SAP: Short form, Short codes.

Previously in my post, I highlighted that SAP consultants love to use short-codes / abbreviation to explain the mechanics of SAP. Today, I will explain few of the short codes widely used in SAP to illustrate the point.

• SAP R/3
  Is the 3-tiered transactional business application of SAP. 3 means 3-tiered, presentation layer (SAP GUI), application layer (ABAP layer), and DB layer (Oracle/Mssql or any other DB).
• FI - Financials Accounting
  This is the core module of R/3. Every other module is tightly integrated with FI. FI is where the accounting book, GL (General Ledger), AP (Accounts Payable), AR (Accounts Receivable) resides.
• CO - Controlling
  This is the "management" aspect of financial. Costing, Revenue is determine here. You can define Cost Center, Profit Center, Cost Object, Internal yada yada yada here. This is used by management to plan cost/revenue flow effectively.
• HR - Human Resource
  Anything related to people.
• AM - Asset Maintenance
  Management of fixed asset, purchase, depreciation etc.
• PS - Project System
  Use for management of Project related stuff. Either it's CAPEX, OPEX or Customer in nature. You can define level of WBS (Work-breakdown structure) of the project.
• PM - Plant Maintenance
  Everything related to equipment preventive maintenance, management etc.
• MM - Materials Management
  Procurement and inventory tracking. This is where you can have the so-called 'Just In Time Inventory'. Gone are the days of having a huge warehouse just to store spares.
• SD - Sales and Distribution
  This module handles from customer sales order to delivery of product, and billing.
• ABAP - Advance Business Application Programming
  In house Business Programming Language of SAP. Instead of manipulating database directly, you use modified OpenSQL to access Business Objects.
• BW - Business Warehousing
  Unlike R/3 which is OLTP in nature (transactional based), BW is an OLAP (analytical in nature. Used for statistical reporting and such) tool. It handles data ETL (Extraction, Transformation and Loading), query, and complex analysis. BW can obtain it's source from different source system, be it SAP R/3 system, or from different sources altogether.

There. This is just a small list of what to come. Yes, I do get lost sometimes with all the jargon and stuff. But nothing beats this typical conversation with an SAP consultant: " Hey, can you SAP Logon into R/3, check in FI module and make a GL posting FB50 so that I can create an ABAP program to interface with BW, to produce a nice report using Bex?".

Anyway, I guess the reason for all this short codes is, SAP is a screen-based, dialog kinda module. So, every transaction is attached to what they called a T-Code. For example, to make a GL posting you only need to type 'FB50' in the SAP GUI command line. Thus leads us to the overzealousness use of abbreviation in the everyday life of an SAP consultant.