Evaluating SAP

[Former Member]

Hello,

I am looking at SAP for the first time, for evaluation purposes in the context of logistics and transportation/warehouse management. I am an experienced programmer, whom has been asked to review the SAP development and deployment environment and compare/contrast it with existing tools/solutions that are long established at our company to see what efficiencies it may introduce.

My goal is to get a development/deployment environment up and running as quickly as possible, and see how fast I can become productive. I do not intend to become particularly familiar with the server components, and I don't want to focus on server setup or administration in the least. I want instead to hopefully (?) spin up a pre-built cloud image of the app server, then develop against it u2013 referencing the published API's u2013 and using Eclipse as my IDE. I then want to deploy a sample application to both a Linux and Mac OS X client machine.

I prefer not to learn a new scripting language if a language I know is supported as an alternative (e.g. Java, Python, JavaScript etc.).

Any help from the community in getting up and running would be much appreciated. Also please correct me if anything I have referenced in this post is incorrect as it pertains to the SAP ecosphere.

Thanks in advance.

[Former Member]

Thanks Oliver for your comments and suggestions. I will take your advice and dig into the "master guides" to see how to proceed.

[Former Member]

Hello and thanks for your reply.

I am aware of course that SAP is a company, and the company itself including licensing models (and the SAP community and community features) are also under review; I am referring to SAP proper and the ERP system + relevant module when I mention SAP.

When I mentioned that I was evaluating in the context of logistics and transportation/warehouse management, I suppose that I was not specifiic enough. My intention is to evaluate SCM and EWM and possible the associated event manager module. I also want to peek around at global trade for US export compliance. Thanks for pointing out that I need to be more specific.

My understanding of Netweaver was that it was the basis for all module expansion. And that once I had it up and running I could install evaluation versions of the various modules, and then try to code against them to evaluate the viability of customizing for our needs. Is this correct?

Also, what scripting/programming language is supported by the modules I have referenced above?

Thanks again

[Former Member]

Hi again,

I don't know SCM and EWM, so I don't know the technical basis of these 2 softwares.

Netweaver is a marketing term : "All SAP softwares are based on Netweaver", does not help.

In real life there are 2 Netweaver: The Netweaver Abap stack and the Netweaver Java stack.

SAP softwares usually use one of this stack (ECC6 the abap stack, SAP Portal the java stack for exemple).

Some products like PI even need both stacks.

My advice is to download the master guides of SCM and EWM and find out which stack(s) is needed and used for your use case.

You will not be able to "install Netwaver and add functional modules". You will have to install SCM or EWM as a full installation.

Most probably you will need an experimented SAP administrator to do the installation because it is not so easy for the first time.

Regards,

Olivier

[Former Member]

Hi,

SAP is a company, not a software.

You have first to know which SAP software you need to use.

Then you will know if the development language will be ABAP or Java.

If it is java, you will not be able to use Eclipse...

Regards,

Olivier