Week 4 Discussion Comments:

Overall, you did a good job of teaching the class this week. My thoughts of each of your teaching points are shown in the paragraphs below. You all listed benefits that were stated by SAP. Please remember that these benefits can only be achieved with the planning, management, user involvement, and executive involvement that you are learning about in this course.

Gaurav provided us with an overview of SAP Manufacturing including two examples. It is always good to study examples of other users of the software -- even those provided by the vendor.

Ann provided an explanation of SAP Project Management and the advantages of integrating Project Management with other data in the business such as Cost Centers. One of SAP's main strengths is a large (and complex) central database that all components use. The PDF she found for us provides a good overview. The availability of information such as this is one of the reasons this course did not use a textbook.

Clarence provided an overview of SAP General Ledger. General Ledger can gather information from other SAP Components so it is not necessary to dig through reports and prepare voluminous journal entries. Ann tied together the information provided by Gaurav and Clarence to show us the importance SAP's database.

Jose Dennis Monteverde introduced us to SAP Netweaver. Entire books have been written on how to use SAP Netweaver and if you are going to work with SAP you would want to study SAP Netweaver carefully. Howard Madison has experience with a portion of this product.SAP NetWeaver has integrated version control. Whenever you do development with multiple team members and many objects (programs, tables, business processes,....), it is important to be able to see an audit trail of changes made to any object and to be able to automatically drop back to prior states. It is impressive that these capabilities are present in the Netweaver Development Infrastructure.

Vasanth Reddy Guda introduced us to SAP Financials. This reminds us that SAP goes well beyond its original base of manufacturing and can be used by non-manufacturing businesses.

Arun Kumar Pattipaka introduced us to Production Planning. He mentioned various ways of planning and managing production including Kanban and Repetitive Manufacturing. This shows that knowledge of manufacturing processes are required to plan and configure the software. That is why we need both industry and SAP experts when building a project team to install SAP.

Nihar Sunny Bheemanathi gave a description of the Supply Chain Management component. He pointed out that SAP claims 35 years of industry expertise and, in my view, this is just another reason why you would not want to develop SCM software on your own.

Howard Madison provided us with a presentation of SAP Human Resources. Slide 4 of the presentation gives a good picture showing that Human Resources is much broader than just Payroll.