Himanshu Goel - Handbook for SAP PP in S/4HANA: Production Planning and Execution in SAP S/4HANA

This Apress imprint is published by the registered company APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

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First of all, I would like to thank my beloved wife Akanksha for all her support and encouragement, which kept me going through the writing process.

I would like to thank my dear friend Diwakar Sharma for his guidance and thorough review of the book.

This book wouldnt be possible without Jawad Akhtar. He connected with me one fine day after reading one of my SAP blogs and planted the idea of writing a book on SAP in my head.

I would like to give a big thank you to the entire team at Apress!

I would like to thank Divya Modi, coordinating editor at Apress, for her great support during the process and her patience with my hectic schedule. Furthermore, many thanks to Laura Berendson, development editor at Apress, who provided her valuable suggestions during the review process.

First things first, SAP is pronounced S-A-P. You say the individual letters S-A-P (ess-ay-pee). This is due to the fact that SAP is an initialism and not an acronym. If you have been pronouncing it as SAP, now you know its wrong.

What if I told you that SAP is none of these? As a matter of fact, SAP is a German company that was founded in 1972 by five ex-IBM engineers. SAP stands for Systeme, Anwendungen und Produkte in der Datenverarbeitung in German, which translates to Systems, Applications, and Products in Data Processing in English.

SAP AG develops software products used by companies to manage their business operations, best known for its ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning ). But it also develops many other products and solutions such as Ariba, Concur, IBP, several cloud-base products, and more. SAP S/4HANA is SAPs latest product and its the successor to SAP ERP. Its built for the SAP HANA in-memory database.

SAP S/4HANA is an abbreviation of SAP Business Suite 4 SAP HANA, which is an enterprise resource planning (ERP) software package. SAP S/4HANA is the successor to SAP ECC (SAP ERP Central Component). Generation 4 is the first SAP business suite to run only on the proprietary SAP HANA (High-Speed Analytical Appliance) database platform.

The SAP S/4HANA business suite is used by companies across the globe to manage their operations, including sales, procurement, planning (advanced), production, inventory management, warehouse management, transport management, finance, human resources, and more. The biggest strength of SAP lies in the unified integration of all business functions, which help businesses run their operations in real time. Companies all over the globe use SAP S/4HANA as a single source of truth for informed decision-making. SAP S/4HANA combines analytical and transactional capabilities.

Now that you know what SAP stands for and how it is correctly pronounced, I want to share some funny acronyms for SAP that you may come across in your SAP career. SAP has been known to be called Slow and Painful, Slow and Problematic, Seriously Annoying Program, and Submit and Pray, to name a few.

ERP stands for Enterprise Resource Planning . Companies need software systems to run their day-to-day business operations, including sales, manufacturing, procurement, finance, human resources, and so on. ERP aids organizations in running their business functions, like logistics, supply chains, finance, human resources, and so on. The strength of ERP lies in the fact that it integrates all business functions into a single platform.