In the procurement sector, SAP has come a long way over the years. From nearly unusable eProcurement requisitioning tools that required twenty clicks to research and make a purchase — from the limited three suppliers in your catalog — to an initial sourcing capability that nearly matched a combination of Excel and Office for its robustness, SAP’s early efforts in the sector left quite a bit to be desired. Today, SAP SRM 7.0, though few companies are willing to take the plunge and buy it, is at least a solid competitor to best-of-breed providers like Ariba — especially when organizations work with SAP partners on supplier enablement, invoice automation and related areas. And SAP E-Sourcing, even though its functional capability is beginning to look dated, continues to offer perhaps the strongest back-end SAP integration capabilities in the market combined with the best overall configuration abilities thanks to an architecture that was truly ahead of its time.
Yet will SAP ever be the “Apple” of its market, as co-chief executive Bill McDermott is claiming? Read the commentary and related analysis over on the NYT’s blog if you’re interested. Granted, it makes sense for SAP to stay focused on the business applications area, which the NYT quotes McDermott as noting is the “mainstay business of supplying the software companies use to manage their finances, customer accounts, manufacturing and procurement.”
