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发表于 28-2-2010 22:45:45
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SAP R/3 Handbook, Third Edition - Chapter 1: SAP: From SAP R/3 to SAP NetWeaver
Overview
This first chapter provides a broad overview of the current SAP solutions, how they have
evolved, and the basics of the new architecture or technology foundations that are found
in the new set of products or components of the SAP NetWeaver integration platform.
Because of the evolution of the SAP solutions, and although the third edition of this book
is still called SAP R/3 Handbook, you must notice that most topics apply the same way to
either R/3 Enterprise (mySAP ERP) or any other SAP solution that is based on the SAP
Web Application Server, including several of the SAP NetWeaver components.
At the same time, and since SAP R/3 is still and will be for the coming years, and
whatever the name it might have in the near future, the basic application platform for the
huge SAP customer base, in this chapter and in this book in general, SAP R/3 Enterprise
(release 4.7) and more specifically the SAP Web Application Server is the main topic. An
organizational and technical overview of the SAP NetWeaver components is presented in
Chapter 11.
Right now, one of the biggest concerns of SAP customers and prospects is to understand
the SAP solution sets, what business processes they are meant to solve, what benefits
they provide, and, most of all, what options are available to solve or improve their
business processes or business requirements.
Some of the common questions usually found in customers are as follows: What was
mySAP.com? What's the buzz about SAP NetWeaver? How do I evolve my SAP
systems? What are the options? How will the different solutions and components
integrate?
This chapter includes an overview of the current state of the SAP solutions, focusing on
the main features of SAP R/3 Enterprise release and providing background information
about the evolution of the SAP solutions so that SAP solution can be better understood, It
also provides useful information for the thousands of customers still running on previous
R/3 releases.
SAP Strategic Evolution
SAP AG started operations in 1972 and became successful in the 1980s with their SAP
R/2 solution. The company name, SAP, stands for Systems, Applications and Products in
Data Processing. After the introduction of SAP R/3 in 1992, SAP AG became the world's
leading vendor of standard application software.
SAP R/3 was the business solution that placed SAP in its leadership position and led to
the company becoming extremely successful in the 1990s. The introduction of release 3.1
of R/3 in 1996 provided the first SAP Internet-enabled solutions. In 1998 SAP
transformed from a single-product company to a global business solutions company. The
"first draft" of the mySAP.com strategy was introduced in 1999. The first years of the
new millennium (2001–2003) were the ones in which mySAP.com was adapting and
reinventing itself; the solid technological foundation was improved by the introduction of
the SAP Web Application Server, which enables running programs either on an ABAP or
on top of a Java engine (J2EE). During these years mySAP.com was also getting ready
for the massive deployment and benefits offered by a new Web services-based
architecture, which is now represented by a reality integration platform known as SAP
NetWeaver.
SAP NetWeaver is defined by SAP as the Web-based integration and application
platform that is used across all SAP solutions. In a general way, SAP NetWeaver is the
realization of what it was meant to be with the 1999 mySAP.com strategy.
SAP history is of an evolution from a traditional, integrated, and solid ERP software
company to one company that can offer a full set of business, integration, and
collaboration solutions and services in the open and global business world.
The ERP Basics
Enterprise Resource Planner (commonly known as ERP) software is a concept that
started in the 1970s and was meant to provide computerized solutions for integrating and
automating business processes across companies' back offices, such as the financial,
logistics, or human resources departments. The idea behind ERP was that companies
could see a cost reduction and better efficiency in the way they operated with their
business partners (customers, providers, banks, authorities, etc.) and also in the way their
users could access and process the information. From that concept, there were already
several solutions in the market during the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s. The
adoption of ERP software revolutionized the way companies conduct their traditional
business.
Since the introduction of SAP R/3 in the first part of the 1990s, SAP R/3 became a clear
market leader in ERP solutions.
SAP invests approximately 20 percent of its annual sales revenue in research and
development in order to remain at the edge of technological innovation. With more than
25 percent of its employees working in the research area, SAP wants to make sure that it
can maintain a constant dialogue with customers and users and exchange with them
experiences and ideas to enhance its systems and service offerings. This information
exchange is vital in order for SAP to maintain a long-term relationship with its customers
and to attract new ones not just to SAP R/3 but also to the SAP NetWeaver wave.
In the mid-1990s SAP had two main products in the business software market:
mainframe system R/2 and client/server R/3. Both were targeted to business application
solutions and feature a great level of complexity, business and organizational experience,
strength, and integration. SAP software systems can be used on different hardware
platforms, offering customers flexibility, openness, and independence from specific
computer technologies. Currently, the SAP offering is comprehensive and it's meant not
only for the ERP back office business processes but also for the Web-enabled
collaboration, integration, the full supply chain. In significant scenarios, it can also run
front office processes, such as CRM, or provide vertical solutions, such as SAP for
Healthcare. SAP R/3 and any of the solutions within mySAP Business Suite are all
business solutions providing a high degree of integration of business processes.
For SAP a business process is the complete functional chain involved in business
practices, whatever module, application, system, or Web Service that has to deal with it.
This means, specifically for the SAP R/3 systems, that the process chain might run across
different modules. SAP sometimes referred to this kind of feature as an "internal data
highway." For instance, travel expenses, sales orders, inventory, materials management,
and almost all types of functions have in common that most of them finally link with the
finance modules. SAP understands that business practices and organization change often
and quickly, so it left the systems flexible enough to adapt efficiently.
Currently, in the age of global business and collaboration, those business processes and
the integration chain can run across different services, which can be provided by SAP and
non-SAP solutions. The capacity of an integration platform and the concept of an
Enterprise Service Architecture is what best defined the need for the SAP NetWeaver
concept.
SAP R/3, which provides the core functionality for many SAP standards, mySAP
Business Suite, and SAP for Industries (formerly known as SAP Industy Solutions),
includes a large amount of predefined business processes across all functional modules
that customers can freely select and use for their own way of doing business.
With releases 4.5, 4.6, and 4.7 (Enterprise) of R/3, SAP has incorporated a library of
more than 1000 predefined business processes across all functional modules that
customers can freely select and use for their own way of doing business. SAP makes new
business functions available regularly.
Other main features that SAP R/3 included from the start were the internationalization of
the product and integration capability.
International applicability was a very important part of the strategy to meet today's
complex and global business needs. For SAP, this means not only having the software
available in different languages but also having the capacity to cover the differentiating
aspects of each country: currency, taxes, legal practices concerning human resources,
import/export regulations, and so on. Users from a multinational company in different-
countries can work simultaneously in the same system using their own language,
currency, and taxes. With Enterprise release (4.7) and SAP NetWeaver, most SAP
solutions are now able to run natively in Unicode format.
An additional aspect of the software integration capability is real time. In fact, the R from
R/3 originally is meant for real time. When new input is made into the system, the logical
application links will concurrently update related modules so that the business can react
to immediate information and changes. This type of updating reduces the overhead of
manual processing and communication and enables companies to react quickly in the
nonstop and complex business world, which makes SAP R/3 software and the SAP
Business Intelligence solutions very valuable tools for executive planning and decision
making.
ERP systems such as R/3 were often implemented as a result of a business process
reengineering, which was based on analysis of current business processes and how to
improve them. Many companies could improve radically their efficiency, but this change
process could not (can never) stop in a global and vast marketplace where the
competition is on every corner ("one click away").
From internal integrated ERP systems, companies look further to improve their supply
chain and therefore to extend the reach of their processes to other partner companies.
This step forward is known as interenterprise collaboration, and the goal was to integrate
and make more efficient the supply chain. This concept, together with the emergence of
eCommerce using the Web as the comprehensive communication platform, was key in
the emergence of mySAP.com strategy in 1999.
Let's review in the next section the motivations and strategic vision of SAP to transform
itself from a single-product company into a global business solutions company.
SAP Transformation into a Global Business Solutions Company
The evolution of information technology systems from the beginning was quite similar in
all industries and activity areas. In the 1960s and 1970s companies chose a hardware
provider, and from there some basic software development products (programming
languages), and started to develop their business applications. Most companies started
with critical areas, like accounting and financial applications, that were somehow easier.
Later, these companies advanced and introduced applications in other, more complex
areas like distribution and production.
In any case, they always made their own development using the previously chosen
hardware and software. Already in the 1970s there were some companies that realized the
possibility of developing business software that could be used by different companies; the
opportunity existed to develop the applications only once and then sell the software to
other companies. Among these companies was SAP AG, created in 1972.
Obviously the development of "standard" software was more viable in those business
areas that were more "standard," like accounting and financial services. There were also
more "standard" processes common to companies from the same or similar industry
sectors (like manufacturing or financial industries).
At the beginning, there were many problems with this standard software and many
technical obstacles that would make it difficult to sell these systems in large quantities.
One of these problems was the dependency of the hardware and software platforms in
which the systems were developed. At the time, it was not possible to use the same
software in different hardware platforms. Another problem was that companies did not
behave as standard as initially thought. For instance, payroll calculation was quite
different between companies, and even more different between countries, since each
country has its own laws and legal rules, agreements, contract types, and so on.
In the late 1970s and during the 1980s, these problems led to companies developing
standard applications that were flexible enough to provide functional features to different
types of companies and in different countries. During the 1980s, with the emergence of
PCs and the massive deployment of computing and computer networks in companies, it
was time to make applications independent of hardware platforms and to make those
applications portable among platforms. This was the open systems wave, when different
hardware vendors were designing computers that could work with (nearly) the same
operating systems (UNIX flavors, Windows NT) and with the same database engines
(Oracle, Informix, and others). This technological advance also enabled the development
of standard applications that could be independent of hardware and software platforms.
At the beginning of the 1990s, SAP AG had a product, SAP R/2, that covered reasonably
well the needs of different types of businesses in different countries and in different
areas, like financial services (accounting, accounts payable and receivable, controlling,
and so on), logistics (materials management, warehousing, distribution, sales, and
production), and human resources (payroll, time management, personnel development).
This system was installed in approximately 3000 companies around the world.
The logical and natural evolution from R/2 to an open systems environment led to the
birth of R/3 in 1992. SAP R/3 was developed through SAP AG's 20 years of accumulated
experience in solving the business problems of its customers, along with experience in
computing and managing complex networks. The company had experience and enough
technological background for R/3 to succeed.
In a few years, the growth in the number of customer installations of the R/3 system was
exponential: 900 installations at the end of 1993, 2400 in 1994, 5200 at the end of 1995,
20,000 by the middle of 1999, and more than 60,000 at the end of 2004, reaching the
amazing number of over 20,000 customers in more than 120 countries.
In the mid-1990s it was clear that the standard business software (commonly known as
ERPs or Enterprise Resource Planner applications) was mature enough so that many
companies chose standard software and could abandon the traditional strategy of local
and custom development, which was often more costly in the middle term. At the same
time, SAP AG started to gain enough critical mass to take a new step in the development
of standard software. This was to start developing software for those company areas that
were less standard and more dependent on the business or industry area. These were, for
instance, the upstream and downstream systems of oil companies, the call center and
customer care systems for telecom or utilities companies, the selling of advertisement in
the media sector, and so on. It was necessary to make a move from the back office
applications (financial, logistics, human resources) to the front office in the different
industry areas. It was also necessary to transform a company selling a product (SAP R/3)
independently of the target customer to a company offering specific solutions for the
needs of its customers.
SAP AG had enough customers in many different industries to think that the
development and selling of specific industry solutions could be profitable. |
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发表于 28-2-2010 22:30:54
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