AN INTRODUCTION TO SAP

WHAT IS SAP?

AN INTRODUCTION TO SAP

SAP stands for "Systems Applications and Products in(for) Data Processing." It was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees in Germany.

The great advantage of SAP is, it creates a common centralized database for all the applications running in an organization. The application has been assembled in such a versatile way that it handles the entire functional department within an organization. Today major companies including Microsoft and IBM are using SAP's Products to run their own businesses.

R/2, which ran on Mainframe architecture, was the first SAP version. Sap's products are generally focused on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). Sap's applications are built around R/3 system which provides the functionality to manage product operations, cost accounting, assets, materials and personnel. The R/3 system of SAP runs on majority of platforms including windows 2000 and it uses the client/sever model.

The main advantage of using SAP as your company ERP system is that SAP have a very high level of integration among its individual applications which guarantee consistency of data throughout the system and the company itself.

In a standard SAP project system, it is divided into three environments, Development, Quality Assurance and Production.

The development system is where most of the implementation work takes place. The quality assurance system is where all the final testing is conducted before moving the transports to the production environment.  The production system is where all the daily business activities occur.  It is also the client that all the end users use to perform their daily job functions.

To all company, the production system should only contains transport that have passed all the tests.