Easy Service Marketplace

The SAP Service Marketplace web site is a monster of information overload, which seems to attest to the comprehensive amount of products and services available from SAP.  The Product menu option has options for SAP ERP, CRM, PLM, SCM, SRM and more.  SAP is known for its enterprise resource planning & customer relationship management, so you can probably figure out the first and second acronyms.   Googling PLM seems to suggest something about pathetic little monkeys.  SAP is a market leader in the supply-chain management segment.  But whose to say SCM doesn't stand for Synchronous Channel Mixer or Sweetened Condensed Milk? There are at least 379 possible meanings to the SCM acronym.

And don't get me started on Flash and popups.

more breadcrumbs than an Italian bakery... and all I wanted was to order a CD!

Here are some  acronyms from SAP, related to SAP and technology in general.  I used to work with a customer who maintained a database of thousands of internal acronyms just to help people navigate their own jobs.  Needless to say it was a large monopoly with thousands of employees, multiple purchasing systems, a web site with 100,000 pages, 47 unique customer identifiers, and 52 billing systems to bill them.  I'm not sure how many people found that acronym database but it was like finding the Rosetta Stone for me.

One of my first exposures to SAP was bringing data from R/2 and other systems into SQL Server to provide an ASP.NET consolidated reporting site for stationery and office supply purchases.  We found out for the customer that they could save over 1 million dollars a year just by ensuring their stationery cabinets were locked in August.  That year the school system in Canada was short 1 million dollars in stationery...

A site I discovered to help navigate the SAP landscape and their acronyms is Easy Service Marketplace.  It is a retro 90's-style no-frills version of the site with some useful links to some of the core marketplace offerings.  It seems mainly to focus on the legacy aspects of SAP (no HANA info here) but some of the shortcuts are true gems.

If you think popups are for spammers, and breadcrumbs are something found in a salad, this site might be a refreshing trip back to 1995 to get fast access to SAP resources.

Or there's always the Wayback Machine.  Ahhhh... Systemanalyse und Programmentwicklung... 1996 was a good year for you...  The 1996 site map back then and today's map.