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On Tuesday 17 October 2006 06:51, Henry Bremridge wrote: > On Mon, Oct 16, 2006 at 05:42:21PM +0000, paul sutton wrote: > > Somehow I think it's going to take a big change to make anything > > happen, but we are getting there slowly. I am trying to figure out > > what exactly SAP is , is it a windows program Unix program etc, and > > what it's for, apart form some sort of business application. > > I have found a website but I just want a simple explanation, of course > > if conveyed via the lug then it would be of interst to anyone else who > > wants to know, in the meantime I will carry on googling, before > > heading off to this evenings lug meet, > > Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SAP_AG > SAP Products page: http://www.sap.com/solutions/index.epx > > SAP is an Enterprise Resource Planning program. There are open source > ones (Compiere which runs on oracle seems to be the best known one > although there are others: > http://sourceforge.net/softwaremap/trove_list.php?form_cat=577) > > What ERP is link all aspects of a business together into one computer > system: > - All Sales (from salesman, web, distributor etc) > - All Purchases (from contractor, purchasing manager etc) > - Inventory > - Finance (including data from banks) > > The biggest problem in creating such a database is the changes to > peoples routines. Creating an ERP program takes a great deal of > management time: try googling for "ERP disasters" eg in a year 2000 > story "Take Meta Group's damning finding, for instance: The average ERP > implementation takes 23 months, has a total cost of ownership of $15 > million and rewards (so to speak) the business with an average negative > net present value of $1.5 million" > > Once completed and assuming data input is accurate then all data can be > managed by those who need it. For example I remember reading somewhere > that Cisco state that they can have their year end accounts finished by > 9 am on the 1 Jan. Which is pretty impressive > > > > -- > Henry > Tue Oct 17 06:51:39 BST 2006 No - I think you'll find SAP is a way of extracting massive amount of contract and training money from companies because they know that the computer knowledge of most of their customers is greatly inadequate. When a company tries to implement ERP and there are a few knowlegable people in position to guide the implementation and stop people using MS office to provide useless content then it can be quite usefull and save a company huge amounts. In the UK this rarely happens as the people in power are generally IT/complexity ignorant and like to think that power means they can ignore the rules. One company I worked for had a reasonably well implemented ERP system that was undermined by salesbods selling things at below cost price and on a sale or return basis because they still got commission. We could have set the EPR system to prevent this - until it transpired that the commission was repeated all the way up the tree and selling at a loss paid the directors more than running the company at a profit would. Couldn't get that one into the shareholders report somehow.... I haven't used Compiere but if I could get a version that ran on mySql or postgres ( and there were 48 hours in the day) - and it had an html front end/document management then I'd implement it as the core system for just about everything. Tom te tom te tom -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html