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What is SAP ERP?

$AP stands for System,Analysis and Products in Processing. It is a set of applications developed for enterprises and is also termed as SAP ERP. There are other ERP vendors in the market but SAP is the leader right now. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are software packages used to manage an organizations business processes.

SAP Product Suite consist of below system:

  • R/3 – Core ERP system
  • APO – Supply Chain Planning System
  • CRM – Customer Relationship System
  • BW – Reporting System
  • SRM – Supplier Relationship System
  • Others – PLM, XI, Netweaver...


R/3 is the heart of SAP and can further be divided into different modules:

  • Logistics
    • Sales and Distribution(SD)
    • Materials Management(MM)
    • Production Planning(PP)
  • Human Resource (HR)
  • Financial FICO
    • Finance FI (includes AR, AP, GL…)
    • Controlling CO
    • Profitability Analysis …

APO which is the Supply Chain Planning component of SAP contains:


  • Demand Planning (DP)
  • Supply Network Planning (SNP)
  • Global Available-To-Promise (GATP)
  • Transportation Planning and Vehicle Scheduling (TPVS)
  • Production Planning and Detailed Scheduling (PPDS)


SAP have its own programming language and all the applications and development in SAP is done in ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming) only.

The power of SAP applications can be well understood by the fact that over 80% of fortune 500 companies run on SAP. Over the years SAP has improvised on their existing applications and introduced new applications which are considered as industry standards.They provide their clients with the industry best practices and give them the power to enhance and customize these based on their requirements.The clients are free to either change their working methodology and adopt to standards provided by SAP or to tweak SAP code and customize it.
For any organization running on SAP the IT team needs three kind of consultants:

  1. Functional- Who consult in business process /business functions and configure SAP software to meet business needs of the client.
  2. Basis -Who install SAP applications and manage the back-end..
  3. Technical - Who do the development in ABAP based on functional specifications provided by the functional consultants.
Below is a brief pictorial representation of SAP system:

 

Note: SAP is pronounced as ess-ay-pea.


Hope this helps in developing the basic understanding of the SAP system.
I am familiar with ABAP and APO module (primarily DP and SNP) and hence most of my upcoming posts will be dedicated to it but I will try to bring in some insight on the other modules too.

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