Five NC State Masters’ Graduates Recognized for SAP Software Skills
The graduates are Ryan Schwenk, Subramani Yetur, and Kavya Nagendra, who were in the NC State Jenkins MBA program; Wiliam Baucom, in the Jenkins MAC program; and Venkatesh Ravi, in the Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering program in NC State’s College of Engineering.
The certificates acknowledge that the students gained significant hands-on experience with the SAP software as part of their academic degree programs, explains Gail Corbitt, U.S. program manager at SAP. To earn the recognition, the students had to complete a minimum of three different courses or equivalent containing SAP content, earning a grade of C or better.
The five students met every other week during the spring 2010 semester with Dr. Marianne Bradford, associate professor of accounting in the NC State College of Management and SAP University Alliance Program director for NC State, completing 200 SAP exercises in 20 units. The students also had previously completed the college’s Enterprise Systems course (MBA 515), offered as part of the Jenkins Graduate School of Management’s MBA curriculum.
“We configured SAP from the ground up and ran transactions and simulated the business – a hypothetical pen distributor,” Bradford said. “This Business Process Integration (BPI) course is part of the SAP University Alliance curriculum, and the amount of hands-on experience that our students received exceeded the three-course requirement for the recognition award,” she said.
“I thoroughly enjoyed the SAP training,” Ravi said. “I am delighted to have acquired SAP skills. SAP is a powerful technology tool for integrating business process and I am sure (it will enable me) to add immediate value to the marketplace,” he said.
“The BPI approach to SAP was ‘Learning by Creating a Model Business’ where a model company was configured and tested using SAP,” Ravi added. “This approach helped us to understand business processes and their integrative nature. It also helped to know about SAP organizational structures.”
Nagendra said she enrolled in the intense directed learning option because “All the other courses I have taken gave just the basics of SAP. I wanted more. This is the only course which would let me experiment with SAP in the detail I wanted to. I am very happy to have taken it and am confident that this course will take me a long way in my current job.”
Yetur said the “SAP direct study was a great learning experience. It was both about understanding the various modules in the system and gaining hands-on experience with configuring the SAP enterprise system for a business environment. I am confident that it would help me have an edge when I start working.”
Ravi and Yetur had also served as student assistants when Bradford taught an intense SAP short course to about 40 Jenkins graduate students earlier this semester.
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