About SAP and its Business Solutions

Hello Friends!! Welcome to our journey of ABAP Certification Course.

Before starting to dive into the details of ABAP, you would be inquisitive to know something about SAP first. Even if you already have a rough idea, you would like to get it confirmed. This post is about introducing you to some of the basic aspects of SAP software business.

Who are SAP’s Customers & What does SAP offers them?

Every company irrespective of their geographical positioning or sizes or to whichever industry segment they belong to, have several business processes carried out during their day to day business. All these business processes give rise to a huge amount of data which are important for future reference, legal requirements and business decisions. For example, before extending credit to one of your customers, your company would surely check the credit history of the customer’s previous transactions.

And this where, SAP comes up with their various business solutions supporting various business processes at these companies. These business solutions record all the data involved in various business processes and provides several decision making tools. These business solutions make these companies, customers of SAP.

Cross-Industry and Industry-specific Solutions

The customers of SAP i.e. Companies belong to different Industry segments e.g. Aerospace, Manufacturing, Oil and Gas, Retail etc. Even though the companies belong to different industry segments, there are certain processes common to all the industries e.g. Payroll, Accounting, Procurement, Sales and distribution etc. SAP provides generic business solutions which are known as cross-industry solutions, to support the common needs of most of the companies in most industry segments, with little bit of configuration. On top of this, seeing the demand from customers, SAP has come up with Industry-specific flavors of its solutions as well which are fine-tuned version of the existing solutions with added functionalities for specific industry segments. There are several prominent industry segments for which SAP has come up with industry specific solutions e.g SAP for Oil and Gas, SAP for Retail, SAP for Automotive, SAP for Aerospace and Defense etc.

Can you tell me about some Popular Business Solutions in SAP’s Portfolio?

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning): Most popular application from SAP. Contains business solutions like Financial Accounting, Controlling, Sales & Distribution, Material Management, Production Planning, Quality Management, Warehouse Management etc. Short overview about these business solutions can be accessed using the post video.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management): Specialized application for managing customer facing tasks of the companies e.g. Sales, Marketing, Service, E-Commerce etc. Refer more details.

SRM (Supplier Relationship management): Specialized application for supporting the Procure-to-Pay business process by better supply base management and enhanced collaborative supplier relationships. Interested in knowing more?

SCM (Supply chain management): Looks after the entire supply chain process, right from procurement planning to procurement to manufacturing to goods delivery. Interested in more details?

I hope this gives you a good idea about SAP’s software offerings and an entry to SAP Ecosystem.

In our next post, we would ponder over the infrastructure needed to run all these business solutions.

Till then, Good Bye!!!