Learning SAP
Background Material
Why this Blog? I have gone through many websites and blogs and found them to be too technical or having very little value. So I decided to write my own experience in my own way without going into too many technical details, hoping these ramblings would serve someone who is looking to roll out SAP. The Blog is for everyone, but it will be certainly more for those who are thinking of implementing SAP within their organization.
Comments and criticism are welcome from one and all. I don’t claim to be an EXPERT in SAP as the SAP Universe is huge and I am a mere mortal human. So let’s begin….
I will keep this training Material simple yet powerful enough, for the beginner having no idea as to HOW SAP Works.
SAP is an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software and much more as we will see later. The Software is one of most popular ERP software worldwide catering to business need of diverse businesses.
SAP is a composite Business Application having many components and each of those components may have several modules and each of those modules serve a specific business area. The major components are called Financials (FI), Production (PP), Material Management (MM), Sales and Distribution (SD), Human Resources (HR) etc.
These components are connected to each other very well and that is why it is called an integrated ERP. The tight integration between components eliminates duplicity of data and also ensures that information comes from a single source resulting in better quality of decision making.
When an organisation takes the decision to roll-out or implement SAP within it, it has to first ask some questions as to why it is investing the time, money, and efforts. What are the business benefits that will be achieved by implementing SAP? How many of those benefits are quantifiable? What is the ROI and how it will be achieved? Do we have clear cut Business Processes Defined? Is there scope of further optimization of those processes during ERP Implementation? Do we have enough knowledge of business processes within the organization to take on this challenge?
After getting answers to these above questions it still has to decide on the components that will be used by its users. For example, a manufacturing company may decide to use SD, PP, QM, MM, FI in the beginning. The component based structure of SAP allows you to use selective components and modules and when you think your foundation is strong, you systems are stabilised you can think about rolling out other components, business functions. The key to success here is a far sighted vision. The business should be able to visualize about its future position and alignment with SAP clearly so that there are no bottlenecks in future.
From my own experiences I can say that all complex business processes can be mapped in SAP ERP. Once you have the conviction and gathered enough knowledge about your business processes, take the bull by horns.
After taking the decision in favour of SAP, the next critical task is to find a good implementation partner / vendor who has got enough knowledge about your business domain and done some implementations in similar organisations. It is the implementation partner / vendor who will ensure correct configuration of SAP ERP as per your business needs. The people deployed by ERP Implementation Partner or Vendor will work as Team with your business people and map all your requirements in SAP ERP.
So you will have to ensure that the people to be deployed by your selected implementation partner are up-to-the-mark and have decent knowledge of business processes similar to yours as well as good knowledge of SAP ERP Configuration.
Okay so you have finalised on SAP ERP, found the right implementation partner / vendor, the next task is creating the Hardware Infrastructure or Outsourcing it as the case may be. Selection of Servers for SAP ERP is very crucial and important as you won’t be able to change the infrastructure rapidly so my advice is plan well and plan the hardware for tomorrow as well. There are tools available to help you in determining what kind of hardware you will need and we will describe them later. Also please note that most major hardware vendors may have SAP Certified server hardware which might fit your requirement with little customization. Involve your hardware vendor completely in creating the infrastructure for you.
Now you have all 3 entities ready, SAP ERP Software (licenses & Media), SAP ERP Implementation Partner, and Hardware for SAP.
Let’s now have a look at the next post to understand how thing work in SAP World.
SAP Architecture.....
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