Customer Reviews

Retail Information Systems Based on SAP Products

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As a user of SAP at a retail company, I was excited to see a title written on SAP specifically for retail. Retail is not one of the traditional industries focused on by SAP and its system shows a strong bias for manufacturing, so I was hoping this book would shed some light on the capabilities of the system that were being underappreciated at my company. Well, the result was that I was quite dissapointed after reading through it. First, the book seems to have been written in German and translated (poorly) to English, because the language is very choppy. Besides, there book lays out a grand vision of the architecture of the system without giving the user much idea on implementation or actual utility of functions. If you are ready to invest a few million on new developments, maybe this book is for you, but if you are looking for small improvements and ideas for medium-term development, this book takes too much of a birds-eye view to be useful.

I was initially excited when I heard of this new book - the first I have found on the subject of SAP IS Retail - but was soon disappointed after reading the first few chapters. And it didn't get any better as I progressed through the rest of it.

The book would have benefited greatly had the authors thought to include an introductory paragraph in each section giving a plain-English conceptual overview as to what the topic at hand is about. But, true to the "obfuscate at all times" philosophy that seems to be part of the SAP culture, instead it just delves into terminology and concepts as if the reader already understands why one would want, say, articles classified in both merchandise and article hierarchies. I felt as if I were trying to learn how to read Sanskrit from a book written in Sanskrit - if I knew already what the author seems to assume then the book itself would be superfluous.

I am in pre-sales on the AFS (Apparel Footwear Solution) side of things and am quite familiar with that topic, yet I was completely lost most of the time in this tome.