Introduction

The SAP system is software which is composed of different software and a server as a whole and has the ability to perform standard business functions for corporations. The system has become so popular because it can serve a wide range of functionality from manufacturing to finishing products. There is one simple reason behind the popularity of this system; it can be tuned to any level for any industry. It has the concepts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business process reengineering (BPR) which is integrated in the system. Sap stands for System, Andwendungen, and Produkte in Der Datanverarbeitung, which when translated to English means System, Application, Products in Data Processing. The name of the parent Company is SAP AG. The company SAP is based on Walldorf in Germany and is the worlds largest enterprise software company. Its foundation is built upon the concept of integration. Originally, dating back to the 1970s, it took the then controversial approach of combining various business functions into one application and database. Dietmar Hopp, Hans-Werner Hector, Hasso Planttner, Klaus Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther, former IBM employees, launched SAP in order to turn the real business processing vision into reality. After a year, the first financial accounting software formed the basis for the continuous development of other software components which later came to be known as the "R/1 system;" "R" stands for real time data processing. By the end of the decade, intensive examination of SAPs IBM database and dialog control system led to the birth of SAP R/2, designed to handle different languages and currencies. The SAP R/2 system attained high level of stability of the previous generation of programs. With this and other innovations in SAP R/2, SAP saw a very rapid growth. By the 1990's, when SAP R/3 was unleashed into the market, the client-server concept, uniform appearance of graphical interfaces, consistent use of relational databases and the ability to run on computers from different vendors met with an overwhelming approval. The client-server architecture moved to a more flexible and scalable architecture. Going by this technology, the processing of an application could be split between the server and workstations the server handling the centralized functionality, while the client workstation maximized for users. The data management was separate from the server. SAP ushered in a new generation of enterprise software from mainframe computing to the three-tier architecture consisting of the Database layer, Application (business logic) layer, and user interface layer. Today is the day for client-server architecture, where one can make changes or scale on layer without having to retool the whole system. The term SAP R/3 stands for runtime system three and the client-server environment provides a set of business application for the system. The R/3 architecture allows distribution of the workload to multiple PC's connecting in a network. The SAP runtime system is designed in such a way that it distributes the presentation, application logic and the data management to different computers