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Flooding the ERP (SAP, PS, Oracle Apps) Job Market

8th March 1999      Sriram N. A. @pcm.bosch.de

-- quote --

Yesterday's hot opportunity turns into today's nightmare as corporate
India closes its doors, says Manish Khanduri.

It's cracked wide open.  The lure that made thousands of professionals and
students dream of huge salaries and exciting job opportunities has proved
a mirage.  Two years ago Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) was the
hottest employment opportunity for professionals in fields as diverse as
soft goods, steel and pharmaceuticals.  They spent millions on full-time
training from institutes that promised astronomical dollar salaries in the
West.

Most, Including 40-50 year-old professionals, quit safe, well-paid jobs in
a time of recession to gamble on the future.

Today, many are still unemployed.  Don't believe what you're reading?

Consider these facts and remember some of the figures are under-estimates:

*Industry estimates suggest that 7,000-8,000 people, or some 50 per cent
of India's trained ERP manpower, are jobless.

That number is climbing.

Some have been jobless for more than a year.

*Industry observers say almost 90 per cent of ERP school-trained
candidates who today apply for ERP-related appointments are unemployable
and will never get a job.

*Four months ago IT major Wipro had a job requirement for four ERP trained
professionals, 1,500 people applied.

*A fledgling ERP startup in Delhi recently advertised for ERP 
professionals.  Around 1,200 turned up in Mumbai alone; eight were hired
there.

Thousands of professionals are reaping a bitter harvest after the manic
seed of ERP was sown in India two years ago.  The reasons for this include
a boom-driven oversupply, a slowdown in corporate demand and a complete
lack of genuinely qualified personnel.  There's no hope of change - not
with people between the ages of 25 and 50 roaming jobless, offering to
work at ERP implementation for a pittance and sometimes, says Satish
Doshi, managing director of IT placement company, Sampoorna Computer
People, "for nothing at all".  Doshi gets 300-400 ERP-related CVs every
month and finds only 5 per cent of them worth his while.  Another IT
placement consultant, Anil Divate of Fidelity IT Jobs, says, "I have a
thousand CVs of ERP-qualified candidates.  Only 20 are placeable.

The crux lies in the changing nature of overseas demand, and the 
unrelenting logic of Indian markets.  Two years ago the basic two or three
months training at an ERP institute in India could have qualified you for
a job abroad.  "Foreign companies were then desperate for trained
manpower, any manpower," recounts Divate.  Today?  "Don't even think about
it," he warns.  In other words, if you don't have hands-on experience of
an ERP project, you have no chance of getting a job abroad.  And perhaps
not even in India.  For placement agencies such as Sampoorna and Fidelity,
six months of experience is the bare minimum requisite demanded of a
Candidate. 
 For most ERP-trained hopefuls, this is proving an insurmountable
 obstacle. You can't get that job abroad if you do not have implementation
 
experience, and getting that in India is becoming well-nigh impossible. 
 Rajesh Tolia, runs a computer and ERP training institute, Karox 
Technologies: "Companies now ask for people with experience of at least
two or three projects but the point is where do you get such experience,
since so few companies use SAP (one of three major providers of ERP
solutions)?" An official at Datamatics Corporation, a Mumbai-based
placement agency, says their success ratio in placement has been one in
100.  It's hard to explain why this is happening.  Indeed, studies of
ERP-related job opportunities look good.  A recent Nasscom study says in
1998-99 the ERP services market in India is expected to gross Rs 520 crore
(Rs 100 crore = Rs 1 billion) over Rs 280 crore the year before.  By 2001,
the report expects ERP-based billings to gross Rs 18,000 crore.  Observers
say ERP implementation in India could be slowing as priorities change. 
Vivek Kulkarni, senior manager, BaaN Company, one of the Big Three
solutions providers, acknowledged that "there has been a slowdown in 1998.
 I think it's because companies are currently more involved in Y2K
projects".

Others suggest that the reality never was anywhere near as rosy as the
statistics projected in the first place.  Indraneel Mukerjee, manager
marketing, SAP India, says, "For SAP it is a question of trying to take a
reality check on the huge growth rates we expect rather than the other way
round."  It is also true, however, that ERP implementation is expensive -
the bill can run into tens of crores - which could be especially tough for
firms hit by recession.  "We keeps hearing reports that companies have
backed off from implementation because it is expensive and because in
these recessionary times they do not have the money to pay for it," says
Doshi.

A few months ago a senior consultant with a Big Five management
consultancy firm had told Business Standard that of the 150 installations
then in the country "130 have run into some trouble or the other".  The
Lloyd Steel project is one example; according to sources in HCL
Infosystems, which was implementing SAP solutions for Lloyd, the company
decided to stop midway through the project.  As a result, ERP pros are
feeling the pinch like never before.  Take Mumbai-based Suresh Iyer.  He
left a well-paying job at software megalith TCS in favour of an ERP
course.  He completed his course about three months ago, is yet to find a
job, and today trains new batches at an institute he has started.  He
says, "The market is not yet mature enough to absorb the huge number of
professionals the institutes are churning out."

Today, there are an estimated 400 ERP training institutes in India, not
all of them authorised licencees of SAP, BaaN or Oracle.  Most of them
mushroomed when ERP became the flavour of the year with corporate India
promising lucrative placements.  Indeed, many of them were able to place
60 to 70 per cent of their initial batches.  Today, there are no
guarantees.

So who's doing the hiring?  The recruiters' end of the market is broadly
divided into two segments, the ERP implementers and the companies
undergoing ERP.  The first category includes the big five accounting
firms, implementation partners and associate implementers.

Implementation partners are companies such as Siemens and HCL Infosystems
for SAP and DSQ Software for MAPICS and PRISM that have been authorised by
the ERP majors (SAP or BaaN or Oracle) to implement projects.  Associate
implementers, such as Eastern Software Systems for Siemens, are the
companies that work in tandem with implementation partners.  And these
people don't even want to hear from you.  Ambarish Dasgupta, executive
director, at PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PwC), says he gets "15 to 20 CVs a
day, an equal number of telephone enquiries, not counting the e-mails from
ERP professionals abroad."

A S Viswanathan, director, Siemens Information Systems Limited, says his
company stopped advertising more than a year ago.  Very few, including
companies such as HCL Infosystems and Eastern Software or Polar Software,
are even willing to look at a resume that carries no implementation
experience.  Recruiters say most people who apply are unfit for ERP
implementation in the first place .  States Doshi, "Most people are unfit
for the job, their training in no way qualifies them for implementation."
In the two years since the mad rush for ERP began, the market is bursting
at the seams with what Anil Bakht, managing director, Eastern Software
Systems, says are "so-called professionals who by rights should never have
been there in the first place."

There is a yawning gap, recruiters and placement agents say, between
someone who is "fit" for ERP and someone who isn't."Just because you have
worked in finance or material management or sales doesn't mean that you
can do an ERP course and become a master implementer," says Doshi.  And
when crores can ride on an ERP implementation no one wants to take a
chance on a dubious candidate.  Every organisation seems to have developed
a solution to this problem.  Most implementers hire people directly from
industry and train them in-house.  States PwC's Dasgupta, "We look at a
person's functional experience, the company that he has worked for and the
college he graduated from.  All of these have to be top-notch.  We rarely
recruit anyone fresh out of college." Companies undergoing implementation,
such as the Mahindras, often prefer to train their own employees. 
Implementers too, like PwC, Siemens and HCL Infosystems, all have their
own internal training pogrammes.  And yet they keep "graduating" in
droves, spending lakhs on dubious ERP courses that promise them the earth.
 For these thousands there is no end, only a hard reality.

Companies are hiring, definitely, but in dribs and drabs.  For instance
Wipro plans to recruit around 25 people soon, HCL Infosystem has an
ongoing programme, as does Eastern Software.  But it's employees in
organisations implementing ERP programmes who have become a favourite
target these days. 
 Even if the job market eases, ERP "graduates" may find still themselves
 in 
a tight situation.  Organisations such as Siemens plan to set up their own
training schools.  SAP India is soon expected to announce authorised
training schools all over in collaboration with Indian partners who are
yet to be named but have been identified.

When that happens the market will be flooded by graduates from authorised
training schools.  But for the moment, hope and desperation persist.  " I
get calls from people," says Siemens Viswanathan, "who say they plan to
withdraw their PF money and invest for their son in a training school.

" What does one tell them?"

-- end quote --

9th March 1999      Manish @del2.vsnl.net.in

If ERP is the past, what is the future?

regards

manish

10th March 1999      Harshal Jawale @it.com.pl

E-Commerce !

10th March 1999      Srinath Srinivasa @usa.net

I don't think that it is because ERP is "past" that it has turned into a
nightmare. It looks like a straight case of demand-supply. Once there was
demand, and once it became known that this demand pays well, there is too
much supply. And then why not? In India, we have the tradition of
following a "world order"-- remember the times when the "in" thing for a
class XII student was engineering or medicine? Remember an ad some years
back that said-- BSc is for staying at home, and BCom is for ...(something
similar); so you have to join this course in this computer center if you
want to become someone in life...

If we try to bring about one single "in" thing for the whole population, I
suspect we are going to see more such nightmares. When I joined
engineering it was computer science that was "in", and if you were a civil
engineer, you'd probably be looked down with contempt (what an irony!--
the only engineer who is "civil" is looked down upon! :-)

The article cited people from so many diverse backgrounds flooding into
ERP because it was "in"-- it payed in dollars, it flew them around the
world. I really don't know how to solve the problem of these "hype
vortices" or superficiality. They can wreck such vast havoc. How can we
convince someone that their field is just as important as any other, and
they are just as valuable to the system as any other, when there is such a
vast difference between renumeration and perks between occupations?

-srinath 

10th March 1999      Jayanta @in.ibm.com