Need your help to define what kind of this application it is. And how can it help to improve quality of CRM. I am wondering, is it some kind of CRM tool like Siebel? Thank you for your kind assistance.

I think it would be beneficial to navigate around www.sap.com as well as websites that discuss it. There should be many of them out there.

I see SAP as an "enterprise" software solution, something a large operation with a lot of materials to deliver would use. SAP has several modules and they cover pretty much all the aspects the running a business on a large scale: Financial, Materials Management, Sales/Distribution (these last two might involve customer service professionals in their day-to-day), Timekeeping, HR, and so on.

I can't speak to the CRM question. I think it is more of a process management tool (a big one), than a CRM tool, but I am not an expert. I have worked in SAP in the past, so I was interested in your question.

Hi,

SAP started out as a software provider of ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software. This is software for supporting regular business end-to-end processes (purchase-to-pay, order-to-make, order-to-stock, etc. and other supporting processes, like financial accounting and HRM).

From that base, they have created many more tools that businesses can use... Business Information Warehouse (BW) for management reporting, Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), and CRM, amongst others.

These days, SAP is moving towards being a platform, where you can plug in several solutions (that use the methodology of SAP for interacting between applications, called SAP Netweaver), and they all cooperate in a best-of-breed fashion to support business processes.

Now, back to CRM. CRM is a separate solution from the SAP R/3 Business suite mentioned above, and as such it can run separately on the SAP platform. Although it is more likely to be implemented in a business that is already using other SAP solutions. If you want to know more, check what I've written about SAP CRM on my site.

Hope this helps.

Erwin Steneker
www.customerservicepoint.com