Introduction

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SAP R/3 is an integrated business system designed to help organizations run such business processes as managing inventory, creating requisitions, processing sales orders, paying invoices, and so on. SAP R/3 covers a wide spectrum of business processes.

In the past, computer systems were specified and brought into organizations by each individual department: Human Resources chose its own system, Materials Management chose its system, Accounting chose its system, and so on. Although each system may have been the best choice for a particular department, keeping them working together was very expensive. This kind of complex patchwork system inhibited change in organizations ”and we all know what happens to organizations that can't change quickly.

SAP R/3 provides a single integrated system to handle the needs of all departments in a corporation. This integration is the single biggest advantage to moving to SAP R/3. Its client/server architecture increases SAP R/3's versatility.

Plain English

Client/Server

In client/server computing, part of the processing runs on your desktop PC (the client), and part runs on central shared computers (servers). The presentation and preprocessing is done on your PC; the information is stored on servers.

SAP R/3 consists of a series of application areas. Figure I.1 shows those areas and how they interconnect.

Figure I.1. The SAP R/3 system components .

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