SAP Business Suite 7 Now Available to Customers Worldwide

May 13, 2009
SAP AG has announced that its Business Suite 7 is now generally available to customers worldwide.

SAP AG has announced that its Business Suite 7 is now generally available to customers worldwide. Following a successful ramp-up period, large enterprises across all industries can now modularly deploy industry-specific end-to-end processes that cut across application boundaries; ease upgrades and reduce IT costs with SAP enhancement packages; and capture growth opportunities through insight gained from analytics tools embedded within SAP Business Suite 7.

More than 300 customers in all major industries across 37 countries participated in the six-month ramp-up program for SAP Business Suite 7, designed to help customers achieve business value from SAP solutions and communicate their experiences to SAP development experts. Several customers are already live and productively using the new SAP Business Suite.

Customers of all sizes and from all industries, such as Centerpoint Energy, Centrica British Gas, Colgate-Palmolive, Dow Corning, Emil Loffelhardt, Exxaro, Hindustan Unilever Limited, IBM, Natural Oil & Gas, Northern Kentucky University and Roche, were key to the success of the SAP Business Suite 7 ramp-up phase by implementing, testing and providing feedback on its key attributes.

Since early 2009, German real estate management company Strabag Property & Facility Services GmbH (Strabag PFS) has been using SAP Business Suite 7 and has already benefited from using SAP enhancement packages.

New Functional Capabilities

The modular, reduced-risk IT approach of the new SAP Business Suite not only helps companies remain competitive in turbulent economic times, but also positions them to quickly capture profitable business opportunities during the economic recovery. For instance, to support companies with their business, the new SAP Business Suite delivers more than 150 functional innovations to better address customer business requirements, including new process collaboration and shared service capabilities, enabling customers to manage complex financial and supply chain processes more easily.

To further support customers in reducing the total cost of ownership, SAP devised a synchronized release schedule for all core SAP Business Suite 7 applications--SAP ERP, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supplier Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management and SAP Product Lifecycle Management--designed to meet the specific business requirements of all industries.

Other key capabilities of the new SAP Business Suite include:

  • Enhancement packages will help customers reduce cost and complexity by delivering future innovations in a minimally-disruptive fashion. Enhancement packages allow customers to select and deploy only the functionality they need without upgrading their solution--leaving long implementations, upgrades and disintegrated point solutions in the past.
  • Value Scenarios focus on solving industry-specific business issues with end-to-end processes that span across lines of business and application boundaries. Value scenarios can be implemented in a step-wise fashion and deployed as customers need them. To further accelerate implementation, SAP Consulting offers implementation services to help speed the success of SAP Business Suite projects.
  • Expanded industry-specific footprint addresses critical business requirements, across all industries, including enhanced supply chain and warehousing processes for trading, logistics and manufacturing industries; improved customer lifecycle management solutions for service and trading industries; investigative case management, tax and revenue management and other service processes for public sector organizations; and advanced metering infrastructure integration and deregulation compliance solutions for the utility industry.
  • Harmonized user interfaces provide a more simplified and consistent user experience when implementing a process that spans across multiple applications.
  • Embedded analytics tools help customers take action on insights gained across demand, production, inventory, sales and supplier activities across their extended business networks.
  • Improved software lifecycle management through integration with the SAP NetWeaver technology platform and the new SAP Business Suite can reduce landscape complexity by consolidating instances and transferring transactional data from retired systems to SAP Business Suite.
  • 2,800 enterprise services enable the flexible, modular development of differentiating one's own practices.
  • Solution manager allows SAP administrators to implement content changes to SAP Business Suite applications, which reduces downtime, accelerates implementations and reduces the total cost of ownership of the IT landscape.

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