SAP AG was founded in 1972 by four former IBM employees, the
company headquarters are based in walldorf, a small German town close to
Heideberg, where the university is a continuous source of employees at SAP.
Many of the gurus behind this phenomenal system known as R/3 come from this
University.
Since it’s foundation, SAP has made significant development
and marketing efforts on standard application software, being a global market
player with it’s R/2 System for mainframe applications and it’s R/3 system for
open client/server technologies.
The company name, SAP, stands for Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing. After the
introduction of SAP R/3 in 1992, SAP AG has become the world’s leading vendor
of standard application software. One
of the reasons for SAP’s success is that since it is a standard package, it can
be configured in multiple areas and adapted to the specific needs of a company.
To support those needs, SAP includes a large number of business functions,
leaving room for turther funcionality and enhancements or adaptability to
business practice changes. More and more, corporations are deciding to use
standards software systems that are highly flexible and configurable and able
to support most their business practices and information needs. This kind of
package leaves the development of custom software only for exceptional case.
The maturity and solid experience of SAP in solving the information management
problems of businesses around the globe have made it’s R/3 system the clear
market leader in the development of standard applications.
Strategy
and Products
SAP invests approximately 20 percent of its annual sales
revenue in research and development in order to remain at the edge of
technological innovation. With more than 25 percent ot its employees working in
the research area, SAP wants to make sure that it can maintain a constant
dialogue with customers and users and exchange with them experiences and ideas
to enhance its systems and service offerings. This information exchange is
vital in order for SAP to maintain a long-term relationship with its customers
and to attract new ones to the R/3 wave.
SAP has greatly based the functionality of its R/2 and R/3
software systems in the business process concept. For SAP, a business process is the complete
functional chain involved in business practices, whatever software module has
to deal with it. This means that the chain might run across different modules.
SAP sometimes refer to this kind of feature as an internal data highway. For instance, what travel expenses, sales
orders, inventory, materials management, and almost all types of functions have
in common is that most of them finally link with the finance modules. R/2 and
R/3 are particulary noted for this type of comprehensive business functionality
which qualifies the systems as being highly
integrated. SAP understands that business practices and organizations
change often and quickly, so it left the system flexible enough to be able to
adapt efficiently.
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