Discover SAP by Nancy Muir and Ian Kimbell - book review
Book: Discover SAP.
Published by SAP Press. First edition 2008. ISBN 978-1-59229-117-5, 425pp.
Writers Nancy Muir (professional author) and Ian Kimbell (Vice President mySAP ERP Strategy at SAP AG) have done a terrific job explaining SAP. The meat is in 350 pages in clear language without fluff and easy to read.
It’s not getting you bogged down into technical details. Instead it gives you an impression of how to place SAP AG’s products in the business environment, what SAP’s product strategy is, which products there are and for which type of business.
In my opinion it is a must-read for anyone who wants to have an overview of SAP AG’s products and the solutions in place to implement SAP’s products in virtually any business in a smooth way. Whether you’re planning for a SAP career, or are responsible for business process automation in your company.
Content
Part I
Shows the historical evolution of SAP’s products and approach to “enterprise computing” in the past. It’s amazing to see how they handled the complexity of diverse business systems. And how they now have understandable concepts such as “Solution Maps”, “Services”, “Portals”, “Roles”and “Enterprise Service Oriented Architectures”, built up from 35 years of experience with business automation.
Part II
Explains the current solutions for large companies as well as solutions for SME’s (small and midsize enterprises) . SAP has most of the Fortune 500 (large) companies as a customer with their Business Suite (SAP ERP, SAP CRM, SAP PLM, SAP SCM, SAP SRM, SAP xApps), but also tens of thousands of implementations at SME’s with SAP Business One and SAP Business All-in-One. All these solutons are explained at an overview level as well as the “new kid on the block” SAP Business by Design, which is a web-based, hosted solution with interesting approaches like try-before-you-buy. It becomes clear that SAP AG is not only for large companies and has a lot in place also for companies starting from 10 employees, with short (months) implementation time.
In this chapter (and throughout the book) there are real-life examples of how companies are improving their business with the SAP solutions described. These case studies don’t go into detail, just give you some practical examples to get the feeling.
For getting a solid overview the first two chapters are important. What I’m missing a little bit is how the “old terminology” applies to the “new terminology”. There is a glossary in the book but how would a novice know what ABAP is for example, or what the relationship is between ECC 6.0 or R/3 and SAP ERP.
Part III, IV: Essential SAP Tools, Technology Overview
Goes more into detail. Although it’s spread out over several chapters, essentially topics are covered such as:
- Which concepts are there for users: work centers, roles, self-service, collaboration
- What are the concepts for underlying technology: SAP Netweaver and it’s components such as SAP Netweaver Business Intelligence, SAP Netweaver Application Server and more
- SAP Tools: What are SAP xApps and Composite Applications. Which solutions are available for developers such as SAP Composite Applications Framework, SAP Netweaver Development Studio, etc.
There is also information about implementation and preparing for implementation. How can you get help from the SAP organization (including SAP’s certified partners) during the phases of planning, building and running. SAP AG has worked out a plethora of standard methods and approaches such as ASAP methodology, Enterprise SOA Adoption Plan etc. SAP AG’s engagement goes further in the areas of execution, expert guidance, quality management, operations support, technical implementation and much more.
Part V The Solution in Place
Briefly describes considerations for preparing for a SAP implemenation. And then describes the SAP Solution Manager for once you are in the implementation phase and thereafter. Managing your application is crucial and the SAP Solution Manager offers tools for application/technology/maintenance management as well as content (methodologies, roadmaps, services) and a gateway to SAP (SAP Development, downloads form the Service Marketplace, etc). The SAP Solution manager also offers “Best Practices” which are a sort of prototype solutions for SAP’s customers to hit the ground running. This kind of terminolgy is explained in the glossary (Appendix A).
A set of links and resources is given in Appendix B, and Appendix C is 30 pages of “Solution Maps”, which show relationships between SAP software applications and the topics which apply to them. It’s a sort of “mind map” in tabular form.
Where to order
You can get this book at SAP Press or at Amazon . It’s currently about $35 which is cheap for what you’re getting. There are localized versions of these two websites which might save you some shipping costs.
Conclusion
In my opinion this book is value for money if you want to get an overview of SAP AG’s products, their product strategies, how they approach implementation, how to place into context many of the buzzwords in the SAP industry. Obviously it can’t cover everything. It is not for techies who want to go in depth. Alternatively, SAP AG has a lot of online material about SAP available for free (see the page about the “Guide to Free SAP Material” on www.erp-training.info ) . I really appreciate finding highlights of the “information jungle” around SAP described together in a single book.
