“What Does SAP Stand For?” Before futher dicussion I request you to “Don’t say ‘sap’, say ‘S’ ‘A’ ‘P’.”
SAP was founded in 1972 in Walldorf, Germany. It stands for Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing. Over the years, it has grown and evolved to become the world premier provider of client/server business solutions for which it is so well known today. The SAP R/3 enterprise application suite for open client/server systems has established a new standards for providing business information management solutions.
What is SAP R3?
We know that SAP R/3 is software, it particular it is client-server software. This means that the groups/layers that make up a R/3 System are designed to run simultaneously across several separate computer systems.
What makes SAP so Flexible?
SAP is a table drive customization software. It allows businesses to make rapid changes in their business requirements with a common set of programs. User-exits are provided for business to add in additional source code. Tools such as screen variants are provided to let you set fields attributes whether to hide, display and make them mandatory fields.
The table driven customization are driving the program functionality instead of those old fashioned hard-coded programs. Therefore, new and changed business requirements can be quickly implemented and tested in the system.
Many other business application software have seen this table driven customization advantage and are now changing their application software based on this table customizing concept.
In order to minimized your upgrading costs, the standard programs and tables should not be changed as far as possible. The main purpose of using a standard business application software like SAP is to reduced the amount of time and money spend on developing and testing all the programs. Therefore, most companies will try to utilized the available tools provided by SAP.