SAP (SAP ERP) stands for Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing. SAP was developed by SAP AG, a German Company. SAP R/3 or SAP ERP are two versions of the enterprise resource planning software product of SAP AG.
SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung.
The acronym SAP was later changed to Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung in German("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing in English").
In 1972 the SAP R/1 solution was launched. Seven years later, in 1979, SAP launched SAP R/2. In 1981, SAP brought a completely re-designed solution to market. With the change from R/2 to R/3 in 1992, SAP followed the trend from mainframe computing to client-server architectures. The development of SAP’s internet strategy with mySAP.com redesigned the concept of business processes (integration via Internet)
SAP ERP is desinged to cater all the needs of an organization from various departments without any need to use additional software application. For this, SAP maintains a central database for all the departments of an enterprise.
It has modules. A client who wants to implement SAP in their company will select the modules required for their business.
Solutions provided are:
Financials
Human Resources
Customer Relationship Management
Supplier Relationship Management
Product Lifecycle Management
Supply Chain Management
Business Intelligence
Major module usually implemented are:
1. FICO - Finance and Control
2. MM - Materials Management
3. SD - Sales and Distribution
4. QM - Quality Management
5. HCM - Human Capital Management
6. PP - Production Planning
7. WM - Warehouse Mangement
apart from these there are others also
like
SM - Service Management
AA - Asset Accounting
PM - Plant Maintenance
PS - Project Systems
and moreover there are industry specific solutions like
IS - Mill - (industry solution for mills)
IS - Oil - (industry solution for petroleum related companies)
IS - Auto - (industry solution for Automobile Industries)
IS - Retail - (industry solution for retail organization)
More over there are new dimension products such as CRM, PLM, SRM, APO etc
CA Cross Application – these lie on top of the individual modules, and include
WF – workflow
BIW – business information warehouse
EP - Enterprise Portal
You can choose to learn any of these modules according your interest but before starting do a good research on that and try to map it to your expectations and your career aspirations.
