A dedicated SAP training center

Solution

Itransition established a dedicated SAP Commerce training center aimed at rapid education of in-house developers and their introduction to real-life SAP-based projects. We created a proprietary 40-hour training course that covers all aspects of developing full-scale solutions on SAP Commerce. We also provided expert SAP engineers to tutor and then assist the developers in real projects.

Course program and flow

When creating the course program, we relied on the official SAP documentation and study materials, as well as our 5+ years of experience in SAP projects for different industries. Itransition’s training course is a practice-oriented, 40-hour program, individually tailored to the trainees’ skill levels and the project tasks they are assigned. 

Though aimed at software engineers with zero knowledge of SAP systems, the course still required confident Java and Java Spring skills and an understanding of database concepts.

The training course had three parts:

1. Introduction to SAP Commerce 
   The theoretical part included a series of online introductory lectures and tests covering the architecture and functional aspects of the SAP Commerce ecosystem.
2. Sandbox project
   In the practical part, the trainees and Itransition’s tutors created an end-to-end SAP Commerce installation for a fictitious company based on SAP Commerce 123 — an open-access training project provided by SAP. This part included cloud-based production setup and configuration check with a final load test, as well as a number of custom exercises from Itransition to master the core features of SAP Commerce.
3. Real-life project 
   The trainees joined production projects under the supervision of our tutors. Since then, the tutors assisted them with every stage of real-life implementations, helping each developer depending on their progress and the project’s complexity. 

With each learning process step, the degree of the tutors’ involvement and help decreased, while the trainees’ autonomy and skill level increased:

The content of Itransition’s SAP Commerce course covered the following topics:

Architecture and platform basic concepts	Modules, layers, extensions, add-ons, type system, data manipulation, data import and export (impex), task automation (business processes and cron jobs), navigation and search (Apache Solr), catalogs, classifications, etc.
Design and development	Data modeling, converters, populators, cache and cluster ops, integration with third-party systems and modules.
Back-office operations and administration	Administration console, back office, cockpit management frameworks, WCMS, system configuration, initialization/update.
Monitoring and troubleshooting	Working with log files and HAC perspectives, debugging, profiling, and APM basics.
Best practices	Codestyle, typical mistakes, unit and integration tests, advanced GIT operations, basic security concepts.