Introduction

Welcome, and thank you for picking up this latest edition of Sams Teach Yourself SAP in 24 Hours. Inside these pages you will find six newly renovated SAP parts and 24 hours of instruction refocused to better teach the SAP newcomer. My colleagues and I have spent a considerable amount of time aligning the content with what a person new to SAP needs to know up front, and we’ve done this from several different perspectives—the information technologist, the end user, the project manager, the wannabe SAP developer or programmer, and the business professional.

We have organized each hour (or chapter) around one of several common themes, beginning naturally with introductory materials useful in helping most anyone understand the underlying technology, business basics, and various SAP implementation roadmaps. Next, we cover SAP’s products and components in detail, laying the groundwork for the next part of the book, which covers implementing SAP. By addressing SAP deployment from project management, business, and technology perspectives, we have strived to give our readers enough real-world breadth and depth to make the book a truly useful guide. Additional SAP technical considerations round out this breadth and depth, followed by a section focused on end users: how to log in, use the various SAP interfaces, customize the interface, and execute common business functions such as reports and queries. The final part of the book concludes with materials designed to help our readers land a job in SAP, including pointers to readily available Internet-based and other resources.