SAP Solutions 101: Your Guide to Success

7 Essential Solutions You Need to Know to build your SAP career

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Too long to read?

• Who & what is exactly SAP?

• How many SAP solutions or products exist?

• How are SAP solutions classified in the business world?

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When you ask somebody what or who is SAP? you end up with all possible kinds of answers. And all of them might be right:

• SAP is a company

• SAP is a brand

• SAP is an ERP

• SAP is a software editor

• SAP is management software etc.

It might be confusing especially if you have never been to the SAP world. And this is why I decided to demystify this topic so you won't get confused anymore:

Before you decide to start an SAP career, you need to know who/what is SAP and what are the SAP solutions out there:

Who/What is SAP?

SAP (System Analysis Program Development - translated from German) is one of the world’s leading producers of software for the management of business processes, developing solutions that facilitate effective data processing and information flow across organisations.

I invite you to visit the official website of SAP to know more about SAP such as its history, SAP’s mission, what is an ERP etc.

How many SAP Products/Solutions exist?

If you go to the official SAP list of products, you will find 267 items 😱

Yes it's huge, especially for a student, fresh graduate or someone who wants to switch to a SAP career. So to make it simple I chose to classify the SAP solutions using the burger. It might not be the latest representation of SAP solutions but for a beginner I find it's a good way to get started:

SAP Portfolio of solutions represented by a burger

Starting from the TOP of the burger:

Business Network:

SAP has solutions to connect companies to the world. Such as connecting them to their suppliers through SAP Ariba which is the largest B2B platform, connecting their assets using IoT (Internet of Things), connecting them with their logistics partners etc.

I invite you to explore this link to discover all the SAP Business network solutions and how they can help companies to connect to the world. We also speak about ISBN: Intelligent Spend and Business Network. This can include SAP Concur which is a solution to manage employees expense claims in an intelligent way.

Customer Experience:

SAP has a portfolio of solutions to help companies deliver the best experience to their customers/consumers to increase loyalty and reduce churn. Think about CRM (Customer Relationship Management), E-commerce, customer service and marketing solutions. You can explore this link to understand the whole SAP CX (Customer Experience) portfolio of solutions.

Business Process:

If you hear people speaking about Business Process Transformation, don't be surprised or confused 😅

In the current economy every company needs to inspect their business processes, understand what's wrong/right, benchmark with industry best practices then take action to stay competitive. SAP SIGNAVIO is the suite of solutions that SAP offers to their customers to help them achieve the right business process transformation to enhance their consumers and employees journey.

The Intelligent Suite(s):

A suite of what? a suite of modules or functionalities 😬 So this is what most of non-SAP people use to know about SAP. In other words it is related to ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). An ERP is a software that helps companies manage their business. An Intelligent ERP is an ERP that allows a company to deliver the best experience tho its customer, making its employees independent so they can focus on what really matters. An Intelligent Enterprise is a company that can achieve more (business, revenue, customers) with less (resources, money, time).

SAP S/4HANA Cloud is SAP's flagship ERP. However there are other ERPs for small and mid sized companies such as Business ByDesign and Business One that you can discover here.

Note that in 2022 SAP created an offering called RISE With SAP which consists on offering to their customers one of its intelligent ERP suites (SAP S/4HANA) combined with a set of free services and solutions.

Industry Cloud Solutions:

SAP covers many business areas and industries but nobody in the world can cover everthing by themself. That's why SAP relies a lot on its channel partners. Partners are SAP's extended arm. They are the closest to its customers so they know what the customer wants and how to overcome their pain points. SAP Industry Cloud is the portfolio of solutions that SAP partners have developed in the cloud using SAP Business Technology Platform (see below section) and that SAP has certified and included in the SAP products roadmap. Customers can find SAP Industry Cloud solutions easily in SAP Store.

Business Technology Platform:

Yeah SAP is not selling management software only. It has a cloud platform that developers can use to extend SAP solutions, integrate them or develop their own apps on it. Think about Eclipse in the old days or AWS now 😎 It gives SAP partners and customers the power to innovate quickly (automation, machine learning, blockchain...) and scale their business by selling their own IP (Intellectual Property) worldwide. Discover SAP Business technology Platform (BTP) here.

SAP recently added to this no-code/low-code solutions (develop web or mobile apps without typing a single line of code, or very few lines) and RPA: robotic process automation (to automate business workflows by connecting events, objects, databases etc. So these solutions are under the umbrella of “SAP Build” wich is part of the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Sustainability:

You don’t know what ESG stands for? No worries, me neither 🙈

ESG = Environmental, Societal & Governance. These are the 3 criteria of a company’s extra-financial analysis. In addition to the classical financial analysis, nowadays Investors attach more importance to the #ESG indicators. These englobe things like carbon emissions, waste management, employees rights and so on. Customers, suppliers and employees are getting into it as well. Gen Z cares more about sustainable buying decisions than brand names 😲

SAP has best of breed solutions to support its customers in maintaining their #sustainability KPIs. You can have a look here for SAP sustainable business solutions and services.

These solutions are branded as “SAP Cloud for Sustainable Enterprises” where we can find: “SAP Responsible Design and Production”, “SAP Product Footprint Management”, “SAP Sustainability Control Tower” etc.

I think with this (plus the previous editions), you know already enough about SAP and you can already speak about it during a job interview 😎

That’s all for today ❤️.