Krepelka 1

Jesse Krepelka
CST 300 Writing Lab
7 September 2019
SAP: A Glance at German Ingenuity

Software development can be an intricate, sometimes arduous, process, but the world is

only becoming more advanced and reliant on technology. Computers are forcing their way into

every conceivable niche they can fit in and there is no reason to expect that to stop any time

soon. Even if technological advancement stopped right where it is today the market might see

decades of expansion as we optimize at our current level around the world.

Part I: Analysis

The pillars of the industry everyone knows: Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft, Oracle, and

IBM. All of these are household names. All these companies have their own way of impacting

our lives. For instance, this is being written using Microsoft Word on a Microsoft Windows

personal computer and without Alphabet’s Google this paper would have taken absolutely ages

to research. But while looking over companies to analyze a name stood out that was only

vaguely recognizable as the letters that I had seen while attending a tournament at the SAP

center, a stadium in San Jose. They are of course a large company. You must be to be a title

sponsor of a stadium. But I had no idea how gargantuan they truly are.

SAP, Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung (Systems,

Applications, and Products in Data Processing), is a multinational software company with offices

in 78 countries, according to their website. They describe themselves as a “market leader in

enterprise application software” (ERP) and as “the world’s #1 cloud business software

company.” Based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg, Germany, with a global work force of

98,332 employees, SAP is the third largest company by market value within the software and

programming sector according to Forbes global 2000 list of 2019. (Forbes, 2019) They do not
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release data on earnings product by product but its safe to say their primary services, ERP and

cloud services, make up most of their focus and resources. (SAP SE2, 2019)

Founded on April 1, 1972 by Dietmar Hopp, Hasso Plattner, Hans-Werner Hector, Klaus

Tschira, and Claus Wellenreuther, SAP was created by a team of engineers who had originally

begun development on their idea for an integrated resource management software product at

IBM, where they were employed at the time. Eventually, due to a difference of opinions on

whether their work was a profitable idea, IBM shuttered their project. As a result, it was decided

that creating their own company was the way forward and SAP was born. (SAP SE3, 2019)

Ever since its inception the core identity and strategy of SAP has been to embed

themselves within existing businesses to help improve their efficiency and effectiveness so that

they may better compete on whatever stage they are on. They do this by educating clients on how

they can use their software as well as shaping the software needs to meet customer demands. The

man in charge of ensuring this identity remains today is CEO Bill McDermott.

Bill McDermott has run the show at SAP since May 21st, 2014 after a 12-year trip

through SAP’s upper management that saw him in roles such as the CEO of SAP America, an

SAP executive board member, and finally a four-year tenure as the co-CEO of SAP. During his

tenure he has received a bevy of awards and appears regularly on the website glassdoor.com’s

top CEOs list for large companies. (glassdoor.com, 2019) Before his time at SAP he was a

division President at Xerox and the President at Gartner; currently he serves on the board of

Under Armour, ANSYS, Inc. and SecureWorks. His school credentials consist of a bachelor’s

degree from Dowling College where he studied Business Management, as well as a Master of

Business Administration from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.

(McDermott, n.d.)
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Juergen Mueller, another key figure at SAP, is the CTO. He has held the position for only

nine months as of this writing. Prior to this role he was the CIO (Chief Innovation Officer),

which saw him involved in the process of researching emerging technologies and deciding the

impact that they would have on the way SAP does business. While performing said task he was

also responsible for various other research and development projects. His schooling background

boasts a diploma from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, where he studied Information

Systems, as well as a Doctor of Engineering, IT Systems Engineering from the Hasso Plattner

Institute. (Mueller, n.d.)

SAP’s key products, in terms of value, are their integrated ERP system called SAP

S/4HANA, SAP Digital Supply Chain, SAP Leonardo, and SAP Cloud Services. SAP S/4HANA

is the title given to their integrated enterprise resource planning software. The software suite

attempts to be an all in one service that helps businesses perform the various tasks they already

must, such as inventory management, customer service, and payroll, in an efficient and easy to

understand way. It acts as a one stop solution for businesses to manage themselves as well as

their customer base using technologies such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation). If there is an

action that a business regularly performs, SAP’s goal is to make that action simpler and/or more

informative.

SAP Digital Supply Chain is the title given to many separate SAP products that focus

specifically on logistics. It includes SAP Integrated Business Planning which analyzes trends

both within and outside of a company to try and predict demand and reduce overhead. And

houses a package of products including Extended Warehouse Management, Transportation

Management, and Logistics Business Network, which are intended to aide a company in all

aspects of their supply chain, End-to-end or input-to-output, so to speak.

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SAP Leonardo is the name given to their more experimental branch which deals with

trying to convert a business to a so-called “business of the future.” This includes basically all the

tech buzzwords you can think of: Machine Learning, Blockchain, Big Data, Internet of Things,

etc. SAP has been acquiring companies with focusses on concepts such as AI (Artificial

Intelligence) and RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to keep ahead of the innovation curve.

SAP Cloud Services are the fastest growing aspect of the company by far. Looking at the

list of SAP’s most recent acquisitions, almost all are either AI or cloud based. (SAP SE4, 2019)

According to SAP’s 2018 Integrated Report, cloud subscription revenue grew by more than 30%

from 2017-2018. This helped them to reach their 2018 operating profit of more than 5.7 billion

euros (SAP SE2, 2019) and is a key indicator that SAP’s profits are likely not going anywhere

but up anytime soon.

SAP has always been dedicated to organic growth, their services are in great demand and

due to the nature of their software being the basis of how businesses operate it is unlikely they

will be shrinking in the near future.

As an employer SAP has a pretty good overall reputation. According to respected review

website glassdoor.com SAP has a good overall rating from former and current employees, 4.4

out of 5 stars, and has been in the top 30 places to work for the last 3 years. Employees typically

cite the work atmosphere and work-life balance that the company promotes, and typical

complaints include a lack of competitiveness regarding their compensation packages.

From a customer’s perspective, SAP has generally favorable ratings from a few different

sources. For example, G2.com, which is a business focused review site designed to help

businesses choose the best products for their needs, sees the service average 4 out of 5 stars over
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400+ reviews. I recognize that human reviews from 400 people neither I nor you, the reader,

know aren’t incredibly scientific but that’s what we’ve got. This is the hardest aspect to backup

with research but across several sites this appears to be consistent.

Part II: Me

The largest impactful trend of technology that I believe has begun to occur and likely

accelerate is the increasing reliance on and move towards automation of tasks. I work at a small

risk management company and we only have a few hundred members in our risk pool. There are

very few of us focused on IT, we only have one or two major projects happening at any one time.

Currently we have been tasked with researching ways that we can leverage RPA to reduce the

work load of our claim’s handlers so that the speed at which our customer base grows will

accelerate more rapidly than the speed at which we must grow our team. Robots are everywhere,

automation is everywhere, and due to my fascination with automation I expect, or maybe hope,

that I will have a job long into the future.

Jobs that grab my attention are primarily those concerned with the buzzwords mentioned

earlier. What interests me is, working with ai/machine learning, using things like RPA to

automate tasks, and solving problems once in a way that means they don’t need solving again

and free up human brainpower. Ideally remote work suits me best. I have some health, and

personality, problems that mean that it would be of great interest to me to secure a remote

position. I find that while I can work in a local environment, I am able to complete a much

greater volume of work when I do not have to remain in a single stressful environment for

several hours a day. That is not to say I that remote work is a requirement, but I very much

would prefer it and with technology today I feel that most tasks, including working within a

team, can be completed via internet-based interaction methods (as this program helps prove).
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To understand what I’m interested in I feel its best if I explain why I’m interested in it.

Growing up, gaming was always my favorite past time. While playing I would ask questions

like; How did they make this? Why did they choose to do it that way? Why does it take so long

to make? These questions led me to messing around with game development programs, the

GameMakers and Unitys of the world. But I kept running into a problem. I couldn’t make them

do exactly what I wanted them to do. This was my introduction to constraints and is what led me

to my interest in creating programs in an environment with the least constraints.

I currently am a student first, but I do have a job in IT, as mentioned above. Because our

team is quite small and I am the newest member I currently have hardware duty, but I only began

working here after I was promised database management experience (admittedly not complex but

still useful) and the opportunity to explore RPA uses, which is the primary reason I joined. Even

small companies can begin to leverage software to automate tasks. Over the course of the next

two years of education I hope to search out opportunities to improve my skills or feed my

interests in relation to technology. An internship at a large tech company seems like it would be

difficult to fit into my schedule and as such I probably will continue to work where I am at least

until graduation.

Living in a college town with an active ACM club that hosts competitions which

welcome all helps to put me into contact with other tech focused individuals that are dedicated to

improving their skills and is therefore a potentially useful networking opportunity.

Another activity that keeps me interested is attending GDC (Game Developer

Conference), getting to talk with game developers and see the kinds of systems that huge game

companies use in the game development process was an extremely enlightening experience. In

the end games are just a piece of software so really a game development pipeline should
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resemble other projects, except that typically software development is more of an ongoing

process with a less clear end point.

A further aide that videogame development provides takes the shape of my weekly

“game dev” sessions with my brother and friend. We spend five hours every Sunday working on

a small game, six weeks per game, which I feel helps me exercise my problem-solving skills and

forces me to learn to work with new technologies in the form of various game development

software packages.

This research process has highlighted a key concept that should be kept in mind in

today’s world. That is, no one can know what will change the world. SAP started from a group

of IBM engineers that were having their project shut down, and grew to be, reportedly, the third

largest software company in the world. Hiding behind the googles and Facebooks of the world

there are companies with more in mind than having their name on every person’s tongue. SAP

wants to be, and arguably is, the world’s business backbone; whether you knew about them or

not.
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References

SAP SE.1 (2019, July 18). SAP Corporate Fact Sheet. Retrieved from

https://www.sap.com/documents/2017/04/4666ecdd-b67c-0010-82c7-eda71af511fa.html

Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2019, March 29). 15-0000 Computer and Mathematical Occupations (Major

Group). Retrieved from https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes150000.htm

Murphy, A., Ponciano, J., Hansen, S., & Touryalai, H. (2019, May 15). The World's Largest Public

Companies. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/

SAP SE.2 (2019) SAP 2018 Integrated Report. Retrieved from

https://www.sap.com/docs/download/investors/2018/sap-2018-integrated-report.pdf

SAP SE.3 (2019) SAP: A 47-year History of Success. Retrieved from

https://www.sap.com/corporate/en/company/history.html

SAP SE.4 (2019) SAP Investor Relations, Acquisitions. Retrieved from

https://www.sap.com/corporate/en/investors/capital-market-story/acquisitions.html

Glassdoor.com (2019) Top CEOs 2019 Employees’ Choice. Retrieved from

https://www.glassdoor.com/Award/Top-CEOs-LST_KQ0,8.htm

Glassdoor.com (2019, September 8) Aggregated SAP-Reviews Retrieved September 8, 2019 from

https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/SAP-Reviews-E10471.htm

G2.com (2019) Aggregated reviews of SAP ERP suite. Retrieved September 8, 2019 from

https://www.g2.com/products/sap-erp/reviews

McDermott, B. [Bill]. (n.d.) Posts [LinkedIn page] Retrieved September 8, 2019 from

https://www.linkedin.com/in/bill-mcdermott-a18157a5/

Mueller, J. [Juergen]. (n.d.) Posts [LinkedIn page] Retrieved September 8, 2019 from

https://www.linkedin.com/in/juergmueller/
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Forbes (2019) The Worlds Largest Public Companies, 2019 Ranking. Retrieved from

https://www.forbes.com/global2000/list/#industry:Software%20%26%20Programming