What is SAP?
In an earlier post, I have tried to explain what SAP ERP is. However, I realized that, while SAP ERP is a well known SAP product for people who already know something about SAP, SAP in itself may be totally unknown to the rest of the world.
So today let’s try to answer this simple question: What is SAP?
SAP is both a company and a products suite. And most people refer to both the company and its main product (the ERP solution) using the SAP acronym.
SAP as a company
SAP is an international company with its headquarters in Germany (in Walldorf) which develops business software that supports most of the operational processes of its customers (mainly large and midsize companies).
It has been funded in 1972 by former IBM engineers and has now around 50.000 employees.
It is today considered as the world’s largest business software company.
SAP as a product
SAP’s flagship product is the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solution. An ERP is a business software that addresses most of the operational processes of a company covering enterprise functions like Finance, Purchasing, Ordering and Billing, Human Capital management, Project management, Analytics, … through the implementation of software modules. Main SAP ERP modules include:
- SAP FI (Finance)
- SAP CO (Controlling)
- SAP MM (Materials Management)
- SAP SD (Sales and Distribution)
- SAP HR (Human Resources)
- SAP PS (Project System)
- SAP PP (Production Planning)
- SAP CS (Customer Service)
and most of those modules contain sub-modules in order to address specific areas of the functional domains. For example, in SAP FI you will find sub-modules covering General Ledger, Accounts Receivables (i.e. customer accounting), Accounts Payables (i.e. vendor accounting), Asset Accounting, Banking, Treasury, …
Next to ERP, SAP is also offering:
- SAP BW (Business Warehouse) to cover Business Intelligence needs together with SAP Business Objects
- CRM (Customer Relationship Management)
- SRM (Supplier Relationship Management)
- PLM (Product Lifecycle Management>
- SCM (Supply Chain Management)
Most of these products run on a common technical platform currently known as Netweaver which provides common technologies and interfacing techniques to the functional modules ensuring a certain degree of uniformity of those modules.