A new approach to system customization

For many years, organizations struggled with extremely long project timelines in order to develop information systems that met their specific requirements. Most IT projects used structured development methodologies that were very unforgiving in terms of missed or changing business requirements. The development of custom code was a tedious process requiring armies of programmers as well as significant end-user involvement.

The project timeline was also extended because often business owners didn’t know what they wanted until they saw it, which led to what is commonly referred to in the IT industry as analysis paralysis in projects. Upon project completion, large IT staffs needed to be retained to maintain the custom programming and to update the programs with requirements that may have changed during the long development cycle. Numerous companies also had departmentalized systems, which oftentimes did not share information. These numerous departmental system became “Information Silos” within the organization. Separate systems per function and/or department can lead to inconsistent results.

These disparate and numerous systems also created the need for many distinct interfaces between systems that were not designed to talk with each other. Despite the interfaces, the systems would never be integrated. Worst of all, accounting systems were updated with financial data by means of batch programs. Batch programs are run on a fixed schedule, generally daily, weekly, or monthly, which means that the data is never current.

To fulfill the new requirements of information systems, a new breed of software systems, now called Enterprise Resource Planning [ERP]systems, was created, ERP systems provide a single source of data with designed integrated between different functional modules [for example, Accounting, Sales and Distribution, Materials Management, Production Planning, and so on] to talk full advantage of an enterprise’s stored information. A common set of source code was needed for these packages so that changes in technology could be rapidly introduced via upgrades to the understand the client concept in this light when you are just starting out in SAP. In the standard project setting, there will be three environments: the development environment, the quality assurance/testing environment [QA], and the production environment. Within each environment there are different clients that are used for specified purposes.