Database Reference
In-Depth Information
that are discrete or continuous in nature, or both. Similarly, a company can also have operations
in service industries like banking and financial services. Such organizations (and many such enter-
prises exist now) need a uniform enterprise-wide system that can span customer-related functions
across all such disparate business activities and help in controlling and managing them on a day-to-
day basis. It's understandable that organizations that have interests in heterogeneous business activi-
ties across different regions of the world can be handicapped when managing day-to-day operations
if different, incompatible, and nonintegrated systems are functioning at all these locations.
5.2.5.1 Application Components
SAP's standard application components address functionality that is commonly used across a broad
spectrum of industries. They are mainly divided into three major groups: Sales, Marketing, and
Service. SAP Sales consists of standard components like Opportunity Management and Pipeline
Management, Account Management, Contact Management, Activity Management, and Quotas
and Incentives. SAP Marketing consists of major components like Marketing Analysis, Customer
Management, Marketing Communications, Content Management and Literature Material, and
Database Marketing. SAP Services consist of components like Service Request Management, Self-
Service, Account Management, Activity Tracking, Service Calendar, and Customer Feedback
System and Satisfaction Survey.
We will be discussing more details of these modules in Chapter 8 “SAP CRM Enterprise
Applications”.
5.2.5.2 Industry-Specific Applications (IAs)
Almost every industry has characteristic requirements that are specific to companies operating
in that industry. Each industry has different needs—different competitive challenges, customer
requirements, business processes, and so on. SAP provides a wide array of industry-specific verti-
cal solutions that address such unique requirements through industry applications (IAs) that are
complementary to the base solution. SAP Systems have invested extensively in developing these
industry-specific applications with deep out-of-the-box functionality and embed the industry best
practices for customer-facing processes such as sales, marketing, and customer service (Table 5.2).
5.2.6 Lowest Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
SAP enables rapid implementation and customization to unique business requirements; provides
for fast application upgrades; provides upwardly compatible enterprise application interfaces;
allows for automatic software distribution to mobile, handheld, connected, and thin client users;
and is easy to administer and support.
SAP is built on a scalable Web architecture that prepackages several important core technolo-
gies critical to E-Business deployments. These include a full-featured rule-based personalization
engine, a content management platform, a business rule, or workflow engine, among others. The
N-tier architecture increases portability and allows business objects and logic to be built in a mod-
ular fashion. This allows for business logic to be shared among multiple applications and multiple
client devices, including connected and offline browser clients, personal digital assistants (PDAs),
phones that are enabled with Web Application Protocol (WAP), and voice.
SAP allows organizations to leverage industry best practices embedded in the software while
enabling them to easily make modifications and provide business edge. The prebuilt features and
