ERP in the different industries

I have been blogging about the very specifics of ERP for sometime now. For instance, my blogs have tackled not just individual vendors like SAP, Oracle, Baan, Saleforce and Microsoft also their individual components as well.

I remember having blogged before about the individual SAP xApps and how each of them have been designed to leave smaller footprints and that some of them have been design for specific industries. One such example I pointed out was SAP xApp Integrated Exploration and Production (SAP xIEP) for the oil industry.

I like to point out how ERP in general has been received in the different industries which have positive effects in the ERP implementations.

In the Manufacturing Industry, ERP has greatly given benefit by increasing the efficiency, quality and throughput of complex manufacturing processes. Before the advent of advanced ERP software applications solutions, the manufacturing industry has been plagued by problems coming out from inefficient management of communication. With ERP implementation, all barriers to communications have been torn down and those such complex areas of manufacturing like supply chains, ware house and logistics have been closely linked and coordinated. Also, in the past, customers would have to go from pillar to post just to make an inquiry about the status of the products or any query about technical problems and difficulties. ERP has helped track down product status so that both customers and the company will not be wasting time digging through records or running from one department to another. The Manufacturing industry is biggest industry to benefit from ERP.

In the Insurance industry, ERP has seamlessly integrated three general areas into one efficient working group. These areas involve the company, the insurers and the insurance agents. With ERP for the insurance industry, transactions and monitoring of performance of the agents can be easier. ERP has helped speed up coordination between agents and insurers. In the area of government insurance, ERP has eliminated or minimized red tapes and bureaucracy as decisions are so crystal clearly based in database data.

ERP has benefited the Healthcare industry by efficiently managing large government hospitals and sorting out hundreds and thousand of clients and different degree of medical attention. In some really huge hospitals, an ERP that focuses on the vertical market segment is commonly implemented. Of course, the healthcare industry has accounting and human resources too so they the bigger the company in this industry is, the more it would need ERP.

In the Hospitality industry, ERP are used by big hotels and resorts. It is very common for world wide chain of hotels to implement an ERP to keep track of operations from different geographic locations. Even in the local level, hotels have different sections like housekeeping, food and beverage, customer service, and many more. The hotel and resort industry is one of the most personalized industry in terms of transactions so data should be fresh and updated all the time to avoid embarrassment and eventual loss of customers.

So there it is. Whatever the industry, will always have a solution.

The SAP Web Application Server

Yesterday, I blogged about SAP Netweaver, the technical foundation for all SAP applications, despite the fact that I had been blogging about a ton of SAP applications already most specifically SAP xApps. I guess it wasn’t too late to get to the core.

Now, let me blog about the SAP Web Application Server. As the name suggest, this is a web server, much like Apache, Microsoft IIS and many other but this one is specialized for all of SAP's cutting edge business solutions.

The Web Application Server (WAS or Web AS) is actually one of the components of SAP Netweaver and is undoubtedly one of the most important products as this serves as a foundation on which all other applications run on.

This product allows the web development of SAP solutions. SAP used to solely rely on the ABAP programming language, but today's development often involves the Java programming language. The Web Application Server is linked with and based on the SAP solution infrastructure. Yes, SAP is very robust, many think of SAP's relative independence as very exclusive and they seem to give the impression that they have an IT world of standards of their own.

SAP's Web Application Server makes possible the development of new internet paradigms such as the combination web services with the transactional operations of ERP. Development of these new internet paradigms start with creating an environment to provide a set of tools carefully matched in order to support many other application. This is called the Web Applications Builder. This is an object-oriented, repository-based development environment employing both Javascript and ABAP. The Web Applications Builder can allow users to develop new kind of enterprise web applications which are the BSP applications while being able to support a complete development lifecycle. Two of the main parts of the applications are the Business Server Pages (acronym BSP) and MIME (Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions) objects.

As mentioned, the Web Application Server is basically a web server like many other in the industry and the main idea behind the WAS is similar to active server pages (ASP) of ASP or Java Server Pages (JSP) of Sun Microsystems. As such, the WAS can of course support documents containing HMTL and other codes in a web page and codes are compile upon the server by end user request. One can have choice between ABAP or JavaScript for use in the documents.

It can be said that the WAS is an assimilation of conventional Web technologies by adding Web Dynpro for the presentation logic for enterprise websites. The Web Dynpro is actually the SAP NetWeaver programming model .

By using the Web AS, one can publish queries, programs and applications based on ABAP. The WAS also offers some flexibility. With versions from 6.20 up, one can have a choice of creating ABAP only, Java Platform, Standard Edition only or mixed environments.

The architecture of SAP Web Application Server has many complex areas. In tomorrow's blog, we will tackle some of those. For the meantime, I wish you a nice business day.