Curiosity, resourcefulness and versatility, the soft skills of SAP Consultant Manuele

Young, competent and enterprising: with these adjectives we could define Manuele, SAP Business Consultant who has been working in the Mashfrog headquarters in Milan for about three years. Even his academic background allows you to sense the continuous thirst for change and knowledge that sets him apart and that led him, in the space of a few years, to assume a role of considerable responsibility in the group. In this short interview, he talked about his passions, from finance to machine learning, and the wonderful journeys he was able to go on to closely monitor the go-lives of certain international projects.

First of all, what is your training background?

My academic career is perfectly in tune with my desire to always remain transversal and to seek new stimuli in everything I do. I have already changed direction several times: I graduated as a surveyor, then I obtained a degree in Economics of Banks, Insurance and Financial Intermediaries at the University of Milan Bicocca and shortly after I started a university master's in technology optimisation whose main partner was Mashfrog, who then selected me to join the company. My training pathway is far from over, in fact I started a new master's in Blockchain and digital assets a few weeks ago. I am always on this continuous search for something new, which leads me to always learn different things, without focusing only on one single area.

Tell us something about the international projects you oversaw in Mashfrog Group.

I joined Mashfrog three years ago and immediately started working for the client Prysmian: I was involved in a project in Germany, which allowed me to monitor the go-live onsite directly at the client's German office in Wuppertal, where I stayed for about a week. It was a great experience that had a big influence on me, but my real upgrade came with the next project, for which I participated in a complete rollout in Muscat, in the capital city of Oman, again for Prysmian. I have been there four times for a total of about two months, together with the whole project team. It was an incredible experience that I would repeat over and over, because it allowed me to get involved and soon become Controlling Area Leader for other projects 

After that project, I started working on another project on the United States and Canada, again belonging to the Prysmian group. In this case, due to the pandemic, unfortunately I was unable to go to the head office; I would have loved to have been able to continue travelling for work, and I hope that new possibilities will arise soon.

What are the ingredients that made you grow professionally?

First of all, I believe that to grow it is necessary to have a good mentor: in my case it was Francesco Palermo, Head of Controlling SAP, who has been a great reference point for me. And then undoubtedly you need to have a good dose of resourcefulness and curiosity, not just doing things that you are already familiar with. Personally, I am a person who gets bored easily, as evidenced by my diversified and transversal academic and professional careers. I feel I'm always searching for something new, which leads me not to focus only on a single area, but pushes me to always do many different things, constantly changing direction.

In mashfrog can you find the right incentives to stimulate your versatility and thirst for change?

Yes, absolutely, as in the area of sap controlling I have the opportunity to take on activities with a high degree of diversity. My job does not only involve acting as a “functional” player, that is, as an intermediary between the business and the developer; sometimes it is necessary to build management control models and think with a more business-oriented approach. I really like the sap area because it allows me to work on tasks that are also very different from each other: I perform business-oriented reasoning, I build algorithms, more generally I try to understand the customer's need, design the best solution and then transpose it into a system. My work includes many sides of the same coin, all always new and stimulating.

Where do you see yourself 10 years from now?

I am very happy with mashfrog. I am building up a lot of experience and skills that I would like to put into practice in the future to give rise to a new project from scratch. In particular, I am attracted to machine learning systems: I have many ideas in mind and I would like to implement them to be able to create a system of my own. In the meantime, I continue to study, read books and inform myself, because you never stop learning.