when SAP IS Retail was founded?

[Former Member]

Hi,

Can any one please tell me when SAP IS Retail is derived as a individual Industry solution Module?

Regards,

Nalini Ramesh

[Former Member]

Mann - you ask questions!

Ok - let's start:

SAP in Walldorf bought in 1994 - 52% of the leading Retail companies of Germany: The Dacos Software GmbH.

The Dacos Software Gmbh was founded in 1978 in St. Ingbert - therefore: The SAP Retail base of the world is in St. Ingbert, Germany. And will always be: Because that is where I started in 96.

SAP did not have a footprint within Retail until 1994 and "bought" the knowledge by gaining the majority of the Dacos company.

The name did not change at first - because I was still hired under the name of Dacos in 96. But within this year 96 or could have been early 97 the name changed to SAP Retail Solutions - which if you think about it has nothing to do with SAP - just a marketing gag to make the product more transparent to clients. Eventually the assimilation became reality and the name changed into SAP Retail after SAP gained the missing 48% around 2001.

By the way : Some of the founders of DACOS "re-founded" the DACOS company in 2005 in Saarbruecken, Germany (15min away from St. Ingbert).

I say that since the beginning after 1994 - whenever the decision was made to use different terminology (Material to Article and so on) and in order to do so you have to switch your MM ERP to Retail ERP by the use of the "Retail Switch" - this solution is considered "separate". But the in reality it is not separate. It is an activation of Add onu2019s. See: Post: Retail Switch.

Hasta la vista

Markus

[Former Member]

Thank you very much Markus.

Can you please let me know where I can find these informations? It would be more helpful.

[Former Member]

Hello

I'm one of the Dacos founders. So I was deeply involved in this story. Markus Semar knows. I was one of the people bringing the Retail-Know-How into SAP. Joachim Hertel mentions some of this history on the new Dacos homepage: http://www.dacos.com/company/profile.html . I do not know any public information covering this history in detail.

Before 1994, when we joined SAP, they had already begun to focus on the retail industry. They bought Dacos to speed up this process because until then they just tried to use standard MM, SD and Warehousing for retailers.

The main change then was to introduce an own top-menu for retail, add some additional functionalities, data and additional organisational units into the standard modules to be able to get a better coverage of retail processes.

All the time SAP was selling its software to retail companies and from 1995 on more and more specialized modules, and articles instead of material were integrated into the mainline and released with the mainline releases. I do not remember at which time exactly it was called "SAP for Retail" or "IS Retail" because this was pure markting.

But retail was always different from other industry solutions because it was fully integrated into the mainline. Even when the "retail switch" was introduced the solution stayed part of the mainline of R/3 just separated by the "retail switch" which was pure customizing at that time. Later this switch was used to toggle different source code.

Wolfgang

Edited by: Wolfgang Barth on Jul 3, 2009 9:55 AM