Who is Functional consultants?

Dear experts,
I have one question here, where most of the abap developers have in their mind.
"When one(ABAP Developer) can say, I am MM/SD/PP or FI functional consultant?"
Do you think a person(ABAP dev) who work with one or twoprojects in MM can say i am MM consultant?
or when can one decide themself that i am confident to be a Functional Consultant.
For customization at particular module(say MM) as ABAPer, how can one gain experince or knowledge, Is it possible only thru course or thru working experince under Functional consultant?
Being ABAPer to start with knowing MM modules, which is the best place to start it.
Ambichan.

Hi Ambi,
Formally speaking, when a person attends the training course offered by SAP and SAP's education partners, takes a certification exam in that area and clears it, he/she can call him/herself a functional consultant in that area.
That said, as usual, there will always be guys who are far more knowledgable and who may not have chosen to take the certification exam. Experience, as always is very important in getting to know how things work.
Now if you want to call yourself a functional consultant, one thumb rule I have is that you should <i>at least</i> be aware of all the stuff in SPRO under your topic. For example, in SPRO, under Sales and Distribution you have things like Master Data, Basic Functions etc., you should have an idea about what each of these does. At every node there, you need to know what is being done and how it affects the functionality.
Now this is just the customizing part. For the area of Logistics (SD and MM), the customization covers most of the stuff. However, you should know some basics outside of SAP. For example, when you buy something you get a bill for that. Which is an invoice. What a typical sales cycle is like, we need to know.
But in areas like FI/CO, there is a lot of stuff outside customizing that we need to understand. For example, you should know what a balance sheet is.
I sometimes read the documentation for each of the nodes to understand a few things. And for someone who wants to learn some functional stuff, i first ask them to start off with reading the documentation in SPRO and alongside see how a particular concept is implemented in SAP. For example, in pricing, you have to look at VA01 and actually create a sales document to see things in action and get your concepts clear.
I could have gone on and on on this one, but I hope you got an idea about it.
Regards,
Anand Mandalika.

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