particular area. In this way, we can train business-oriented and functional specialists who are able to handle the many exciting tasks and processes of which SAP is a part."
"SAP is a business-critical system for Solar and many other businesses. By setting up this trainee scheme, Solar is taking social responsibility and helping to ensure that SAP specialists continue to be trained," concludes Pia.
What is SAP?
SAP is a software program for managing business processes that makes data processing and information flow across an organisation easier, and standardises its processes.
SAP supports all the main processes we use at Solar: product life cycle (product-related processes), procure to pay (purchasing and creditors), receive to ship (warehouse and transport), order to cash (orders and receivables), hire to retire (HR related processes) and finance & analytics (finance-related processes).
The AutoStore system at Solar's warehouse in Vejen is a good example of a system in which SAP is a supporting element and essential to its functionality.
Meet our SAP team
From incoming goods to SAP Specialist
New SAP trainees
Thiago and Amruta moved to Denmark to work with SAP
Two of Solar's SAP consultants, Thiago Tageshi Konno and Amruta Duduskar, moved from Brazil and India respectively to work at Solar's SAP Department in Vejen, Denmark.