Understanding SAP Offerings

This is the first piece of a Crescense series on Understanding SAP Offerings for the life sciences, retail, and consumer products industries.

As an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, SAP’s most basic function is to assist businesses with various daily processes in one integrated system. Much of its appeal resides in the customizability by industry, subindustry, and specific company tasks.  

With 92% of the Fortune Global 2000 Companies list utilizing SAP and 77% of global transaction revenue coming into contact with it, it’s clearly omnipresent in industry. This widespread application means that the true capabilities of the software surpass what most companies need. Consequently, understanding SAP can be a challenge. 

AN OVERVIEW OF SAP 

To begin to understand SAP, we must start with the broadest lens. There are different SAP core offerings, or architectures, which provide the foundation for what the software can do. These include SAP ECC (which is synonymous with SAP ERP), HANA, and S/4 HANA, and each has their own capabilities. A simple way to view them may be as successive software updates similar to how a phone upgrades with iOS 14, 15, and 16. 

SAP ECC or ERP is the longest standing SAP architecture. Its primary distinction from other SAP offerings is that it functions on a third-party database. SAP HANA was a more recent addition to the architecture lineup. In contrast to ECC, it itself is an in-memory database which is typically paired with S/4 HANA to help run business applications much faster than ECC. While HANA can be used to run business applications by itself to limit disruption during migration to S/4 HANA, it’s typically a transitive platform.  

S/4 HANA is the most recent architecture. It’s essentially an overhauled version of ECC that runs on HANA or the HANA Cloud Platform, which stores data virtually. This means that businesses utilizing S/4 HANA can expect fewer technical issues, speedier run times, and a host of new features. SAP S/4 HANA can also be displayed on a new web-based interface called Fiori. 

Now that we understand these, we can become more specific when saying that architectures run business applications. SAP offers a Business Suite composed of various modular applications that perform different business processes. For example, there are modules for financial accounting, manufacturing, procurement, sales, human resources, marketing, and plenty more. It’s important to understand that each architecture may not possess each module, especially for legacy systems like ECC.  

SAP modules can become more manageable by being divided into submodules. For example, the Financial Accounting module (FI) can be subdivided into General Ledger, Accounts Receivable and Payable, Travel Management, and so on. Companies can pick and choose what is important for them and thus manage end-to-end business processes all in one place. 

To learn more about various SAP offerings, contact us today.