Monday, January 12, 2009

Why You Need SAP For Your Career and Business

By Paul Gray

In 1972, five ex-IBM engineers established SAP. Interpreted from German, it means Systems, Applications, Products in Data Processing. The full name of the parenting organization is SAO AG. Situated close to the town of Heidelberg, SAP has subsidiaries in 50 countries. Because of their success, the original beginners have marketed SAP AG into the 3rd broadest software maker in the universe.

More than half of the Earth top 500 corporations and over 17,500 customers make use of this software manufacturer. There are more than 27,000 workers worldwide and SAP AG controls a revenue of $7.34 billion and a net revenue of $581 million in FY01. Because SAP is named in Germany it makes up the 30 stocks of DAX and on the New York Stock Exchange as ticker:SAP.

In one hundred twenty nations with more than 10 million users, there are 44,500 installations of SAP. Why did this firm become successful? In 1979 SAP released SAP R/2 into the German market; it was an instant success! Every big German organization had a SAP software and for yr this enterprise stayed within Germanys boundaries. Eventually the software firm expanded throughout Europe and towards the end of the 1980s, client-server architecture became well known.

SAP released R/3 and in 1988 it was published in the North America region which resulted in an big prosperous business venture. It took only 5 yr for the North American market to take on 44% of total SAP global sales. More than 3,000 individuals have added the names of many of the Fortune 500 to their customer based list. Currently SAP is available in 46 particular country versions, incorporating 28 languages; industry specified versions number 21. Huge corporations are no longer the pleased owners of SAP as smaller firms have verified the need to incorporate this software into their business.

There are good causes why firms are implementing SAP. Exchanging outdated and inefficient IT Architecture provides for a competitive advantage. Some Other good reasons are to enable business process change since it is easier to change firms process to adapt to SAP. There is a competitive advantage and of course this depends on the organization. Behind every thriving business is a cost profit analysis. If SAP cannot be implemented with a confident result than it likely should not be embarked on. A ballpark cost would be $4,000 and is based on a price per user with an yearly support cost of 10% and periodic upgrades. Check with SAP for complementary selective information.

The shortest time to apply SAP is 45 days, and there are multi nationals who remain to accomplish SAP over 5 to 10 years and many have planned as successful world deployments but one should be capable to get a single instance project completed in a little over a year. The least of SAP implementations can be done on a part time basis and the broadest will involve up to a 1000 people including armies of consultants. The tiniest SAP implementations uses a production system box, a box for examination and a box for developing. The broadest implementations use well over 100 packages specially if programmes are required. This can cost from $400,000 to millions of dollars.

SAP can be all things to all enterprises, and it is here to stay.

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