Customer Reviews

mySAP.com Industry Solutions: New Strategies for Success with SAP's Industry Business Units

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You need not be a SAP R/3 consultant to benefit from this interesting book. In fact, I am not an R/3 expert and have little direct experience with the product. My motivation for reading this book is to better understand ERP in general as it applies to various industry segments, and SAP R/3 and PeopleSoft in particular because of a consulting assignment.

Before reading this book I was under the mistaken impression that SAP R/3 was inflexible and required any company implementing it to completely redesign their business processes to accommodate the software. In many respects this is true. However, SAP has a tagline that "All Industries Are Not Created Equal", which means that a generic solution enforced by an application is not a real solution at all. Using this book I discovered two things: (1) SAP R/3 is a lot more flexible than I heard and can be highly customized using industry-specific solution maps to a number of industries, and (2) the market challenges of the 20 industries covered in this book.

What I like is the consistent way each industry if presented, using a fixed format that discusses each industry's market trends, requirements and solution maps. As a consultant who works across a wide landscape of industries I was able to quickly absorb some of the characteristics of each industry and their key challenges, as well as see how an ERP solution fit within them. Of course, learning about how SAP as a product supports these industries is also useful, and I suspect essential to consultants and constancies focused on this particular product.

The book is a quick read, informative and definitely a worthwhile investment to anyone who is involved in ERP in general and SAP R/3 in particular.

Sorry, but this is more an SAP advertisement for why you should consider mySAP.com, than a reference on what it is. In fairness, the various industry solutions are reasonably well explained, and so is how mySAP.com addresses those industries. But it's really about the level of depth and detail, which is not much in this case. For example, at the end of each chapter, a case study is provided. These, however, are generally a bit vague and "marketing-sounding", while the name of the company or client is often omitted, affecting credibility.

Granted, the whole subject is extensive, however, I was expecting more. It doesn't help that this is a translation from German, which tends to make the reading a bit "stiff" and academic compared to what we are accustomed to in North America.