Study of SAP R/3 Architecture

Submitted by: Manjinder Singh Sohi mss046000@utdallas.edu

Outline
What is SAP? SAP R/3 Architecture Components of SAP R/3 Features of SAP R/3 Issues Conclusion

Manjinder Singh Sohi

What is SAP?
SAP (System Application and Product) is the name of the biggest European German Software company as well as the name of software itself. The company was founded in 1972 by the five IBM employees. SAP R/3 Software has been developed using ABAP/4 as a programming language. SAP is the ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system that aims to integrate all the different modules(SD,MM,CO,HR etc) in the company.The integration results in consistency of data throught out the system and the company as a whole. As of 2005, SAP employs over 28,900 people in more than 50

countries.

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SAP R/3 Architecture

SAP R/3 is one of the main product of SAP,where R stands for RealTime and the number 3 relates to three tier application architecture(Data base,Application Server and Client). Most of the business in todays world runs on SAP R/3 system.About 80% of the companies implemented this software.

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SAP R/3 Architecture (Continued)

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Components of SAP R/3 Architecture

Internet communication Manager(ICM)-set up connection to internet. Supports protocol HTTP,SMTP. Dispatcher distributes the requests to the work processes. If all the processes are occupied then the requests are stored in dispatcher queue. ABAP Work Process executes the ABAP code. SAP gateway makes the RFC interface between SAP instances available. Message server exchanges the messages and balances the load.

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Features
Scalability Open Standard Support Robustness

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Feature-Scalability
The architecture is such that it can be easily scalable if the load at one server is increased. As application is independent from the data base and the presentation layer then the servers can be replicated in order to balance the load. Gateway component using RFC adds many SAP servers to it.

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Feature-Supports open standards

SAP R/3 architecture is designed to be support most of the open standard available today.It can run on UNIX,NT,AIX etc. Customization language used:ABAP/4 Netweaver:ABAP/4 and JAVA

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Robustness
SAP R/3 is highly robust as a whole. All the components work in the coordinated manner. So they will work as a whole in order to solve the unexpected scenario.

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Issues
No cache memory in ICM In SAP R/3 architecture ,clients treated as dumb terminals. Complex Architecture No Support for other languages.

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Issues:No Cache
ICM(Internet Connection Manager) ICM uses the threads to parallelize the load that comes up.

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Issue:R/3 models desktops as dumb terminals

Today desktops are very powerful and they can be used to do a large part of computation. But in SAP,there is other way round.

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Issue:Complex Architecture
Today the technology is changing so fast that the code of SAP R/3 architecture becomes large and more complex. So the possibility of falls behind and not keeping up with the current technology..

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Issue:No support for other languages.

SAP R/3 architecture only supports ABAP/4 language. New architecture from SAP-Netweaver supports JAVA also. But still support for other popular languages C/C++ etc left.

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In the Nut-shell
Even though SAP R/3 architecture supports scalability,security etc but still there are many issues that are to be resolved. Issues:No cache,customization problem,No Programming language support(C/C++),Complex architecture,treat clients as dumb.

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References
http://help.sap.com/saphelp_nw04/helpdata/en/84/549 53fc405330ee10000000a114084/content.htm[date accessed April 20,2005) Original SAP R/3 release 6.20 (2003) Library Documentation. SAP-Help UTD-SOM(SAP Users Group) http://www.hp.com/hpbooks/prentice/chapters/0130280 844.pdf[date accessed April 20,2004] www. sapfans.com/[date accessed April 20,2005]

Manjinder Singh Sohi