What is SAP?
“What is SAP?” – simple explanation
“What is SAP?” is the most asked question if you tell people, that you are a SAP consultant. It was always hard for me to explain it with a few words, so I decided to try to make it simple:
- SAP is a company that offers software.
- It offers software for the whole business.
- The software name is also SAP.
“What is SAP?” – long explanation
Now we can continue with the long explanation:
SAP is one of the biggest software companies nowadays, operating worldwide. It offers a lot of software solutions mostly for the large enterprises, but also for the small and middle businesses (SMB) and for the small enterprises (SE). SAP offers a wide palette of software systems, tools and instruments, designed for the different business processes in the company and for the different kinds of businesses.
The most famous solution of SAP is SAP R3 (later called SAP ERP), where ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is a system, which manages all the business processes in a company starting with the accounting, controlling, warehousing and than continuing with the supply chain management, purchasing, production and sales planning, marketing, human resources etc. There are different modules for every part of the business, so the processes can be standardized and the management can have better and faster information about the direction in which the company goes.
The big advantage of SAP is the possibility for customization. SAP is flexible. It can fit all the different customer needs. In the same time there are predefined business contents in the SAP system. Companies of different industries can use them in their custom installations.
SAP offers a big variety of solutions and modules for the big companies, but also for the small ones. There is the possibility to have the solutions in the cloud or on premise.
The abbreviation SAP
The abbreviation SAP comes from the German name of the company “SAP Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung” , which was grounded 1972 by five German programmers. In English it is translated as “System Applications Products”. During the years SAP has grown to the third biggest software supplier in the world.
I hope I answered the question: “What is SAP?”.
