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The Accountants are busy, payroll is stressed, managers are rushing to create budgets, sales teams are anxious trying to hit target and all are on their best behaviour awaiting their annual review. It could only mean one thing, end of the financial year!

And what a year it has been; if you follow our Quarterly Crunch blogs then it will be no surprise to you that Speller International have had a fantastic year – our best year yet! This is across all facets of our business from placements made, number of contractors out working, interstate and even some international growth, Speller Consulting, growth within existing clients, bringing on new clients and of course professional development within the team itself.

Why have we had a good year?

• We grew our average monthly contractor number by 12.5%

• We had 82% more contractors working in June 17 than in June 16.

• The average initial contract length increased

• We did 10% more placements this financial year 2016/17 than last year 2015/16

What caused this?

• As a company, we focussed on increasing all of the above. The Team took ownership and ended up delivering. As Nick Speller used to say “It’s funny what happens when you get on the phone!”

• The constant restructuring of IT teams in order to try and fit the new technology landscapes resulted in less permanent headcounts, thus more contract requirements.

• Although SAP Australia has not had the best couple of years when it comes to new sales, Australian businesses have been growing strong and appear to have money to spend.

• Business appetite for new technology accelerators have increased; coupled with all new products available has created a demand that IT is struggling to keep up with.

• The need for more IT focussed business roles has increased which has driven demand for more Business Analysts, Master Data, Business Project Managers, Business Partners and Service Delivery roles.

• The complex and mixed technological IT environments have driven the need for multiple SAP/IT teams as opposed to the old 1 or 2 team structure (support and project).Along with increasing the need for Enterprise Architect

What were we busiest in?

• ABAP - made an incredible come back last year (2015/16) and it continued this past year as well. Companies appear to be seeing the value again in not always offshoring this area.

• Integration (PI/PO/HCI) - has been a busy area for us this year – limited only by how many strong Integration consultants are available!

• Utilities Industry - while it has never been deemed as quiet since even before the first push to AMI (Advanced Metering Infrastructure Project, which saw many Utilities companies investing in SAP). It certainly continued this past year (our biggest industry accounting for 30% of our overall placements).

• HCM - We have been extremely busy in the SAP HCM arena across all areas (SuccessFactors, Payroll and even some standard HR) across Functional, Technical, BA’s, Testers, Data, Architects, Project Managers, Trainers and Super Users.

What were out quieter areas?

• Permanent roles – only 10% of our placements were permanent and/or fixed term contract (they usually represent around 20-25% for Speller International’s business). While I do believe that this was part to do with many companies finding it difficult to get permanent headcount, I would also put this down to companies preferring to do their permanent recruitment in house as speed does not seem to be an issue here where as cost does.

• SAP BW and SAP SD was quieter this year with companies deciding to spend more money on Finance, Procurement and HCM and our FMGC and Logistics clients investing more in Warehousing and APO.

• Mining quietened down which in turn saw WA as one of our quietest states this year.

• Senior Project Management roles – multiple smaller projects being preferred over the large programs of work; and where large programs are taking place, we are seeing that they are being broken down into smaller (more manageable?!) pieces of work!

What are my predictions for the coming year?

• Continuation of increased demand across ABAP and Integration. As much as those “our product will seamlessly integrate” promises will continue to come – do not underestimate this area!

• Analytics will get busier again. With companies having already now put in some of the newer products across Finance/Procurement and HCM, the analytics will follow. I think this will continue to be a mixed technology environment (eg Tableau sat on HANA or BW and Qlikview).

• Increase in “Generalist” roles. Business Analysts and Project Managers who have SAP as well as numerous other products/ systems experience. Companies are leaning more towards “the broader the better” in these requirements as opposed to the more specialist approach we in SAP have been more used to.

• More customers making the move to

• Data roles – given the above, it will be more important than ever before to have their Data in order.

• Deloitte and EY will be the big partners to watch this year with both of them making a push only for S4 Projects and having success.

• It will be another great year for the Australian SAP market and Speller alike – maybe even bigger! With the nervousness of going S4HANA decreasing with every project go-live and the business appetite and desire to do things better, fast, smarter than ever before, I think we are in for an exciting year indeed!