Blog Editor-in-Chief

ERP Ideals 2025

The window of opportunity for SAP to correct its course is closing. The next two years will determine whether SAP will become a cloud company or remain the ERP leader for standard business software.

IT technology before ERP content

A technical discourse has dominated the SAP community for years, stealing resources and attention away from business challenges. At this year’s Sapphire in Barcelona, instead of discussing new types of organization and business management, Christian Klein addressed the question of when public cloud will reach its final stage.

Supply Chain Planning

Supply chain management and the associated logistics, scheduling and material requirements planning are a key and decisive challenge for every trading and production company. From a business and organizational perspective, SAP created APO, Advanced Planner and Optimizer, a much-celebrated innovation here very early on. SAP APO became the standard in many industries.

I have an interesting and instructive anecdote to share about the APO innovation: APO was programmed correctly, but due to the sheer volume of data it needed to process and the rather weak hardware at the time, it was also extremely slow. So it was not out of the ordinary that an MRP run process was completed only after production was already meant to have started. Professor Hasso Plattner (one of SAP’S founders) then gave APO its own internal database, which was completely stored in the computer’s main memory—this trick then accelerated APO many times over. This also means, however, that Hana is not SAP’s first in-memory computing database.

From APO to IBP

SAP discontinued APO and introduced Integrated Business Planning (IBP). A much acclaimed and praised supply chain planning product. Now, instead of celebrating and customizing this business and organizational innovation, SAP is offering the IBP product exclusively in the cloud, sparking a technical cloud discussion. In the past, with a product like IBP, SAP would have organized business symposiums on the new logistics. Today, SAP is discussing the technical circumstance of whether to give preference to a private or public cloud. Under the leadership of SAP CEO Christian Klein, the focus has shifted from business administration (digitization) to technology such as cloud computing, in-memory computing, and business technology platforms.

Green Ledger

The environment, resources, and sustainability are key issues in the current economy. In the past, SAP would have developed algorithms, i.e., standard business software, and not have given a second thought to which operating system, database, and hardware this solution would require. In Barcelona at this year’s Sapphire trade fair, SAP CEO Christian Klein presented a Green Leger for Sustainability with the discreet hint that it will only be available for cloud customers. For SAP, the technical operating model seems to be of much more importance than standard business solutions—and this is a betrayal of the original ERP ideals.

Any comments, questions, or concerns? Feel free to let us know in a comment below.

About the author

Peter M. Färbinger, Editor-in-Chief

Peter M. Färbinger is Editor-in-Chief and Publisher at E-3 Magazine, B4Bmedia.net AG, Munich, Germany. He can be reached at pmf@b4bmedia.net

5 Comments

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  • Sap has lost the battle in most spheres. Only those who are drunk on their marketing propaganda are blind not to see how backward each and every technical aspect sap now represents. From a useless database which is impossible to tune and cannot have infunction calls vs going into a loop or tuning software or Even four optinets where you cannot make head or take as most features are not documented. Fiori.. what you.. archaic hand written in this decade .. remind me I am not in the 80s.
    Entire financial must be rewritten from scratch and this stupid concept of residual docs and 999 mainframe era punchcard legacy must go. Even most data models are ims based yes it seems they overlooked the relational model.

    • Hello! Yes, this criticism is justified, but also understandable due to SAP’s history. SAP has always concentrated on business and organizational tasks and thus never displayed any true interest in using Oracle, DB2 and MS-SQL-Server’s SQL commands in any meaningful way. So yes, SAP continues to use a mainframe-IMS.

      I am also unaware as to why SAP now wants to become a technical company. SAP CEO Christian Klein seems to have different goals than those of SAP’s founders. Especially since SAP has no technical expertise. The future remains uncertain.

      • Peter so has oracle. The technology stack and offering especially in ascp beats sap by decades. Look on how they improved entire functionality because user community demands it. This is the difference sap has shut itself from Innovation in ERP to the point they steal ideas on premises of Colab with clients without giving credit to independent ideas.
        Se16n in this day of SQL you must be kidding me. It reminds me of old mainframe days. Then again what decade are we in.
        Having worked in four ERP deep tech stack . R3, oracle r12, fusion, and S4 Hans which is just a marketing wrap of ECC with Fiori , half cooked acdoca and go knows what they were drinking with hana. With ai their failed attempt at Leonardo shows total failure but see how 21c seamlessly is prepared for today and tomorrow and preferred db for a lot of AI datacenters.
        You are correct they don’t know what they need to focus on. First.. rewrite the entire ERP away into new century.

        • From my experience, you’re right. The entire SAP community will have to reorient itself, and SAP customers will have a good deal of work to do.
          Thank you and kind regards,
          Peter

          • Absolutely Peter unfortunately we are the fringe group who knows more than average sap who have been brainwashed not to understand what is out there.
            Keep up the good work. These columns you write are appreciated

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