All about SAP and SAP Basics overview
Every business starts out with the objective of vertical and horizontal expansion. After a few years of successful operations in a particular area, businesses look to expand into other territories and countries even. A business can expand only when they have all their management processes in order. The common management processes that businesses have to deal with include production planning, management of raw materials, warehousing of the goods, sales and distribution, quality assessment of the products produced, customer relationship management and much more. Handling these tasks individually is quite daunting especially in a global set-up, let alone handling then in an interpersonal environment.
To aid businesses handle their operations more effectively, enterprise resource planning or ERP software have been created which not only handle every aspect of a business individually but also in an integrated manner. Enterprise resource planning software handles not only the main functions of a company but also other aspects such as analytics of operations, finance and workforce even for execution, management and planning of these fields. SAP ERP is software which is very widely used by mid-sized and large scale companies for the management of their day to day activities. The software is owned by SAP AG and more than 50,000 companies use the modules designed by the company. SAP has got solutions for all kinds of enterprise resource management. For example, the SAP Material Management (MM) has incorporated into it sub-modules such as production planning (PP), sales and distribution (SD), SAP Financials or FI/CO (finance and controlling) for complete management of the materials that are handled by the company. Similarly, SAP Business Intelligence (BI) for analytics and reporting together with SAP Business Objects. The SAP module meant for human resources management is SAP Human Capital Management which takes care of employee appraisal, payrolls, leaves and other aspects.
These modules are programmed using the ABAP language and all kinds of functions can be performed through them. The user will have to input the commands and the ABAP language would take care of the commands entered. It would also display any error message if the software is unable to perform the functions.
A lot of companies start out with dual modules such as SD+HR, FICO+SD, PP+MM etc. which would take care of two functional modules which are much pertinent. These enterprise resource planning software have made handling business processes much easier for all.
John Simley has been working as a SAP Financials FICO consultant for the past couple of years. He has written this article as an overview of SAP.
