All the components of SAP make it scalable ERP to handle all the departments of an organization irrespective of its size thus introduction and training on these components is always beneficial. SAP is a multi-lingual, supports multi-currency and is capable of handling different rules and regulations of different countries, SAP components are the basic force behind ERP to give it versatility and flexibility to adjust according to the required changes and also to make it capable of working on different systems.
There are four main components of SAP and these are SAP technology, Basis, interfaces and modules. SAP technology has been designed to give flexibility and scalability to the SAP ERP software. This technology enables SAP to work with ease with all the departments of large and small organizations. This technology also allows SAP to run on any type of system which saves cost of the user on IT infrastructure and existing setup can be utilized without any problem. It gives SAP ERP multi-lingual, multi-currency features and can work for large organizations with subsidiaries and work with many locations in different countries.
SAP Basis system is another SAP component which handles the interaction with the user, it ensures correct data flow, checks the input is in accordance with the validation clauses and defines screens and flow of logic. The SAP Basis component comprises of four components which are Screen interpreter, ABAP/4 interpreter, Flow control and Data dictionary. Screen interpreter defines and controls the layout of the screens used by the user for inputting the data, it also validates the entries made by the user as per the program specifications and raises error messages in the case of wrong or illegitimate entry.
ABAP/4 is the fourth generation programming language developed by SAP for coding its applications. All the applications and modules are developed in ABAP/4 and ABAP/4 interpreter is responsible for processing the input data and produce the output. Data dictionary holds the definitions of domains, data elements, structures, tables, views, search helps, lock objects, mathcode objects, the table maintenance generator and the table description generator. These descriptions in the dictionary ensure data integrity, management of definitions without redundancy and their integration with other ABAP/4 applications.
Defining data integrity rules in dictionary ensure logical and correct entry of data and defining these rules at dictionary level removes the need of defining them again in every program. Flow control ensures the proper storage of data and execution of any series of commands in the form of batch with same sequence and preferences as described in the syntax.
Interfaces are of three types, user interface, system interface and communication interface. User interface ensures that user get the similar looks of the screen no matter on which computer system they are working on. This gives universal working interface throughout the organization even if IT hardware is different. System interface establishes connectivity with other software used by the organization with SAP applications, these other applications can be SAP or non-SAP applications. The communication interface establishes communication between computers and establishes and manages electronic data transfer.
