SAP – Opening new horizons of business triumph

SAP AG (Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing, read as ‘S.A.P’ and not ‘saap’ where AG stands for ‘Aktiengesellschaft’, German word for ‘a corporation which is limited by shares’) is a German software corporation established in 1972 by five former IBM engineers. S.A.P is world’s largest software solution enterprise with regional offices all over the Globe. SAP’s best-known products are its SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP) and SAP Business Objects softwares. It has a customer base of over 46,000 all over the world with over 100,000 installations, employing more than 53,000 engineers and technology experts.

SAP ERP is a completely integrated, enterprise-wide information system that replaces legacy systems with a series of software modules that communicate with each other seamlessly, replacing current business processes with internationally accepted best practices. SAP software is a total information system that weaves together all the data from manufacturing with all the data from inventory, purchasing, finance, sales, marketing, supply chain, human resource and infinitum. Shared entities in SAP modules eliminate the need of maintaining desperate databases throughout the business locations.

SAP ERP system emerged as strong customer choice with its R/2 (‘R’ for real-time and ‘2’ for tier II ) release in late 1970’s which was replaced by R/3 in 1990s and the latest SAP ERP version is it’s SAP ECC (ERP Central component) which was released in 2005.

SAP is fundamentally arranged in the product families like logistics, finance, and human resource that all have further modules inside them. A detailed list of SAP ERP modules is given in figure 1. However SAP application’s major modules are
• MM – materials management
• HCM – Human capital management
• PM – Pant maintenance
• PP – Project planning
• QA – Quality assurance
• SD – Sales and Distribution
• FI – Financial accounting

SAP’s supply chain solution mySAP SCM is world’s most preferred supply chain integration and optimization system, which unifies an organization’s scattered business functions and makes them more visible to managers. SAP’s business analytics lets managers take quicker decisions through the information that the may instantly need to make long and short term company decisions and form effective organizational and departmental strategies to achieve competitive advantage.

Source code of SAP is open for customers and partners for customization of business specific functions, which enables companies to redesign the system to a significant extent to suite their traditional and legal systems, still allowing them to enjoy SAP’s tight integration and modular strength.

Various SAP products are:
• SAP ERP
• SAP SRM (Supplier relationship management)
• SAP Netweaver
• SAP CRM (Customer relationship management)
• SAP PLC (Product life cycle)

SAP has an excellent customer base all over the world; it enjoys the trust of international companies like Shell, Nestle, Pfizer, Pepsi, Verizon, Colgate, Coca-Cola, Toyota, and BMW. SAP covers the major ERP market with a net share of 35 %, which is followed by 28 % of oracle that is the second largest ERP systems provider.

With an excellent customer support services and relatively quicker implementation methodologies, SAP has outsmarted the competitors in ERP systems applications, although SAP is considerably a high-cost business solution, yet looking at the long-term benefits and control it provides over the business functions, the SAP implementation and support cost is minimal. SAP implementation is a critical task for every department and individual in the firm, requiring information sharing and moral and technical support from every department of a firm from top to bottom. The change has to be built inside every single worker’s mind. This change can initially be a complex one, but later on as the system becomes norm of the company, the firm will see wide-spread benefits. SAP solutions help every individual enhance his own productive capacity and professional expertise which ultimately help the organization grow as a mature, integrated and leading business entity among the competitors nation-wide and internationally. So if you are moving a SAP change, rest assured it, surely is a change for betterment, change for revival and change for triumph.