SAP is mainly an ERP system, but it has various modules dealing with stuff from Purchase Orders and Materials Management to HR. It can be very large and extreme

SAP is mainly an ERP system, but it has various modules dealing with stuff from Purchase Orders and Materials Management to HR. It can be very large and extremely expensive, like over $1 billion for one company in ~ 20 years. It can be customized in many ways, good consultants are very expensive and the cheap ones are usually a waste of money. Without customization very few companies can map their processes on out of the box SAP. It was developed a very long time ago, it has a huge adoption in large companies and a few years ago when they migrated from R3 to Hana one of their own people told us in an architecture review meeting that they have over 300,000 built in reports to migrate. In many cases companies are adopting SAP because "nobody was ever fired for buying IBM". Anecdotical, the company where my brother works is implementing SAP and changed all existing networking gear with Cisco because "this is what big companies do". They threw away brand new equipment and spent several millions on the SAP implementation that is still not working, forecasting they will pay even more millions to make it work then millions per year to use it.