SAP faculty skills development and Certification opportunities

Workshops

A core component of the UKI UA Programme is providing faculty with the opportunity build their skills and understand the nature, navigation and use of SAP before ‘going live’. SAP provides workshops in collaboration with member universities that enable around 20 faculty at a time to learn SAP skills usually over the course of four or five days. These are invaluable not only to develop skills in areas of interest to faculty but also serve as a networking mechanism – there are around 200 current UKI faculty that have the same skills but perhaps slightly different teaching and research interests. Workshops provide opportunities to learn and to further enhance the academic rigour of research and teaching by providing tangible skills and providing access to a network of likeminded colleagues. Previous workshops on the topics of Business Process Integration, IDES (SAP’S Certification Database) and Business Data Warehouse / Strategic Enterprise Manager have been held at:

• Aston University, Aston Business School
• Brunel University, Brunel School of Computing
• City University, School of Informatics
• Coventry University, School of Management
• Lancaster University, School of Management
• Liverpool University, School of Management
• University of Surrey, School of Management
• Warwick University, Warwick Business School
• SAP UK & I Headquarters

Certification

SAP UKI also recognises that some faculty may like to take their SAP knowledge one step further and actually obtain a SAP Certification. The University Alliances Programme invites a selected number of faculty each year to study for an SAP Certification ‘Solution Architect: Business Process Integration’. There are a limited number of places from member universities which provide a range of online courses, materials, sit-down class-based lessons and printed materials to enable faculty to study at their own pace and then also provides a place to undertake the TERP1e Certification exam. The course provides an overview of the entire SAP ERP environment with a particular focus on the integration between such elements as procurement, manufacturing, product lifecycle management, project management asset management, business intelligence, strategic enterprise management and finance.

Upon Certification faculty hold a recognised global qualification that shows they have undertaken around 100 hours of study and have a thorough knowledge of how the elements of SAP ERP are interconnected. These Certifications are limited to those faculty who have shown a clear teaching and research interest in SAP and who wish to deepen their understanding of the solution. In particular SAP allocates places to those faculty that see a Certification as a means to improve the student learning experience by improving their own depth and breadth of knowledge.