Question { Satyam, 23432 }

what is the difference between SAP AND ASAP

Answer

- SAP is the name of organization which stands for System Application Products in Data Processing
- ASAP is the methodology suggested by SAP in order to implement SAP in any organization. It provides a road map which any Organization must follow in order to implement SAP: Initialization, Blue Print, Realization, Go Live Check, Support.

Question { 14300 }

What is ERP?

Answer

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource and Planning. It is a complete solution package for any business.
Why ERP?
Typically a business deals with external entities such as Customers, Vendors, Banks and internal entities such as Employees, Assets, etc. Now Suppose I have one Car Company which is product and service based. This company can have multiple departments such as Sales Dept to deal with customers, Material Mgmt Dept for procurement, PP Dept for Production, HR Dept. for Employee Mgmt, etc.
Now when I am not using any ERP software to manage my company then I must be using different software/tools to manage work. For example SD dept. using software Freshsales with its own database and MM dept. using Zoho Inventory with its own database and so other depts. In this case you can sense the gap, the whole business is decentralized. Now If Customers are calling to Sales Dept. for multiple orders then Sales team reach out to MM team to know the status of procured materials, Production Planning Team to know time period for production of the same order. Now if Production team finds out that they have lack of resource in order to full fill the order on time so now HR comes into picture to hire resources. And in this way the whole business become chaos. In order to maintain the data consistency between different software of different depts. integration is implemented among these software/tools. Now this integration has its own associated cost which again results increase in cost of ownership for products. Now company (business) not just paying vendor for product maintenance but also need to hire integration experts who can maintain the integrations between all products being used. And if any one product is being changed(upgraded/migrated) then again it may require integration settings to be changed. In this way company's cost to ownership increases to very high level.
Now assume what if I could get all applications/tools required to run my business in one package only.. This will be great relief because of the same company the applications will be tightly coupled, centralized using only one database, Less or no integration required, etc. So this package is known as ERP package.
SAP is the leading company in ERP market because its solution ERP 6.0 for any business. The benefit of SAP ERP is that it support almost every OS(Windows Server, Unix,Linux, IBM P Series,etc), DB(Oracle, DB2, Sybase, MS SQL Server, HANA, etc), almost all languages(564), multiple modules which can be activated based on requirement, tight coupling between modules, etc..
Thus SAP is still very successful and stable in ERP market..:)