How Accurate Was SAP on Reengineering Business Processes?

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Executive Summary

For years SAP has stated that SAP performs reengineering business processes.
In this article, we review the accuracy of this claim.

What SAP Said About How Accurate Was SAP on Reengineering Business Processes?

Business process reengineering was a hot topic and consulting line of business back in the 1980s. The concept, which SAP, Gartner much promoted, and SAP consulting companies (among others), was that the business process could be reengineered or adjusted to match the functionality in SAP. SAP further proposed that whatever the prospect was doing in its existing systems was inferior to the best practices within SAP’s software.

Our References for This Article

If you want to see our references for this article and other related Brightwork articles, see this link.

Notice of Lack of Financial Bias: We have no financial ties to SAP or any other entity mentioned in this article.

This is published by a research entity, not some lowbrow entity that is part of the SAP ecosystem.
Second, no one paid for this article to be written, and it is not pretending to inform you while being rigged to sell you software or consulting services. Unlike nearly every other article you will find from Google on this topic, it has had no input from any company's marketing or sales department. As you are reading this article, consider how rare this is. The vast majority of information on the Internet on SAP is provided by SAP, which is filled with false claims and sleazy consulting companies and SAP consultants who will tell any lie for personal benefit. Furthermore, SAP pays off all IT analysts -- who have the same concern for accuracy as SAP. Not one of these entities will disclose their pro-SAP financial bias to their readers.

The Truth About Reengineering Business Processes?

Reengineering ran out of steam in the early 1990s, but as is covered in the article Reengineering and its Impact on ERP Sales,

SAP told companies to redesign their processes and use SAP’s standard functionality over and over, but it simply was not feasible for the vast majority of functionality. A massive industry built up around coding in the highly inefficient SAP ABAP coding language to place these customer processes into SAP. This was covered in the article Why Did Customers Listen to SAP on ABAP and Coding Tools?

Primarily in the battle between reengineering and customization, customization won.

Conclusion and Calculation

SAP receives a 0% accuracy rating on SAP regarding reengineering to match SAP would lead to significant advantages.

Link to the Parent Article

This is one of many research articles on a specific topic that supports a larger research calculation. For the overview of the research calculation for all of the SAP topics that were part of the study, see the following primary research A Study into SAP’s Accuracy.