What is SAP?

Mrs_pbradley936

Thanks everyone. My son is looking for a new job and one of the job descriptions said “knowledge of SAP would be useful”.

magyar

pbradley936 wrote:

Thanks everyone. My son is looking for a new job and one of the job descriptions said “knowledge of SAP would be useful”.

As a requirement for the job, or just a piece of general advice?!

DrSmutt

Sap can do stock control, data tracking, process control. I think you can customise it to your requirements adding and removing components.

HP use it.

amcluesent

>The big money is to be made in talking to people in big corporations and translating what they want into what SAP can do<

True enough. The drudge work of configuring the SAP s/w is generally offshored - ours was configured in the Philippines's before being installed.

That said, I thought SAP were having to simplify the system to make it saleable to FTSE250 and smaller companies?

MadCowMan

You are not wrong , I'm pretty sure there is a SAP SME version too.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/12/09/sap_hones_midmarket_message/

Mrs_pbradley936

Well I emailed SAP because I could not see what I wanted and this is the reply in case anyone else is interested.

The overwiew course we schedule is the SAP01 which is 3 days and costs £1080 + VAT. We can run a 1 one executive overview called the WGBEXO, however as there is no constant demand for it, we can only run the course as a customer specific event. This would work out very expensive for one person as the whole event is charged for the day.

The best option would perhaps be to register to one of our e-learning offerings. The SAP125 would give a brief overview of SAP and only costs £40.

Mrs_pbradley936

magyar wrote:

As a requirement for the job, or just a piece of general advice?!

Well, he will not be getting the job if it is a requirement!

newfoundglory

I think a good summary of what SAP is, would be a totally integrated all-encompassing solution.

If you imagine a small-ish company (or even a large company for that matter), has developed a number of its own in-house computer systems (different computer programs to solve problems, developed at different times throughout the years to do different tasks). All these might be okay, but they may be legacy systems (which are restricted to old platforms), where none of them have incredible features and none of them may be able to "talk" with each other within the business. This makes processing large amounts of data expensive and perhaps a difficult task.

The point of SAP would be to overcome this. Making something which can talk to other parts and systems within a business and in theory make things easier. While this might be the end result a number of years down the line, the true reality is that often a "switch" to SAP is hell, requires extensive staff training and costs a small fortune (sometimes tens or hundereds of millions of £)

AMO

There was a movement away from large systems such as these to selecting integration between best-of-breed applications at one point in the last few years.

SAP has been found to be expensive to buy and expensive to maintain and customise.

Many projects have been abandoned using SAP and many customers using SAP have found that they are paying through the nose to the point that the business they are in, they can be less competitive.

AMO