Introduction To SAP

Introduction

     SAP is the number one among the several ERP Vendors in the World. SAP is the world's largest business software company. It operates in four geographic regions: EMEA (Europe, Middle East, Africa), AMERICA (United States and Canada), LAC (Latin America and Caribbean), and APJ (Asia Pacific and Japan), which represents Japan, Australia, India, and parts of Asia. In addition, SAP operates a network of 115 subsidiaries, and has R&D (Research & Development) facilities around the globe in Germany, India, the US, Canada, France, Brazil, Turkey, China, Hungary, Israel, Ireland and Bulgaria.

SAP focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services. It offers more than 25 industry solution portfolios for large enterprises and more than 550 micro-vertical solutions for mid size companies and small businesses.

Who Founded SAP.

SAP was founded in June 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung ("System Analysis and Program Development") by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg (Dietmar Hopp, Klaus Tschira,Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, and Claus Wellenreuther).

Products,

SAP's products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). The company's main product is SAP ERP. The current version is SAP ERP 6.0 and is part of the SAP Business Suite. Its previous name was R/3. The "R" of SAP R/3 stood for real-time – even though it is not a real-time solution. The number 3 related to the 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAP GUI). R/2, which ran on Mainframe architecture, was the predecessor of R/3.

SAP product are consider excellent but not perfect.  The main problems with software product is that it can never be perfect.

SAP ECC is one of five enterprise applications in Sap’s Business Suite. The other four applications are:

• Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – helps companies acquire and retain customers, gain marketing and customer insight
• Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) – helps manufacturers with product-related information
• Supply Chain Management (SCM) – helps companies with the process of resourcing its manufacturing and service processes
• Supplier Relationship Management (SRM) – enables companies to procure from suppliers

Advantages of SAP 

The main advantage of using SAP as your company ERP system is that SAP have a very high level of integration among its individual applications which guarantee consistency of data throughout the system and the company itself.


SAP is a table drive customization software.  It allows businesses to make rapid changes in their business requirements with a common set of programs.  User-exits are provided for business to add in additional source code.  Tools such as screen variants are provided to let you set fields attributes whether to hide, display and make them mandatory fields.


This is what makes ERP system and SAP in particular so flexible.  The table driven customization are driving the program functionality instead of those old fashioned hard-coded programs.  Therefore, new and changed business requirements can be quickly implemented and tested in the system.


Many other business application software have seen this table driven customization advantage and are now changing their application software based on this table customizing concept.


Architecture of SAP R/3  system
The SAP R/3 System architecture consists of three layers:  Presentation, Application, and Data Storage. The following diagram illustrates the function served by each layer and how the layers work together:

Presentation 

This is where users of the SAP R/3 System will submit input to the SAP R/3 System for the processing of business transactions. It is also where the output from these transactions appears as output fields, reports, tables and spread sheets.

On the desktop level, R/3 offers a user-friendly graphical interface called SAP GUI. The system also integrates alternative interfaces for optimum compliance with your requirements. This includes integrating common PC applications. Information exchange is also carried out through the Internet, Kiosk touch screen systems and telephone applications.

Application

 An application is a logically independent component residing at the host operating system level within the SAP R/3 client/server environment. This component is represented by an application server in the SAP R/3 network. After a user initiates a request at the presentation level, logic is invoked to service and process that information. The application logic modules can reside on one centralized host machine or be distributed over several physical host machines within a particular SAP R/3 network. Typically, the update and en queue processes reside on the database server in the application layer. In most cases, the message, spool and gateway processes will also reside on the database server.

The database server may also be referred to as the “central server”. On the application level, R/3 offers sophisticated mechanisms to optimally use high-performance system

resources. The system implements interconnections between various applications so that they are practical from a business perspective. R/3 closes the gap between the exacting concept of a business transaction and transactions from a data processing perspective.

Data Storage

 On the database level, R/3 exclusively uses relational database systems by various manufacturers. R/3 is able to utilize the most advanced features of each database vendor’s product. In other words, it is not constrained by the lack of features in any individual database engine. Instead, it is able to fully use a supplier-specific implementation without jeopardizing it’s own portability.