Enterprise resource planning (ERP) is a broad term for a wide range of activities supported by multi-module application software that helps a company manage the mission – critical areas of its business, including product planning, parts purchasing, maintaining inventories, supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM). ERP can also include application modules for the financials and human resources aspects of a business.

Enterprise resource planning systems (ERPs) integrate all data and processes of an organization into a unified system. A typical ERP system will use multiple components of computer software and hardware to achieve the integration. A key ingredient of most ERP system is the use of a unified database to store data for the various system modules. The term ERP originally implied systems designed to plan the utilization of enterprise-wide resources. Although the acronym ERP originated in the manufacturing environment, today’s use of the term ERP systems has much broader scope. ERP systems typically attempt to cover all basic functions of an organization, governments, and other large entities utilize ERP systems.

Companies are implementing tens of millions of dollars at a time to implement SAP, Oracle, Siebel, or other large and well known ERP or CRM technologies in hopes of achieving dramatic improvements in an organization’s efficiency. In their quests to successfully implement these complex technologies, most companies are well versed in their abilities to develop detailed business cases to gain management approval for new and more efficient proposed system.

Using ERP systems as a tool to achieve overall business objectives, IT firms and corporate managers will be able to better maximize the potential benefits of any particular system. A comprehensive benefits realization program is needed as a part of any ERP system program implementation to ensure that this maximization arrives.

Cost pressures, organizational inefficiencies, and hype are all common catalysts for the introduction of new technologies. However, despite the compelling reasons for information technology, many companies fail to realize the full benefit of these technologies.

Additionally, it may be noted that to be considered an ERP system, a software package generally would only need to provide functionality in a single package that would normally be covered by two or more systems. Technically, a software package that provides both Payroll and Accounting functions would be considered an ERP software package.

Examples of modules in an ERP, which formerly would have been stand-alone applications, include: manufacturing, supply chain, financials, CRM, human resources, warehouse management.

The manufacturing module includes engineering, bills of material, scheduling, capacity, workflow management, quality control, cost management, manufacturing process, manufacturing projects, manufacturing flow.

Supply chain management includes inventory, order entry, purchasing, product configurator, supply chain planning, supplier scheduling.

Financials contains general ledger, cash management, accounts payable, accounts receivable, and fixed assets. Projects module includes costing, billing, time and expense, activity management. Human resources module includes payroll, training, human resources, time and attendance, benefits.

Customer relationship management includes sales and marketing, commissions, service, customer contact and call center support. Data warehouse and various self service interfaces for customers, suppliers and employees.

ERP software, among other things, combined the data of formerly disparate applications. This made the worry of keeping employee number in synchronization across multiple systems disappears. It standardized and reduced the number of software specialties required within larger organizations.

Let’s have more information about the ERP’s future from Stewart McKie, a senior of IT consulting.  From departmental systems to enterprise systems to business partner integration, the trend is to spread information further and further. The better informed we are, the better positioned we are to act. So it is important to know which new technologies are currently helping to spread the word. According to McKie, there are two emerging technologies that we can’t ignore. The first is Web services and the second is XML (extensible markup language).

“Until XML came along,” McKie says, “there was no technology that could unleash the full potential of business collaboration. Now everyone has pretty much decided that XML will be the standard for exchanging documents between systems. “With the emergence of the Internet and XML, EDI (electronic data interchange linking systems with different data formats) has become cost-effective and accessible to all.

ERP software, among other things, combined the data of formerly disparate applications; this made the worry of keeping employee numbers in synchronization across multiple systems disappear. It will standardize and reduce the number of software specialties required within larger organizations.

To remain competitive, manufacturers are looking to improve their customer-order fulfillment rates. In many cases, an ERP system can increase fill rates to 80% or 90% by providing the information that allows the company to have the right product in the right place at the right time. The result is higher customer satisfaction and retention.

It is really hard to put a price on lost business; customers will take their business elsewhere if the products they want are not available when they need them. There are many manufacturers that physically count inventory each month – in some cases, each weekend often an inventory accuracy rate as low as 25%. An ERP system can increase inventory accuracy to more than 90%, while reducing the need for frequent physical audits. For many, a comprehensive physical inventory is not costly in it, but requires a temporary shutdown of business to count, tag and check stock.

Better inventory accuracy, fewer audits; higher quality, less re-work; timely revenue collection, improved cash flow. Those are some more ERP’s advantages. The “soft” benefits of ERP provide good bottom-line savings and sustainable top-line growth, lower inventory and operating cost, more efficient production, and improved quality with less waste, higher customer acquisition retention and better cash flow.

In the future, more companies will be able to let their ERP systems handle cash management, as this functionality works through the industry. More companies will pull everything into the cash management module of their ERP systems.

ERP II systems are not just the backbone of the enterprise. They are also the information link for an enterprise in the supply chain. Given the above discussion of current IT challenges, it is clear that there is a need to ensure that companies more fully realize the potential benefits of technology. Unfortunately, investing millions of dollars in new information technology without a compelling justification and validation of this justification is not acceptable in today’s increasingly competitive environment. By integrating a comprehensive benefits realization approach into IT implementations, managers will ensure that their projects are rolled out successfully and that the projects translate to wise investment decisions for the company.

Jan Baan created the Baan Corporation in 1978 in Barneveld, Nederland, providing administrative and financial consulting services. Jan Baan entered what was to become the ERP industry. A few years later, Paul Baan, Jan’s brother, joined the company. It is the largest software family firm in Dutch history. After some accounting scandals, some losses occurred and Baan was sold to Invensys, a firm from UK.

In 2003 poor market performances of Baan ERP led Invensys to sell Baan to SSA Global Technologies. Since that moment, the promoted brand was SSA Baan.

With 44 implementations in 25 years and zero failures, SSA Baan implement projects on time, staying in the budget and plan for the short, medium and long term plans.

Future plans are involving the product’s lifecycle management, to elevate customer service level from order acquisition through manufacturing and subsequent service and maintenance. Another goal is to increase flexibility in order-driven manufacturing.

HP and SSA Global made a product together to offer the best in class end-t-end ERP solutions. Baan is a really sophisticated system, and its “Milestone Deliverables” philosophy has no failure. This is an ERP system that is responding to customer demands with flexibility, not holding back.

Baan is helping the firms to achieve manufacturing excellence. The specialists are saying that no other ERP system offers the breadth and depth of support for order-driven, project-based discrete manufacturing. From made-to-stock to engineer-to-order and from flow line technology to lean manufacturing, Baan recovers all the requirements. Full product lifecycle management enables you to elevate customer service levels from order acquisition through manufacturing and subsequent service and maintenance.

Here are the main activities than Baan is developing now and in the future:

-          Improve operational efficiency

-          Gain better control of processes

-          Increase user productivity

-          Improve communication and collaboration

-          Enhance performance and scalability

-          Leverage IT infrastructure and information assets

-          Reduce costs

Discrete manufacturing operations systems are the most difficult to manage; Baan delivers comprehensive support for it, extending the traditional ERP footprint of finance, sales, purchasing, and manufacturing into freight management, warehouse management, and after-market service support.

The designers are an important goal for the future: to make Baan more easy to implement, easy to own, and most importantly, easy to adapt to changing environments, with a dynamic enterprise modeler that enables business processes to be recorded in the system and fully integrated components that allow changes to be reflected immediately in user roles.

The system will run on a variety of platforms, from low cost Linux / MySQL to multi – CPU. Multi—tier data centers, providing further flexibility.

From the very beginning, ERP solutions are growing permanently, they have more than 10 years experience and all this time developed more powerful versions. The future is open to new huge innovative resources, to offer effective and very complex solutions.

ERP solution will develop and implement the most effective software programs for small middle and growing companies. ERP solutions will cover the most various fields (production, distribution, media, consultancy, and financial services) for successful business.

Oracle released a free dev tool for its Fusion middleware. The new productivity tool is called Oracle Developer Depot and provides access to a library or reusable and sample code for rapid development of Java app prototypes.

After the mega acquisition of rival PeopleSoft, the database world leader has many opportunities for the future.  Database marketing secures Oracle future; the strong revenue growth will be in two areas: oracle.com application service provider (ASP) business that allows companies to rent Oracle’s e-business software over the Web, and its application-server software business technology, that runs e-business and Web site transactions.

Headquartered in Redwood Shores, California (US), Oracle develops and deploys Internet enabled enterprise software across its entire product line, which includes database, server, enterprise business applications and application development, and decision support tools. Oracle offers e-business solutions that extend from front- office customers relationship management to back-office operational applications to platform infrastructure.

Oracle co-president Charles Phillips offered a few hints as to what partners can expect from the company’s next database and applications generation. The upcoming Oracle 11g database, for example, will allow segregation between applications users and the database that feeds their applications. Application users will not be able to see underlying data in the database unless they have the rights to see it.

What is being done now in compliance is the “tip of the iceberg”. “Future Oracle users will be able to audit database information and access by applications and users. It will track not only which applications it is possible to use, but what data must be viewed, what changes was made; it will identify the person once and track him across all apps and the stack. It will be a complete audit trail from keyboard to disk,” Phillips said.

Oracle’s current technology can monitor user response times across the stack and isolate problems, Phillips said. Future applications will be able to initiate a rollback of the application server and database.  Phillips also talked up tighter integration and going forward between the core Oracle database and middleware stack and applications going forward. “We have assets on the tech side that apply elsewhere. In our umbrella strategy, we have single core foundation of the technology stack – the database and middleware. Around that we have industry-oriented applications, ERP and CRM. The applications should leverage the core stack.”

Oracle has pledged continued upgrades not only to its homegrown apps suite but for Siebel, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards apps as well. The company can do more for customers and partners in terms of security, high availability and compliance in its next product wave. Many JD Edwards and PeopleSoft customers run their applications on IBM’s DB2 database, which competes with Oracle’s bread-and-butter database. Likewise, Oracle has promised that its database will continue to fully support third-party applications that compete with its own software.

Also was announced new Business Accelerators for the mid market. These wizard-like programs let partners and users easily enter information about the desired application and automate its optimal set up, Oracle said. A new Oracle Accelerate program aims to get partners to extend these accelerators for their verticals. Phillips also announced a new Configuration Support manager to ease deployments and optimize performance. It will be part of Oracle’s Premier support options.

In the future, Oracle products will enable centralized entitlements, so a user’s access to data and applications will automatically follow him or her thought applications and tasks. Oracle’s business information is about how to manage it, use it, share it, and protect it. The word’s largest enterprise software company, Oracle is the only vendor to offer solutions for every tier of your business: database, middleware, business intelligence, business applications, and collaboration. With Oracle, information that helps to measure results, improve processes, and communicate a single truth to the constituents is possible quick and in a correct manner.

Oracle has made a number of strategic acquisitions to help the users get the broadest functionality and the most value from the business applications. In the future they will make it even easier for the users to take advantage of the rich customer relationship management capabilities of Oracle’s Siebel CRM, by helping the users to integrate Siebel applications with the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise applications.

Oracle’s Siebel Customer Relationship Management applications help provide insight to the right person at the right time, leading to faster, better informed decision. With solutions tailored to the specific needs of more than 20 industries, Siebel provides predictive analytics capabilities that deliver real-time intelligence, greater flexibility through support of both J2EE and .Net, and a lower total cost ownership.

Siebel Integrations are software bridges that reduce implementation costs by accelerating the deployment time required for front to back office integration – all without disruption to existing business operations. By allowing information to flow across entire enterprise business processes, Siebel integrations provide immediate value.

In addition to Siebel CRM Call Center on Demand to Oracle E-Business Suite, which was just released, Oracle is developing these Siebel Integration offerings:

• Siebel Order Capture to Oracle Order Management, that combines Siebel’s campaign to opportunity product set with Oracle’s order management, fulfillment, and financials capabilities, giving to the users a single view of his opportunities to cash business process.
• Siebel CRM on Demand to Oracle E-Business Suite provides consistent customer data across the front and back office applications, enabling a true 360-degree view, so the user can provide more knowledgeable and personalized customer service.
• Siebel CRM to I-flex FLEXCUBE Integration enables a quick, integrated account and fulfillment process, reducing the time required to open an account, while allowing fast service request processing across multiple request channels.

Oracle’s commitment to providing industry solutions has never been stronger; they customers experience it, their partners share it, and analysts recognize the scope and strength of offerings that have been carefully developed with the input of thousand of valuable customers.

Oracle industry applications are based on a wealth of industry experience and are tailored to address the unique challenges and processes that drive the business. Oracle applications and technologies provides a uniquely platform that is helping industry leaders around the world get the most accurate and up-to-date information from their business systems.

Recovery Manager (RMAN) was introduced in Oracle 8.0 and enabled true incremental backups for the first time. Prior to RMAN, database exports could be taken incrementally, but if any block in a table was changed, the entire table was written. RMAN incremental backups write only the changed blocks from a given data file, thus saving space.

Priori to the version 10g, however, incremental backups required a scan of an entire data file to detect which blocks in it had changed. For very large databases, this made the time required for incremental not much better than for full backups, even though space was saved.  Change tracking, sometimes called Block Change Tracking, provides a solution by recording to a separate Change Tracking file, which blocks have changed. The changes are written in real time by a background process.

This is a performance impact to enabling Change Tracking, so unless you are using RMAN’s incremental backup feature, it is best left disabled. But if you are doing incremental backups, the time lost recording changes will be more than made up in faster backups.

Some industries are aerospace and defense, high technology (semiconductor, complex electronic equipment, computers, peripherals and consumer electronics, electronics contract manufacturing), oil and gas, professional services, public sector (national and local government, defense, justice and public safety), chemicals, industrial manufacturing (durable goods, heavy equipment and machinery manufacturing, industrial products), retail, telecom, education and research (higher education and research, k-12 primary and secondary education), life sciences (clinical applications, medical services, pharmaceuticals and biotechnology), travel and transportation (airlines, airports, logistics), financial services (banking, insurance, capital markets), media and entertainment, utilities (electricity, gas, water, waste), natural resources (raw material producers, mining, mill products), healthcare (health payers, health providers, government healthcare agencies). The future is looking so bright for Oracle!

To meet the new challenges, Web services link servers over the Internet to exchange data and combine information in new ways. These services run on Web-based severs instead of individual PCs, allowing people to use then through any device that has Internet access, including cellular phones and handheld computing gadgets, as well as desktop and notebook computers.

Oracle’s Siebel Mobile Solutions applications provide field technicians with complete mobile access to customer information, asset histories, reporting tools, parts information, corporate knowledge bases and much more. By supporting a large variety of devices in both connected and disconnected modes, it enables efficient and accurate customer service and ensures that all technicians have access to the right information in the right place at the right time.

Oracle’s Siebel Wireless will provide technicians more real-time access to critical service information, including activities, service requests, order status, account and contact details and an employee directory. And because it will be seamlessly integrated with other Oracle applications, it will be easily configurable and developed.

The main directions are:

-          Deliver real-time access to critical information through a wireless device

-          Wirelessly push messaged to employees, partners and customers

-          Support multiple handheld devices and phones.

Wireless Browser Support: Siebel Wireless provides real-time access to critical information through a wireless device. Using WML or HTML browser on a mobile phone or handheld device, a field user can read, edit and write data in the customer database. As a result, the application enables field professionals to order items, trace parts, send correspondence, update service activities, review customer and activity information, access calendar and contact details, and respond to service requests.

Siebel Handheld will allow field technicians to access key information from the customer database through Direct Server Synchronization or Companion Synchronization to a Windows Pocket PC device. Developers will connect to the Siebel Server using a variety of mediums to download and synchronize activities, service requests and other critical data.

Siebel Mobile Web Client enables field service professionals to access a full desktop computing solution on a laptop through an automatic exchange of information with corporate servers. It offers synchronization of laptop records with data over LANs, WANs, dial-up connections, and the Internet.

More than ever, developers need to be able to acquire, integrate, repurpose, and exchange information with other applications to feed their growing databases and to coordinate their business operations with those of partners and suppliers over the Web. These tasks can be dramatically simplified using XML.

Oracle is making a major commitment to XML, and the Core XML Support being delivered in Oracle11i is a major step. Oracle will continue to make it even easier to build database-driven Internet applications that exploit XML in future releases of Oracle, AppServer, Tools, and packaged Applications.

By more tightly integrating the SQL type system and XML, the database will provide a natural mapping of object/relational SQL query results to a well-formed XML document. Combining this tighter SQL? XML integration with the current Oracle mechanism for defining Object Views over relational data, it will be possible to query a logical view of “Accounts” and return all of the related, supporting information pertinent to that account with a single request to the database

Rather than receiving HTML pages that present schedules, price lists, and product information in an attractive visual format, XML allows to request and receive the raw data itself for further processing.

The number or Oracle’s certifications is growing constantly; there are more than 230000 with growth mainly in India and China. This means that Oracle’s future is really bright. There are many reasons to use a well-known oracle development team, a group of outstanding Oracle professionals with a dedication to quality and a reputation as an author and expert. Managers can create some development teams with confidence when it is composed of respected industry experts. The Oracle’s expert’s future is looking bright too…

The prospective are very optimistic; there are obstacles too, but managers can optimize the business value of Oracle. There are many obstacles to Oracle benefits realization but managers can use some “levers” to realize Oracle benefits using their existing people, processes, and organizations. There are specific tools and approaches for leveraging the possibilities of Oracle, including performance measurement, process improvement, organizational design, training (very important and expensive), and communications.

Oracle’s XML strategy is to deliver the best platform for developers to productively build and cost-effectively deploy reliable and scalable Internet applications exploiting XML. Oracle represents a significant “down payment” on the delivery of this strategy, and broad efforts are underway within Oracle to deliver additional XML capabilities up and down the product stack.

The main development directions are to assist Oracle analysts and design tools users in maximizing their investment in Oracle Designer and JDeveloper, through sharing experience with the other users and to ensure that Oracle customers are fully apprised of the future direction of Oracle analysis and design tools.

Oracle relies on its own software to run its global operations and meticulously plans software upgrades. There is an added complexity for Oracle: the company implements its software before releasing the new version to customers, so the pressure to get it right is overwhelming.

What made this possible is a foundation based on an integrated information model with a highly componentized application solution, with rich support for J2EE compliant APIs and Web services. It is a part of the latest evolution in the technology for designing and programming application software packages called Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). “In spite of this massive acquisition (PeopleSoft) in the middle our upgrade cycle we had a single place to upgrade, a single place to roll up processes, and without this architecture it would have been a very different story,” said David Cooke, Vice President and Global Oracle Alliance Leader.

Project Fusion is the next stage to bring together Oracle, PeopleSoft and JD Edwards product lines. This will bring all three product sets together using Java and HTML standards to make the new software easy to integrate into other systems.

“The future looks bright now: the new architecture and the results companies will achieve will be truly revolutionary, but the path to the new successor product line will be evolutionary”. (John Wookey, VP of application development at Oracle)

Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise applications are designed for the most complex business requirements. They provide web services integration with vendor and homegrown applications and can be easily configured and adapted to meet the most unique customer requirements. In addition, PeopleSoft Enterprise supports a very broad choice of technology infrastructure.

The future efforts are focused for:

1. Accelerate the path to Fusion
2. Drive superior ownership experience
3. Deliver best in-class business processes

The solution dynamically personalizes report information retrieved from PeopleSoft and other enterprises data sources and securely delivers individually formatted views to tens, of thousands of users inside and outside the firewall. The solution will integrate non-PeopleSoft data and the Management, Financial Management, Human Capital Management, Supply chain Management, and enterprise Performance Management by accessing them directly with Enterprise Information Integration, native PeopleSoft drivers, or through the AppConnect enterprise Warehouse.

The future solution will access PeopleSoft application data directly or through the data warehouse. It will be designed to integrate seamlessly with PeopleSoft applications and data including:

• PeopleSoft Security
• PeopleSoft Internet Architecture (PIA)

PeopleSoft data sources

PeopleSoft Support, Consulting, Education, Hosting, and Financing are now integrated with Oracle Services.

“Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft is not the dawn of a scary new era; it is the twilight of the old ERP age. It may also be an opportunity to create and ERP future that adds value not costs, to business”. (Scott Berinato).

PeopleSoft enterprise Supply Chain is a flexible solution that helps businesses synchronizes their supply chain. This helps provide efficiency, which in turn provides cost savings. Within the PeopleSoft Supply Chain there are solution modules like customer order management, logistics, manufacturing solution, and supply chain planning. PeopleSoft SCM falls under Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise product suite and its future is following Oracle’s main directions.

PeopleSoft is developing new solutions to accelerate deployment, improve system performance and availability and preserve the integrity of application code. PeopleSoft solutions help improve the control and visibility over the system performance and change management needs for the PeopleSoft platform and its underlying databases enabling you to achieve operational excellence and compliance to regulatory standards.

PeopleSoft will always work to deliver the best possible all-around application experience to the customers. PeopleSoft consultants and in-house teams depend on the code quality and optimization and performance solution to keep applications running smoothly. In fact, they will use Quest tools in their labs and on customer consulting engagements.

PeopleSoft for Oracle is the facto-standard for database developers and administrators with more than 500,000 users worldwide. Oracle increases user productivity and application code quality with rich features for data-base object management, develop and debug Pl/SQL, create, execute and optimize SQL queries while providing an interactive community to support the user experience.

Oracle and PeopleSoft will provide solutions for a comprehensive data management workbench that enables DBAs to manage more databases from a single, integrated interface. Oracle and PeopleSoft will combine best-of-breed products for:

• Database Analysis
• Performance Monitoring
• Performance Diagnostics
• Database Administration
• Space Management
• SQL Tuning
• Load Testing / Data Generation
• Performance Analysis / SQL History

Oracle and PeopleSoft will provide fault-tolerant, streaming replication for the Oracle database, allowing maintaining a near-real time copy of the database for reporting and migrations.

PeopleSoft Experience Monitor for Web-based applications optimizes the real customer experience, improves capacity and quickly diagnoses availability problems. Schema Manager eases the deployment of schema changes from development to test to production by managing dependencies while maintaining control with extensive change documentation. Schema Manager can help ensure a smooth migration for customizations or upgrades that have been introduces in the PeopleSoft database.

End User Management will provide better transaction simulation, performance measurement and problem reproduction to guarantee optimal service levels for any applications by assigning accountability for the end use experience.

Sap is the largest European software enterprise, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. SAP’s products focus on ERP, which it helped to pioneer. The company’s main product is MySAP ERP. SAP is the clear leader in the industry, with 4% of market share in the US, and plans to extend that.

“In retail, we are growing faster than any other vertical. In public services, we’ve made some very important investments. Our vertical strategy, segmented strategy, team, execution are right now at a better state than ever before.” (McDermott)

The company is positioned at the forefront of the enterprise technology using a long-term strategy. This ability to execute over the long term has helped SAP achieve a dominant global market share.

According to Gartner, SAP is #1 in enterprise software. Sap in the worldwide market leader in CRM, ERP, and supply chain software, according to a comprehensive new study. With 26% of CRM market chare, 29% of ERP market share, and 19% of SCM market chare by total software revenue. SAP exceeded overall market growth rates in all three segments. It is no wonder more organizations are turning to SAP to become best-run businesses.

SAP will improve supplier relationship management (SRM) with real word wisdom. SAP, its customers, and its partners have amassed a wealth of real wisdom on forging successful supplier relationships. Now, they will share that wisdom with its customers. Watch Web casts on best practices, lessons learned, and case studies to discover new insights into the most critical supplier-related challenges facing the client’s company today.

Great companies relay on SAP, not just great big companies. More than 65% of SAP customers are small and midsize companies. The clients don’t have to be a big company to maximize the advantage with flexible, affordable, and proven software from SAP.

SAP increases transparency and predictability with new CRC applications. SAP is enhancing the market-leading governance, risk, and compliance portfolio with three new applications to deliver more simplicity and increase process and cost efficiency, accountability, and control – based on a holistic approach to managing GRC.

With the new SAP Net Waver Application Server, Java EE 5 Edition, SAP will provide a platform for building enterprise-class, scalable, distributed and open standards- based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). A new solution will be designed for the process of building and testing a simple Web service using SAP Net Weaver Application Server, Java EE 5 Edition.

Sap is the largest European software enterprise, with headquarters in Walldorf, Germany. SAP’s products

SAP is already working with Microsoft Corp. to integrate SAP processes with Microsoft’s Windows in a project named Mendocino.

The main technology related goal would be to improve the user experience of the company’s products that suffered since SAP is redesigning its screens to work with the Windows operating system instead of UNIX, because there is nearly 50% less space available on the screen.

SAP will follow in the same tradition featuring a very sophisticated, intuitive and versatile user interface powered by an unmatched analysis engine and design tools for engineers working on transportation, industrial, public works, sports, and other facilities.

From its 3D object based graphical modeling environment, to the wide variety of analysis and design options completely integrated across one powerful user interface, Sap will prove that it will be the most integrated, productive and practical general purpose structural program on the market today.

This intuitive interface will allow creating structural models rapidly and intuitively, without long learning curve delays. Complex models can be generated and meshed with powerful templates built into the interface.

Getting a head start on information, exchanging knowledge and the possibility of making a difference these were the principles, which first brought SAP software users together. By 2006, approximately 1,850 German-language companies, institutions and authorities had enlisted as members.