It is common perception that SAP is very difficult to customize as compared to its competitors Oracle, or Microsoft. Many organizations believe customization of SAP ERP can be extremely expensive. Many organizations feel the highest share of expense in SAP implementation goes on making changes as per the requirements of the organization, therefore, new features are provided in SAP to enable easy customization. SAP can be customized by its partners and customers, according to their needs using the various tools provided by the ERP provider.
Extension Points - Extension points provide easy modifications in functionalities. The developmental environment of Netweaver has provided a platform to allow users to customize the system and there are two types of developmental environment provided through Netweaver. One of the environments is powered by ABAP and the other environment is powered by Java.
Business Add-Ins - The extension points are called the Business Add-Ins, and the organizations that do not have provisions to use the features can contact provider for developmental services. The standards version of the software has Business add-in, in which, industries can define unique functions of their organization as per the changed requirements.
Development using Netweaver - The solution can be extended to provide custom components using Netweaver which provides the developmental environment. The custom development is provided by a team of project managers, architects and developers, and the team can provide safe and flexible customized service, which supports upward compatibility and prevents errors caused by modifications in code.
Various products such as Business One and R/3 follow different procedures for modification.
Business One
It enables an organization to integrate the software to other applications and change processes to meet the future needs. In Business One, a software development kit is provided that has a user interface and a data interface. The SAP SDK of Business One uses "Open" technology and it can be integrated to the product of other vendors such as Microsoft Visual Studio. The software uses tools which can be used for coding and configuring processes according to the requirements.
R/3
R/3 provides a set of tools which can be used for configuring and managing business processes. The implementation management guide provides the procedure which can be used to configure and customize the system. The R/3 reference model comes with configuration feature, in which, thousands of business activities and hundred business scenarios can be created.
The reference model contains five views: the process view to see the event driven chains, function view for business functions, information flow view which provides the information flow between various processes, data view to define the clusters of data and organization view to define the relationship between various units of enterprise.
Users can define the parameters in tables and use the view which best suits the organization. The requirements which cannot be found in reference model can be programmed with ABAP/4 i.e. the ABAP/4 development workbench.
For rapid implementation the tool called Accelerated SAP is provided that helps in analyzing, configuring and designing the processes.
