Let's learn SAP

This is a short and sweet blog about SAP. I hope this blog will help readers to get high-level information about SAP including topics such as..

• SAP as a software company.
• It’s flagship ERP products.
• It’s cloud products.
• and most importantly, the SAP areas that have got the most demand.

If you are new to my blog, my name is Aroon and I make videos and write blogs about SAP. I also offer one-on-one SAP career coaching for students and professionals. Please check out the link here, if you are interested.

Now, let’s get into the topic.

Overview of SAP

SAP was founded about 50 years ago in 1972 by 5 former IBM employees.

Fast forward to 2024, it has got more than 110K employees.

More than 440K customers in 180 countries.

Offices in 100 locations around the world and generates a revenue of 31 Billion euros which makes it as the fourth largest software company in the world.

What does SAP do?

SAP is the leader in the ERP market. They offer ERP software and a bunch of other software products which are used by 99% of the worlds fortune 100 companies.

It is remarkable to look at some of the statistics about SAP, like

• 99 of the 100 largest companies in the world are SAP customers
• SAP customers produce 64% of the world’s ice creams
• SAP customers distribute 78% of the world’s food
• 98% of the 100 most valuable brands in the world are SAP customers
• SAP customers produce 77% of the world’s beer
• 86% of Global Fortune 500 companies are SAP customers
• SAP customers make 52% of the world’s movies
• SAP customers produce 70% of the world’s chocolates

And there is so much more, which basically proves the fact that SAP is widely used by so many organisations globally. Especially by the big ones like Apple, Microsoft, Walmart and Google run their day-to-day business operations using SAP.

Before we get into the details of SAP products, let’s see what is an ERP software?

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning. It is one of the most important software an organisation runs to manage their end-to-end business.

Think about the type of activities an organisation need to perform to run their business..

They need to source raw materials, raise invoices, and receipts, manufacture products, ship them, store them, sell those products, pay taxes, manage finance, manage their assets, hire employees, train them, manage them and pay them and so much more.

Imagine a software that can do all of these activities and that is called as an ERP software.

In SAP, these business activities are grouped into functionalities called modules. For example, they are called as finance module, procurement module, logistics module, etc.

Anyway, what you see in the picture represents the evolution of SAP’s ERP software. It started as R/1 in which ‘R’ stands for realtime and 1 stands for single-tier architecture. It has evolved and developed over the years and now the latest ERP software by SAP is called S/4HANA.

S/4HANA has a bunch of cool functionalities and it runs on SAP’s in-memory database called HANA. I have written blogs about both SAP HANA and S/4HANA. Please check them out.

What are the software applications offered by SAP?

SAP offers hundreds of products and it is impossible to list every single one of them but I have listed the most commonly used ones.

S/4HANA is the digital core of SAP’s software applications. It is the hero product that contains the most number of modules and functionalities that are used by most organisations.

The modules covered under S/4HANA include Finance, Sales & Distribution, Asset Management, Manufacturing, Sourcing & Procurement, R&D Engineering, Supply Chain Management and Extended Warehouse Management.

The rest of the software applications are mainly cloud based applications that plugs the gap in terms of functionalities that are not offered in S/4HANA.

For example, SuccessFactors, which is a cloud based employee management application, Ariba which is a cloud based procurement application, then there is Customer Experience Solutions, Integrated Business Planning, Concur, Analytics Cloud, Datasphere and the most important one which is the SAP Business Technology Platform.

SAP Business Technology Platform is becoming popular among SAP customers who use it to develop new software solutions based on an organisation’s requirement and integrate it with S/4HANA or other SAP software products. It offer multiple functionalities like extension suite, integration, document management services and analytics.

Now, let’s take a look at where is the demand?

Looking at the data based on the number of jobs that are advertised every month, currently, four areas are most popular in SAP.

They are

• SAP S/4HANA.
• SAP BTP – Business Technology Platform.
• SAP SuccessFactors.
• SAP Analytics.

Within S/4HANA, the most popular modules are finance, logistics, procurement and asset management.

Within BTP, the most popular functionalities are the extension suite and the cloud platform integration.

Within SuccessFactors, the most popular modules are employee central payroll, recruitment, onboarding and succession planning.

Within the SAP Analytics space, the most popular ones are SAP Analytics Cloud and BW4HANA.

I have written blogs about a lot of these topics. Check them out if you are interested in learning those topics.

Please share this blog with your friends as it can be beneficial for them.

If you have any questions, please post them in the comments and I will respond.