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Lesson 23. SAP R3 Industry Solutions

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Lesson 23. SAP R/3 Industry Solutions

In this lesson, you learn what the Industry Solutions are and how they may affect you.

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What Is an Industry Solution?

A generic copy of SAP R/3 provides a starting point for most businesses. However, some companies (because of the nature of their business) can benefit from starting with a version of SAP R/3 that has been customized for their industry. Such versions are called Industry Solutions .

Industry Solutions versions of SAP are different from the vanilla SAP R/3 because they are (somewhat) preconfigured and have extensions . This doesn't mean that your company can bypass the configuration step, but it does mean a better fit between your "out-of-the-box" system and your needs. In essence, Industry Solutions give you the benefit of the learning and experience from earlier SAP R/3 installations in your industry.

Plain English

Extension

An addition to SAP R/3 that doesn't come with the plain version; a program written to add industry-specific functionality to R/3.

Examples of Industry Solutions

In the two years between the first and second edition of this book, the number of Industry Solutions has gone from seven to 20. It's safe to assume that new Industry Solutions will continue to be developed. The Industry Solutions available now include the following:

SAP Aerospace and Defense	SAP Automotive
SAP Banking	SAP Chemicals
SAP Consumer Products	SAP Engineering and Construction
SAP Healthcare	SAP High Tech
SAP Insurance	SAP Media
SAP Mil Products	SAP Oil and Gas
SAP Pharmaceuticals	SAP Public Sector
SAP Real Estate	SAP Retail
SAP Service Provider	SAP Telecommunications
SAP Transportation	SAP Utilities

How Industry Solutions Affect You

If you start from an Industry Solution, your configuration time will probably be shorter, and configuration will present fewer risks than if you were to start with generic SAP R/3. You also might need to adapt your business processes less than you would with a generic version.

Some kinds of industries don't yet have Industry Solutions. It's possible that your business will first implement SAP R/3 by using a generic version that has been configured for your company, and later switch to an Industry Solution “based system. This would likely be another large project, similar to (but hopefully easier than) your original SAP R/3 implementation.

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Industry Solutions and the Future

As SAP R/3 continues to develop, more than likely more Industry Solutions will become available. These solutions should become more detailed and better tuned to their respective industries as people work with them and see opportunities for increased efficiency.

Here's a glimpse of what the future might hold for SAP R/3:

SAP is planning to decouple SAP R/3 so that companies can buy and implement only the modules they need.
SAP R/3 is being marketed to medium- sized businesses, in addition to the large corporations using it now. Although this integration will cost them money up front, it will help not only their internal integration, but potentially also their integration with other companies using SAP R/3.
Because of SAP R/3's integration capabilities, more companies will be willing to outsource services (by using SAP R/3 to integrate the functions) that they might not consider outsourceable today.

Plain English

Outsource

The current euphemism for contacting services to farm out functions that were formerly done by in-house staff.

The primary benefit of SAP R/3 is its integration between modules. Some people feel the Internet performs (or will perform) this function just as well and don't see a need to implement SAP R/3. Although it's true that the Net can help you get more life out of your existing systems, R/3 offers much more to business process integration than just the capability to send data between systems.

In this lesson, you learned about Industry Solutions and how they could affect you. You also learned about some future possibilities involving SAP R/3 and Industry Solutions. In the next lesson, you learn about the company-specific help that is usually provided to document how to use SAP where you work. You also learn about training and SAP.

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Sharpe S., Gambrel B.

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