mySAP ERP for Dummies ESA Edition Book Review
I am not a fan of "Dummies" books. As a general rule they try to hard to be funny and not hard enough at communicating worthwhile information. This book by Andreas Vogel and Ian Kimball was better than I expected.
The first section of the book talks about ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP has been around for a long time. SAP's implementation of ERP now includes ESA - Enterprise Services Architecture. ERP and the impact of ESA are given an overview that is not too technical.
The second section of the book covers NetWeaver. It uses some of the standard charts (like page 121) that are found in every SAP NetWeaver presentation. Here is the definition from the book: "SAP NetWeaver is a set of capabilities that are provided by many different SAP products constructed to work with each other to make people, information, and business processes work together across technologies and organizations, all based on services." Every time I hear NetWeaver described I get a vision of Dan Akroyd on Saturday Night Live portraying Julia Child and proclaiming "It's a floor wax and it's a dessert topping". There is also a chapter on Composites and how they fit in to the NetWeaver scheme of things.
The third section talks about future releases of SAP and building an ERP Roadmap
The last section of the book discusses how to make people more productive. I learned a new acronym - KPI - Key Performance Indicator. This chapter is mostly "future" stuff. The book does contain a good glossary of all the current SAP buzzwords.
If you are pretty familiar with IT concepts but unfamiliar with SAP this book would offer a good starting point. If you have significant experience with SAP there is much to be gained from this book but one needs to turn off their cynicism before reading it. This book is about half way between Ray Kurzweil's extremely optimistic "The Singularity Is Near" and Frederick Brooks' very realistic "The Mythical Man Month".
I will be reviewing NetWeaver for Dummies in a couple of weeks. I'll let you know if you need to read both books or if you can get all you need from one of them.
The first section of the book talks about ERP - Enterprise Resource Planning. ERP has been around for a long time. SAP's implementation of ERP now includes ESA - Enterprise Services Architecture. ERP and the impact of ESA are given an overview that is not too technical.
The second section of the book covers NetWeaver. It uses some of the standard charts (like page 121) that are found in every SAP NetWeaver presentation. Here is the definition from the book: "SAP NetWeaver is a set of capabilities that are provided by many different SAP products constructed to work with each other to make people, information, and business processes work together across technologies and organizations, all based on services." Every time I hear NetWeaver described I get a vision of Dan Akroyd on Saturday Night Live portraying Julia Child and proclaiming "It's a floor wax and it's a dessert topping". There is also a chapter on Composites and how they fit in to the NetWeaver scheme of things.
The third section talks about future releases of SAP and building an ERP Roadmap
The last section of the book discusses how to make people more productive. I learned a new acronym - KPI - Key Performance Indicator. This chapter is mostly "future" stuff. The book does contain a good glossary of all the current SAP buzzwords.
If you are pretty familiar with IT concepts but unfamiliar with SAP this book would offer a good starting point. If you have significant experience with SAP there is much to be gained from this book but one needs to turn off their cynicism before reading it. This book is about half way between Ray Kurzweil's extremely optimistic "The Singularity Is Near" and Frederick Brooks' very realistic "The Mythical Man Month".
I will be reviewing NetWeaver for Dummies in a couple of weeks. I'll let you know if you need to read both books or if you can get all you need from one of them.
posted by John Hill at 4:14 AM
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