Describing SAP Systems

SAP Business Suite consists of several SAP applications, including the following applications:

• SAP Enterprise Resource Planning (SAP ERP)
• SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM)
• SAP Supply Chain Management (SAP SCM)
• SAP Supplier Relationship Management (SAP SRM)
• SAP Product Lifecycle Management (SAP PLM)

The SAP applications consist of several installable units called SAP systems or components.

SAP ERP is the largest SAP application, and SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC) is the largest SAP system, so we will look at this component in detail.

Besides several others, SAP ERP comprises the following components:

• SAP ERP Central Component (SAP ECC)
• SAP Employee and Manager Self Services (SAP XSS)
• SAP Business Warehouse (SAP BW)
• SAP Enterprise Portal (SAP EP)
• SAP TREX

• SAP Process Integration (SAP PI) – not displayed on the slide

In parallel to SAP Business Suite exists SAP Business Suite for SAP HANA (SAP S/4HANA). The SAP systems inside SAP Business Suite run with any database – SAP MaxDB, SAP ASE, SAP HANA, Oracle, MS SQL Server, DB2 and others. SAP S/4HANA consists of the SAP S/4HANA Server – which runs with the SAP HANA database, only. Also a SAP Front End Server is required – which runs with the SAP MaxDB, SAP ASE, and SAP HANA database. The Front End Server is used to run the Fiori Apps for the end users. Users like system administrators or developers still log on directly to the SAP S/4HANA Server, using e.g. SAP GUI or SAP Business Client. The Front End Server is more or less an AS ABAP-only system – with no business software components.

The current release of SAP Business Suite since end of January 2016 is SAP Business Suite 7i2016. The previous SAP Business Suite release was SAP Business Suite 7i2013.

The major solutions within the SAP Business Suite 7i2016 have the following releases:

• SAP ERP 6.08: enhancement package 8 for SAP ERP 6.0
• SAP CRM 7.04: enhancement package 4 for SAP CRM 7.0
• SAP SCM 7.04: enhancement package 4 for SAP SCM 7.0
• SAP SRM 7.04: enhancement package 4 for SAP SRM 7.0

The kernel is not a software component, rather, it is the runtime environment to run the software components. The kernel depends on the database and operating system in use; the kernel is available for several operating systems and databases.

The software components SAP_BASIS and SAP_ABA contain the basic functions, such as user administration, performance tools, Transport Management System (TMS), development tools, and so on.

The basic software components together with the kernel are also called SAP NetWeaver AS. In case of an ABAP-based system (such as SAP ECC), the name of these software components and the kernel is abbreviated with Application Server (AS) ABAP. In Java-based system (such as SAP Enterprise Portal), the name is abbreviated with AS Java.

The software components on top of AS ABAP (or AS Java) are application-specific software components.