About SAP

About SAP
SAP AG (ISIN: DE0007164600, FWB:SAP, NYSE: SAP) is the largest European software enterprise and the third largest in the world, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany.

History
SAP was founded in 1972 as Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung by five former IBM engineers in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg (Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Plattner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther). The acronym was later changed to stand for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung ("Systems, Applications and Products in Data Processing").
In 1976 "SAP GmbH" was founded and the following year it moved headquarters to Walldorf. SAP AG became the company's official name after the 2005 annual general meeting (AG is short for Aktiengesellschaft).
In August 1988, SAP GmbH transferred into SAP AG (a corporation by German law), and public trading started November 4. Shares are listed on the Frankfurt and Stuttgart stock exchange. The founding members Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Klaus E. Tschira and Hans-Werner Hector form the executive board. In 1995, SAP was included in the German stock index DAX. On September 22, 2003, SAP was included in the Dow Jones STOXX 50. In 1991, Prof. Dr. Henning Kagermann joined the board; Dr. Peter Zencke became a board member in 1993. Claus Heinrich, and Gerhard Oswald have been members of the SAP Executive Board since 1996. Two years later, in 1998 the first change at the helm takes place. Dietmar Hopp and Klaus Tschira move to the supervisory board, Dietmar Hopp is appointed Chairman of the supervisory board. Henning Kagermann is appointed as Co-Chairman and CEO of SAP next to Hasso Plattner. Werner Brandt joined SAP in 2001 as member of the SAP Executive Board and Chief Financial Officer since 2001. Léo Apotheker has
been a member of the SAP Executive Board and president of Global Customer Solutions & Operations since 2002, was appointed Deputy CEO in 2007, then became co-CEO alongside Kagermann in 2008.
Henning Kagermann became the sole CEO of SAP in 2003. In February 2007 his contract was extended until 2009. After continuous disputes over the responsibility of the development organization, Shai Agassi, a member of the executive board who had been named as a potential successor to Kagermann, left the organization.

Business and markets
SAP is the world's largest business software company and the third-largest independent software provider in terms of revenues. It operates in three geographic regions – EMEA, which represents Europe, Middle East and Africa; the Americas (SAP America, headquartered in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania), which represents both North America and Latin America; and Asia Pacific Japan (APJ), which represents Japan, Australia and parts of Asia. In addition, SAP operates a network of 115 subsidiaries, and has R&D facilities around the globe in Germany, North America, Canada, China, Hungary, India, Israel and Bulgaria.
SAP focuses on six industry sectors: process industries, discrete industries, consumer industries, service industries, financial services, and public services. It offers more than 25 industry solution portfolios for large enterprises and more than 550 micro-vertical solutions for midsize companies and small businesses.

Products
SAP's products focus on Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), which it helped to pioneer. The company's main product is SAP ERP. The name of its predecessor SAP R/3 hints at its functionality: the "R" stands for realtime (even though it is not a realtime solution), the number 3 relates to a 3-tier architecture: database, application server and client (SAPgui). R/2, which ran on a Mainframe architecture, was the first SAP version.
SAP ERP is one of five major enterprise applications in SAP's Business Suite. The other four applications are:
* customer relationship management (CRM) - helps companies acquire and retain customers, gain deep marketing and customer insight, and align organization on customer-focused strategies
* product lifecycle management (PLM) - helps manufacturers with a single source of all product-related information necessary for collaborating with business partners and supporting product lines
* supply chain management (SCM) - helps companies enhance operational flexibility across global enterprises and provide real-time visibility for customers and suppliers
* supplier relationship management (SRM) - customers can collaborate closely with suppliers and integrate sourcing processes with applications throughout the enterprise to enhance transparency and lower costs
Other major product offerings include: the NetWeaver platform, Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) solutions, Duet (joint offering with Microsoft), Performance Management solutions and RFID. SAP offers a systematic approach to enterprise SOA, which is the technical standard that enables various enterprise software applications to exchange data effectively. Through enterprise SOA, SAP is focusing on enabling more flexible business processes as well as creating technical connections between IT systems and building a common language for business.
While its original products were typically used by Fortune 500 companies, SAP is now also actively targeting small and medium sized enterprises (SME) with its SAP Business One and SAP Business All-in-One. On September 19th, 2007 SAP announced a new product named SAP Business ByDesign complementing its portfolio for SME. SAP Business ByDesign was known under the code name "A1S" before.
SAP officials say there are over 100,600 SAP installations serving more than 41,200 companies in more than 25 industries in more than 120 countries.

List of SAP Products
Enterprise Applications
* SAP
o Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
o Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
o Product Lifecycle Management (PLM)
o Supply Chain Management (SCM)
o Supplier Relationship Management (SRM)

Business Solutions
* SAP Advanced Planner and Optimizer (APO)
* SAP Analytics
* SAP Apparel and Footwear Solution (AFS)
* SAP Business Information Warehouse (BW)
* SAP Business Intelligence (BI)
* SAP Catalog Content Management (CCM)
* SAP Enterprise Buyer Professional (EBP)
* SAP Enterprise Learning
* SAP Portal (EP)
* SAP Exchange Infrastructure (XI)
* SAP Financial and Controlling (FICO)
* Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC)
* SAP Human Resource Management Systems (HRMS)
* SAP Internet Transaction Server (ITS)
* SAP Knowledge Warehouse (KW)
* SAP Manufacturing
* SAP Master Data Management (MDM)
* SAP Materials Management (MM)
* SAP Plant Maintenance (PM)
* SAP Production Planning (PP)
* SAP Sales and Distribution (SD)
* SAP Service and Asset Management
* SAP Solutions for mobile business
* SAP Solution Composer
* SAP Solution Manager
* SAP Strategic Enterprise Management (SEM)
* SAP Test Data Migration Server (TDMS)
* SAP Training and Event Management (TEM)
* SAP NetWeaver Application Server (Web AS)
* SAP xApps
* SAP Quality Maintenance (QM)

Solutions for Small and Midsize Enterprises
* SAP Business One (6.2, 6.5, 2004, 2005, 7.x)
* SAP Business ByDesign[1]]
* SAP Business All-in-One

Platforms and frameworks
* SAP Enterprise Services Architecture
* SAP NetWeaver Platform
o SAP NetWeaver Portal (formerly SAP Enterprise Portal)
o SAP NetWeaver Business Intelligence
o SAP NetWeaver Visual Composer
o SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure
o SAP Composite Application Framework
o SAP Netweaver Development Infrastructure
* SAP Business Connector (deprecated/removed from product range)

Legacy Platforms
* SAP R/3
* SAP R/2

Others
* SAP CCMS, monitoring program
* SAPgui
* eCATT
* SAP Central Process Scheduling, process automation and job scheduler


New Product Development and Introduction:
Innovating for Profitable Growth
Driven by consumer demand and fueled by technology advances, many companies must bring more products to market faster – if they hope to remain competitive and sustain profitable growth. That's why new product development and introduction (NPDI) may be your most important business process.
SAP delivers a comprehensive set of solutions for managing your end-to-end NPDI processes – from identification of market opportunity to successful product launch. With SAP solutions, you can address these key process areas:
* NPDI process visibility – An NPDI dashboard lets you easily monitor and control your overall product portfolio and pipeline, as well as NPDI-related key performance indicators.
* Portfolio strategy – Portfolio management capabilities help you make the right go/kill decisions and prioritize your use of resources.
* Product management – Project, cost, and resource management capabilities improve the management of the entire product development and introduction process.
* Functional execution – A broad range of capabilities support functional-level tasks such as initial ideas capture, product development, strategic sourcing, supply chain planning, prototyping, production ramp-up, and market launch. Plus, you get capabilities for managing product-related data, including quality engineering and change and configuration management.

Cross-Industry and Industry-Specific Functionality
SAP enables NPDI through a broad range of proven solutions, including:
* SAP Customer Relationship Management
* SAP Product Lifecycle Management
* SAP Supplier Relationship Management
* SAP Supply Chain Management
* SAP Product Definition
* SAP Resource and Portfolio Management

SAP solutions address the NPDI needs of key industry segments, including:
* Apparel and Footwear
* Automotive OEMs
* Automotive Suppliers
* Beverage
* Chemicals
* Consumer Durables
* Food
* High-Tech OEMs
* Home and Personal Care
* Industrial Machinery & Components
* Semiconductor Manufacturers

Processes

Strategic Portfolio Management
The primary challenge of strategic portfolio management is to provide a comprehensive up-to-date view of a company’s entire project portfolio and answer several important questions. Is the portfolio aligned with corporate goals? What is the future demand for resources and what is the capacity? Are the most skilled employees working on the most appropriate projects? Will the portfolio meet its business performance targets? What are the risks and impact of a delay? Timely answers to these questions are critical in determining which projects to pursue and which ones to fix or cancel. Project registration and enforcing an enterprise-wide decision making process for approving projects is an additional critical area in strategic portfolio management. Strategic portfolio management combines and gives visibility into the financial, strategic and operative aspects across your entire project portfolio to enforce governance, to make fact-based decisions and to maximize return on existing assets.

Idea and Concept Management
SAP xPD addresses the hurdles and inefficiencies at the critical front-end of product development processes: idea management and concept development. This solution enables organizations to capitalize on every possible good idea for new products or services, study their market potential and technical constraints, evaluate if and how to efficiently produce them and then come up with a short list of promising product concepts that match a company’s strategy.

Source of Supply Management
You can use this business process to process all your requirements and optimize your source of supply for each individual item. You can identify saving opportunities and evaluate suppliers in their ability to provide materials and services at low cost, high quality, and according to schedule.
Once you have determined the best source of supply for your requirements, you can collaborate in project teams both internally and with your suppliers, and establish on-going relationships based, for example, on contracts and global outline agreements.