SAP - German software product and company

Right then,

As above question, just what on earth does a SAP do? What does it stand for? Senior Analyst Programmer?

Am I one already without even knowing it?

Anyone out there please enlighten me to this latest IT buzzword?

Type SAP into Google and all will be revealed.

It stands for Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte I think

*Hey* flash of brilliance: if Toytown manages to functionally replicate google for its users - they type in questions and out come answers, does that mean we can float ourselves on the Nasdaq for $20bn like the real google? That would be cool. That would be $20,4m for each registered member. Solid gold steinkrugs all round!

Most larger business run S-A-P (Nestle, BMW, a lot of hospitals). any organization that needs an comprehensive management system have SAP. i am however not allowed to voice my real opinions.

heard of PeopleSoft? same idea. oracle was trying to hostilely take over PeopleSoft recently.

SAP - works also in English

systems, applications, products.

As far as I know it is Germany's largest software company, don't know where they rank on a worldwide comparison.

In the Software Mag Top 500 they are in 10th.

Okay... so it is the name of a German company called SAP AG founded by ex-IBMers.

Is is any use to a small under ten man company?

No. The software is built for large companies.

Definately not !! Its a very expensive application. We use it in my company, and am currently in the process of migrating all processes to SAP. HR, S'n'D, MM, FI, CO, etc, and the entire project costs around 10 million EUR.

Debatable. I would say no personally. Depends what you want it for Jeremy. SAP systems cover all sorts of business areas, and the old adage, "Jack of all Trades, Master of none" often applies in such cases.
I assume the SAP system will cost you x euros, and getting it to do what you need it to will involve getting an SAP consultant in, costing x more euros. There are zillions of jobs offered over here for inhouse SAP consultants, suggesting that my assumption is correct.
These masive all-in-one systems are fundamentally flawed anyway - even the SAP ceo has admitted that best-of-breed solutions are more likely to take over.

SAP uses Oracle as its database, so best to just get SQL and get someone to program something for you !

Hiya
Too dear for what you want it for probably but go an see them to make a fair comparison as their canteen is lovely so it is worth the trip.
I would have said to look at Navision Financials and their industry-solutions but they got bought by Microsoft and I don't know what their product development has been like since. I stopped doing Navision in 2001 but I am sure that someone here will know more.
If you type in Navision.com you now get Microsoft Business Solutions.
Whatever product you go for, work out first what you actually need - this will save you a lot of money in the long run.
Katrina

Yeah, would agree with that, the eastern european countries of my company are starting to use Navision, as they cannot afford SAP. Think its an application moving in the right direction, although with the recent news that Microsoft will/have bought it, am not sure what that means for the future of Navision.

I would not. I would never normally dare to disagree with Katrina, but they use Navision where I work, and I think it is extremely poorly put together. Microsoft have not got involved atall with the development of it yet AFAIK, and this is pretty obvious when you use it, as it does not actually conform to alot of windows standards.

BTW, here's an example of what it looks like

Okay...no use for me then.

I am project manager for a small geographical information system / CAD company. We develop maps for transportation and municipal clients within Germany. Our projects are small and easily run thus seem to have no need to use these solutions.

@ oli2000 - I know what SAP looks like, there is 15 SAP servers sitting in the cellar of the building I am sitting in, although I've never seen Navision.

Oh.. Oli2000 why are you running this in German ? on the login you can change the language to what ever you want !

Looks suspiciously Motif/Unix like to me in the interface.

Navision went to MS when I was just about to leave MS, so May 2002.
I know quite a few people who made quite a lot of money out of that sale *cough*. Anyway Navision is now sorely missed at the CeBit as they always had great parties - the best Navision programmers were from Iceland as this was Navision's first market outside of Denmark, so they were pretty feucht-fröhlich...
Back then I was a data-warehousing DBA for Navison/SQL for Navision's biggest client so this is why I used to go to their bashes.
Katrina
PS Don, it really depends on the industry-solution. Some are cobbled together really badly, textiles was a good solution, some others were bobbins though.

why had you considered SAP in the first place? do you need some kind of document managment system? i guess at your scale accesss and sql would probably help you out hte most.

Access is more than adequate for my project. I am operating on a relatively low tech scale here.

Nope I was just curious having heard of SAP everywhere what the word meant.

I have a friend back home in the States who works with SAP, she tells me it stands for Suckers Are Paying. check out her website http://www.sapgoddess.com

Hee to the hee hee.

"Mary Jane Steele" Cool name. Is she a member of the X-Men?

Hi there,

I'm looking at the possibility of taking a job working with the Navision Software. Can anyone advise me on whether this is a good idea, or is it best to head in a different direction altogether?

Our company has just also taken on Navision for all the smaller countries that cannot afford SAP.

As I understand there is a growing market at the moment for Navision.

I use S.A.P. at my workplace and NOONE likes it!!! We have learned to live with it now, but for the first year or two, the whole of our financial system went to pot because of it. It definitely did not appear to be "Vorsprung durch Technik"! It is a financial system, can't remember what it actually stands for though. I have to use the blessed thing every day for processing sales orders, it is very un user friendly and even my German friends hate it!

Could not resist from posting...

I was just going thu the Xtra and found this post.
Just for those curious about SAP.

I am a terrible fan of S.A.P. Not just becoz i make living out of it. But you cant find a better product for Enterprises which are huge and massive in scale. And you once you are familiar with it, you would not like anything else.

Btw, this is not for individual usage. More a business product. And if you look at the size of the economy and job it creates, its truly amazing.

And as always, a small thought by few IBM engineers was responsible for such a phenomenon existing here.

One of the best options in the good job market today.

Those of you, more interested:
SAP

Btw, my client is looking for ABAP PROGRAMMERS in SAP with german language skills. anyone interested, PM me.

Their canteen is TOP!

More from the user side myself but have said too much already!

Also, SAP stands for

"Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung". That basically means "Systems, Applications and Products in the area of data processing"

Some other ERP Systems, some Free

Of course, your mileage may vary, and you get what you pay for. But, if you're looking to get started with ERP concepts, free is the right price.

--phil

I'm not thrilled with SAP. Of course, I work for Siebel, but my complaints about SAP are purely technical: they do the screwiest shit with characters and addressing rather than implementing standard codepages or Unicode.

Meh.

woof.

What do you mean? Could you eloborate...?

Characters for environments with multiple languages are mapped in a proprietary manner rather than using standard code pages like 1252, 1250, 950, 032, etc. If you have an SAP environment with English and Russian, you have a strange mapping which includes characters from 1252 and 1250. Since we interface with SAP and since I'm a specialist in I18N, I get to see problems in data warehousing or conversion. Since Siebel doesn't support mixed code pages, we have to translate all that into Unicode (only in our version 7.5 and later).

the phrase is "lock-in", not that I'd be offended so much by it were SAP to pay me scads of Eurobucks to work on it for SAP instead of Little Blue. (:

woof.

Want to work for a company on SAP that might pay you better there Baddoggie?

Hi BD,

that makes you a good candidate for SAP. Have u ever tried there?

Btw, you are right. Code page thing is tricky there. But how do u handle this in Siebel?

I don't know squat about SAP or Siebel, really. I'm completely on the technical side (OS, I18N, etc.). I get it up and running, fix it if it stops, and little more. If someone's willing to pay me 80K and accept a few simple conditions, I'm more than happy to listen to the offer.

Of course, I'd always give my current employer the right of first refusal.


Never applied to SAP. I don't know much about it and I've never even successfully created a M:M join in Siebel.

As far as languages, we've always been strict about single codepages or Unicode. We had a lot of language-specific builds prior to version 7.5. This caused the I18N team constant nightmares, especially with patches. The I18N team is now deeply involved with Engineering to make sure they don't drop some language-specific string in some library.

woof.

The company that I know of is looking for SAP profi's and 80k would be the minimum for the right person. The SAP fix-it all guys are earning 3x that. I am almost tempted to switch careers simply for the money.

@Eurovol,
Could you forward my resume to them?

Hope they dont ask german skills!

No prob. My wife and I already got them their systems admistrator and to be honest, the guy learned most of his shit on the job. However, he has learned and learned and learned and is today actually a real sys.ad. They sent him to many a course. The company wants to set up an SAP course in Munich and they want to get in badly, but the course costs a fortune and they don't really have a profi of their own yet. With the net bubble burst, they were down for a while, but their numbers are coming back up quite healthily and I do believe they are back in the market to entertain the idea of expanding into SAP once again. It was their agenda several years ago.

Edit: German skills would be basically essential, but if you are a profi, I am sure they would send you to a German course as part of your work.

@Eurovol

Are they looking for SAP developers ? I'm on the lookout for a higher paying job. I've got 7 years SAP experience.

PM me if you could send them my CV ?

Thanks.

which one? you've obviously not been to WDF. if you're talking HBM, then yes, you are correct.

Picking this thread back up, now that I'm considering moving back to the land of the freedom fry, was wondering if anyone has worked for or currently works for SAP and could give me some info. Would be nice to have a job where I still had to use my German skills every so often. Any info (PM ok) appreciated.

This software resides on my computer at work, and I have no idea what it is or does (prolly better that way).