Common Questions

1. What is ERP?

ERP is a package with the techniques and concepts for the integrated management of business as a whole, for effective use of management resources, to improve the efficiency of an enterprise. Initially, ERP was targeted for manufacturing industry mainly for planning and managing core business like production and financial market. As the growth and merits of ERP package ERP software is designed for basic process of a company from manufacturing to small shops with a target of integrating information across the company.

2. Different types of ERP?

SAP, BAAN, JD Edwards, Oracle Financials, Siebel, PeopleSoft. Among all the ERP’s most of the companies implemented or trying to implement SAP because of number of advantages over other ERP packages.

3. What is SAP?

SAP is the name of the company founded in 1972 under the German name (Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing) is the leading ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software package.

4. Why do you usually choose to implement SAP?

There are number of technical reasons numbers of companies are planning to implement SAP. It’s highly configurable, highly secure data handling, minimum data redundancy, maximum data consistency; you can capitalize on economics of sales like purchasing, tight integration-cross function.

5. Can CRM run without a SAP R/3 implementation?

Certainly, you can run CRM without R/3 implementation. You can use pre-defined content in CRM using your non-SAP data. Here you simply need to map the transfer structures associated with CRM data sources to the inbound data files or load data in CRM.

6. What is IDES?

International Demonstration and Education System. A sample application provided for faster learning and implementation.


7. What is SAP R/3?

A third generation set of highly integrated software modules that performs common business function based on multinational leading practice. Takes care of any enterprise however diverse in operation, spread over the world. In R/3 system all the three servers like presentation; application server and database server are located at different system.

8. What are presentation, application and database servers in SAP R/3?

The application layer of an R/3 System is made up of the application servers and the message server. Application programs in an R/3 System are run on application servers. The application servers communicate with the presentation components, the database, and also with each other, using the message server. All the data are stored in a centralized server. This server is called database server.

9. What are datasets?

The sequential files (processed on application server) are called datasets. They are used for file handling in SAP.

10. How can an ERP such as SAP help a business owner learn more about how business operates?

In order to use an ERP system, a business person must understand the business processes and how they work together from one functional area to the other. This knowledge gives us a much deeper understanding of how a business operates. Using SAP as a tool to learn about ERP systems will require that the
people understand the business processes and how they integrate.

11. Define Master data and Transaction data?

Master Data: Master data is data that remains unchanged over a long period of time. It contains information that is always needed in the same way. With master data you are dealing with attributes, texts or hierarchies.
Transaction data: Data relating to the day-to-day transactions is the Transaction data.

12. Name some drawbacks of SAP?

Interfaces are huge problem, Determine where master data resides, Expensive, very complex, demands highly trained staff, lengthy implementation time.

13. What are variables?

Variables are parameters of a query that are set in the parameter query definition and are not filled with values until the queries are inserted into workbooks. There are different types of variables which are used in different application: Characteristics variables, Hierarchies and hierarchy node.

14. What is AWB? What is its purpose?

AWB stands for Administrator Work Bench AWB is a tool for controlling, monitoring and maintaining all the processes connected with data staging and processing in the CRM system.

15. What are the different types of source system?

SAP R/3 Source Systems, SAP BW, Flat Files and External Systems.

16. What is Extractor?

Extractors is a data retrieval mechanisms in the SAP source system. Which can fill the extract structure of a data source with the data from the SAP source system datasets. The extractor may be able to supply data to more fields than exist in the extract structure.