What Is an SAP Variant?
SAP, one of the industry leaders in enterprise resource and productivity (ERP) software tools was founded in 1972 by five former IBM employees. At its heart, SAP provides a custom database implementation and several add on products and modules that either gather data that goes into that database or process data from that database into reports for business management and resource allocation needs. While SAP's standard product suite and modules can meet the needs of many businesses, customization of reports and data collection is a large part of what SAP provides and each of those customizations is an SAP variant.
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Customer Relationship Management
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SAP provides modules that allow businesses to manage their relationships with customers. These tools range from online order entry systems to sales management tools that track which person sold which product or service to which account. Nearly every customer-facing implementation of this concept represents an SAP variant that has been coded in response to customer needs.
Business Intelligence
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Business intelligence services, whether for large or small businesses, boil down to getting the most accurate data about costs, income streams, upcoming products, existing sales patterns and current labor levels, ideally updated in real time. This information needs to be shared throughout an organization, but not all of it needs to be shared to all parties -- deciding who gets what piece of information is an important management practice decision. Designing custom reports on top of the stock business intelligence tools provided by SAP is a common SAP variant.
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Governance and Compliance Planning
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Many businesses have to comply with regulatory burdens about what information must be stored, shared and presented to governmental officials upon demand; an example of this type of legislation is Sarbanes-Oxley, or SarbOx, which mandates a laundry list of information that must be stored to prevent fraud like what brought down ENRON. SAP provides several modules and programs that tie into their enterprise management solutions to comply with SarbOx type regulations; because companies can operate in multiple countries and fall under the aegis of different regulatory structures, SAP variants that yield customized reports are common in this area of business management.
Supply Chain Management
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Current business practices mandate a lean manufacturing model, where the parts that are used to make something are kept on low inventory levels and target requirements for meeting production goals are met by better use of the assets on hand. This process is called supply chain management and is a thorny logistics problem; if handled well, it cuts costs considerably for a business. This process requires intensive customization and the creation of SAP variants for data input and report generation, tailored to the specific business needs of a given industry.
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References
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