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SAP R/3 is the name of the main ERP software produced by the SAP company. Its new (modern) name is mySAP (http://www.sap.com/solutions/erp/)
History of SAP R/3
SAP R/2 was a mainframe based business application software suite that was very successful in the 1980s and early 1990s. It was particularly popular with large multinational European companies who required soft-real-time business applications, with multi-currency and multi-language capabilities built in. With the advent of distributed client-server computing SAP AG brought out a client-server version of the software called SAP R/3 that was manageable on multiple platforms, which opened up SAP to a whole new customer base. SAP R/3, which was launched in 1993 came to dominate the large business applications market over the next 10 years.
Reasons for success
From the 1960s to the 1980s there was a concern that software development was too complex, and liable to go wrong. One of the solutions to this proposed by many people including Fred Brooks was the development of a modular approach in order to maximise software reuse.
SAP software comes with customisable processes which a company uses in the modelling of its business. Traditionally, software purchases had provided tools for building applications, but these tools did not provide business processes. SAP provided standarised processes, which were termed best-practices solutions of processes. The implementation of SAP software commonly required the expertise of knowledgeable external consultants, who were familiar with these best practices.
Organization
SAP R/3 is arranged into distinct functional modules, such as Sales & Distribution, Finance, Human Resources and Materials Management. Each module handles specific business tasks on its own, but is linked to the others where applicable. For instance, an invoice from the Billing portion of Sales & Distribution will pass through to accounting, where it will appear in accounts receivable and cost of goods sold.
SAP has typically focused on best practice methodologies for driving its software processes, but has more recently expanded into vertical markets. In these situations, SAP produces specialized modules geared toward a particular market segment, such as utilities or retail.
Using SAP often requires the payment of hefty licence fees, as the customers have effectively outsourced various business software development tasks to SAP. By specialisng in software development, SAP hopes to provide a better value to corporations than they could if they attempted to develop and maintain their own applications.
Technology
SAP R/3 is a client/server based application, utilizing a 3-tiered model. A presentation layer, or client, interfaces with the user. The application layer houses all the business-specific logic, and the database layer records and stores all the information about the system, including transactional and configuration data.
SAP R/3 functionality is structured using its own proprietary language called ABAP (Advanced Business Application Programming). ABAP, or ABAP/4 is a fourth generation language (4GL), geared toward the creation of simple, yet powerful programs. R/3 also offers a complete development environment where developers can either modify existing SAP code to modify existing functionality or develop their own functions, whether reports or complete transactional systems within the SAP framework.
ABAP's main interaction with the database system is via open SQL statements. These statements allow a developer to query, update, or delete information from the database. Advanced topics include GUI development and advanced integration with other systems.
See also
External links
de:SAP R/3
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