Here is a course listing:

SAP NetWeaver®:

• SAP Solution Manager
• SAP NetWeaver XI Bootcamp
• SAP ERP Upgrade
• Archiving your SAP Data
• Financial Reporting with SAP
• SAP HR Reporting
• The Best of SAP NetWeaver BI Reporting
• SAP Executive Reporting and Performance Management
• SAP NetWeaver Portal
• The Best of SAP NetWeaver Portal
• SAP Sales and Inventory Reporting
• SAP NetWeaver BI Integrated Planning
• SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM)
• Data Modeling and ETL
• SAP NetWeaver Security and User Administration
• Service-Oriented Architecture Strategies for SAP Solutions
• SAP NetWeaver BI Update and Upgrade Seminar
• BW Reporting

SAP® Business Suite:
Supply Chain Management:

• SAP Sales and Inventory Reporting
• APO Decisions and Strategies
• Warehouse and Inventory Management
• SEM Bootcamp
• APO Bootcamp
• SAP Supply Chain Planning

Financials:

• The Best of SAP NetWeaver BI Reporting
• Financial Reporting with SAP
• SAP Financial Accounting (FI)
• The New SAP General Ledger (G/L)
• SAP Managerial Accounting (CO)
• SAP NetWeaver BI Integrated Planning
• Consolidations and Time to Close
• The Best of SAP R/3 Reporting
• R/3 Reporting
• BW Reporting

HR:

• SAP HR Reporting
• SAP Employee Self-Service and SAP Manager Self-Service Solutions
• SAP Compensation and Talent Management
• SAP HR Time Management and Payroll

IT Management:

• SAP Solution Manager
• SAP ERP Upgrade
• Financial Reporting with SAP
• SAP Executive Reporting and Performance Management
• Service-Oriented Architecture Strategies for SAP Solutions
• SAP NetWeaver Master Data Management (MDM)

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The video shows Datango’s Performance Suite, very easy to use software with which you can create interactive simulations, documentation and support material to support users learning their SAP environment.

There are other software solutions we’ve used to create online SAP help and other training material for SAP end users such as RWD’s uPerform (also known als SPP - SAP Productivity Pak), Global Knowledge’s OnDemand and Assima, but Datango’s product is something to keep a close eye on.

We saw a demo during one of the SAP User Group meetings. What struck us the most is Datango’s way of storing recorded data in a database. After recording simulations, data can be manipulated to create plant/country specific data variants. These data variants are used as input for automatically generated new simulations in SAP, only this time the result is customized for those other plants/countries. This enables getting out online help/training material in other languages with very little effort compared to the traditional alternatives. As you probably know localized help/training material is quite often required when a company starts rolling out SAP to their foreign branches. Translating would be a tough job for translation companies because of the SAP terminology.

With their powerful suite, Datango currently is breaking into the US and wider international market at record speed, helping companies to quickly and smoothly launch and operate new enterprise applications worldwide. The past fiscal year they had a growth rate of more than 100%

What is your experience with this type of products? Just leave a comment and share with our website visitors.

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Published by Authorhouse. First edition 2005. ISBN 1-4208-7387-3 (sc), 242 pages.

Author Stephen Birchall is a SAP expert. He has more than 25 years of experience with designing and implementing integrated business system solutions, and experience with using SAP for the last 15 years. His focus is on SAP Logistics.

The book does not go into technical details and is easy to read. It gives an insight in what’s involved with introducing a SAP solution into a business, based on Stephen Birchall’s vast experience in the field. Stephen Birchall is known for his common sense and radical methods resulting in simple solutions.

From SAP user training viewpoint this book is interesting because it places training in the context of a SAP implementation and also here some radical approaches are discussed.

Intended audience is anyone wondering “where to start” and what to watch out for. Management, and also a broader audience like project team members, persons contemplating a SAP career, and anyone wanting to learn more about how to avoid pitfalls when getting involved with SAP.

Content

The first 6 sections (41 pages) discuss what SAP is about:

• An overview of SAP R/3
• Is SAP the ideal system for your business?
• Has SAP R/3 changed the way that systems are implemented?
• Is SAP the best system available?
• Why the “horror stories”?
• Is SAP suitable for the small to medium size business?

These questions are answered in general. Explained is how robust the SAP system is with complex integration of its many modules. And that there are several right and wrong ways to implement it. Obviously the wrong implementations leading to the “horror stories”. Birchall describes numerous practical examples, and what are the right approaches to the proven thousands of successful SAP implementations. SAP for small to medium size business is very briefly discussed. In the meantime (2008) SAP has much more solutions for this area.

The next 6 sections (91 pages) focus on how to get it right with new or more SAP systems.

• How to get it right
• A new SAP implementation? Some points to consider
• Existing implementations
• What if the implementation of SAP was seen as a disaster, what are the options?
• How to get more from an existing SAP implementation
• The Competency Centre

Practical topics are covered like what’s important when changing automation systems and business organizations, which people to use and project team structure, role of people within the business, big-bang or phased implementation, what to do with old (legacy systems), offshore or not, to which extent modify/use ABAP , training approach, how much documentation, support structures during and after go-live

The last 5 sections (108 pages) are actually separate topics

• Is SAP right for you?
  What are the benefits of a SAP solution for the CEO, the finance director, the IS director, senior business managers. What’s important if you are a SAP project/implementation manager

• SAP training
  Examples and pitfalls of several training approaches

• Recruitment
  What to watch out for when getting SAP experts through agencies. Use undependent consultants or not?

• The SAP certification, is it important?
  Throughout the book hints are given for people wanting to work as a SAP professional. This chapter discusses certification exams and how it works.

• Common issues and areas of confusion
  This is more technical than the previous sections. It covers mapping the organisation structure to SAP concepts as Clients, Company Codes, Plants and Storage locations, etc.
  It further explains terms and concepts in Birchall’s SAP Logistics area of expertise: Material Master management and control/catalogue approaches, functional design topics with invoice verification, MRP - Material Requirements Planning, MRP II, inter-company transfers, and finally a brief description of some of SAP R/3’s major modules: FI, CO, SD, MM, PM.

Where to order
You can get this book at Amazon for $17.50 new, or used in the range of $11. You might want to check out your local Amazon store to save shipping costs

Conclusion
Although this book is from 2005 and SAP has continued moving forward conquering the market, many of the potential pitfalls described are still valid. Concepts like SAP Netweaver, SAP Enterprise SOA, SAP Business by Design etc, are not mentioned but that’s not the point. And don’t expect all ins and outs of a successful SAP implementation in 242 pages - it is already an achievement to convey so much useful information in such a short space. It is perhaps even more important to have the approach right when introducing or expanding SAP solutions in a business. And that’s exactly where Stephen Birchall offers no-nonsense advice from his decades of practical experience. If you’re involved with implementing or expanding SAP in your organisation, this book is worth it’s price many times over.

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Enterprise Service-Oriented Architecture is SAP’s blueprint for implementing an architecture based on ’services’ as building blocks for business processes. You can download Goran’s document from SAP’s Developer Network (SDN), search for “Enterprise SOA Glossary”.

The “Guide to Free SAP Study Material” has a link to SAP’s Developer Network (SDN).

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To download the guide, go to  Guide to Free SAP Material page 

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There are at least 15 companies in India alone on SAP’s own  list of SAP Education Partners, but apparently that is not what Mr. Barlas means. His view is that newbees trying to get into the SAP market are trained by unqualified third parties,  leading to unsufficient skills of the people starting a career as a SAP professional. “When SAP skills get diluted, projects fail”.

In that line of thinking, the education of SAP trainers (training the end users in a company how to use SAP) is equally important.  SAP has a whole new certification model for consultants, motivated by the need to not only be knowledgable about the software but also about the business processes.  But there is no specific education for SAP trainers i.e. a qualification as certified SAP trainer.

SAP trainers, who have contact with most of the first users of a new SAP system, can have a great impact on the success or failure of a SAP implementation. They need to have a thorough understanding of how all the business processes and SAP tie together just like certified SAP consultants. And they also have to have the skills to overcome the inevitable objections users have when confronted with changes in an organisation. The risks of letting a junior consultant or an inexperienced person (or an offshore remote trainer by the way) train the SAP end users in our opinion are underestimated.

With SAP’s training business revenue in 2007 exceeding 400 million euros (that’s over  $600,000,000) and a growth of +7% compared to the previous year we can be certain to hear more about this.

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Several websites exist offering IDES, obviously you have to make sure you’re not getting an illegal version.

SearchSAP.com in their blog “Practice SAP skills online” recently posted about SID. This is a service for online access to SAP aimed at SAP consultants and IT professionals. For a yearly fee you can access SAP ECC6.0 via a SAP GUI (SAP’s graphical user interface) or a web browser. You can make your own configuration and data changes in your own client (=environment) , unlike the ‘evaluation’ or ‘IDES’ clients. The site is at www.sidmembers.com

According to Paul Helbrough of SID Members they are the only such service to offer fully legally licensed SAP software.

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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.

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