Learning ERP (SAP R/3) Via the Internet:
A Student Perspective
Robert
Fogle Figueroa
Merten Foerster
Florida Gulf Coast University
Fort Myers, Florida, USA
&
Hochschule Harz University
Wernigerode, Germany
Email: robertfig@earthlink.net
merten.foerster@hvr5.siemens.de
Abstract
This paper presents a student perspective of an ERP (SAP R/3) course delivered via the Internet and involving an international collaboration between universities, instructors, and students in Germany and the United States. Content, methods and approaches are examined from this student perspective. The paper explores the psychological and social issues involved in learning this subject via this mode of delivery as much as the technical and procedural ones. The student authors additionally use the experience, together with subsequent ones as interns with an R/3–focused consulting group, to discuss SAP R/3 learning issues generally.
Keywords
Business engineering, Distance / Internet-delivered education, Electronic business, Enterprise resource planning, Enterprise strategy, MySAP.com, SAP R/3, SAP R/3 online learning resources, SAP R/3 consulting, Student perspectives of Internet-delivered education, Virtual education
INTRODUCTION
Most of the growing number of educators conducting courses over the Internet have not experienced such courses as students. In terms of reaching critical mass in our collective consciousness, the Internet is still quite young: its use as a structured teaching medium remains relatively new and experimental. Thoughtful student perspectives tend consequently to be highly sought after and valued on the part of many educators in many disciplines, all seeking the most effective methods and approaches. This student-authored paper represents one modest attempt to help provide this perspective in information technology (IT) education, specifically in the area of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), and more specifically still, in terms of the leading ERP system, SAP R/3 (http//:www.sap.com).
The particular Internet learning experience described here carried challenges destined to become, we believe, increasingly common in distance education in this global information age: complex content delivered from another continent (a six hour time difference in this case) by an instructor whose first language (German) is not that of his students (English). Meeting these challenges involved more than the technological and procedural issues of enabling effective communication and interaction between students and teacher, and between students and the R/3 system, all of which will be discussed to some extent below. At least as important—and deserving of equal space here—are the social and psychological aspects of engaging in this unique form of educational endeavor.
In addition to their examination of the course in question, the authors extend the discussion to include a conversation about the issues, challenges, and rewards involved with learning R/3 generally (both online and off), based on their student experience as well as on a subsequent internship with an R/3–focused consulting group (see below).
By way of explanation, when this ERP course transpired, in the fall of 1999, one of the authors was a student at Florida Gulf Coast University (FGCU), the other at Hochschule Harz University in Wernigerode, Germany. They participated in the course in quite different ways and from opposite sides of the Atlantic. While the American student’s participation occurred entirely over the Internet, the German student (at the time the two students were enrolled in different programs and courses that were connected only by the fact they shared the same instructor and R/3 system) was co-located with the instructor as well as the physical R/3 installation at Harz University. This allowed the German student hands-on experience with the R/3 system directly, while the American student’s access to the system over the Internet was more limited and indirect. This did not, however, prevent the exchanging of several roles in R/3-enabled electronic business (e-business) scenarios (such as that of an overseas customer and a Sales and Distribution employee) between the German and American students. Nevertheless, the student authors collaborated in a quite limited way in the course. Thus the Internet perspective that makes up a good portion of this paper is provided largely by the American student. The German student contributes a more experienced, hands-on, and in-depth view of learning SAP, as both a university student and as an intern training as an R/3 consultant (again, see below).
Subsequent to the course (and because of it) the two authors have had the opportunity to meet and learn together in person as fellow students at Hochschule Harz (through an exchange program; the German student will enroll in FGCU in the spring of 2001). Their collaboration also owes a large debt to Siemens Business Services (SBS) in Hanover, Germany (http://www.siemens.com/sbs/en/company/index.html), where at the time of this writing (summer 2000) both are engaged in internships involving R/3-related projects.
ERP
AS ENTERPRISE STRATEGY - Student Impressions of an Internet ERP Course
1. Introducing Enterprise Strategy, Systems, and Resource Planning—and Greetings from Germany
Entitled “Enterprise Strategy,” the graduate level course described here (for the spring 2000 version of the course Web site see http://ruby.fgcu.edu/courses/djohnson/ism6336/) was offered within the computer information systems (CIS) program in the College of Business at FGCU. Collaboratively taught by an American instructor, Dr. David Johnson (djohnson@fgcu.edu), and a German instructor, Professor Hans-Jürgen Scheruhn (hscheruhn@fh-harz.de), the first half occurred conventionally in weekly classroom meetings. The American professor led a wide-ranging exploration of enterprise level IT planning and management concepts and issues, some of which include:
· The role of corporate culture, IT specialists, and top management commitment, as well as the information literacy of users across an enterprise, in determining the success of strategic IS initiatives;
· The crisis of management in an information age characterized by accelerating technological advances and constant organizational change and an ever-shifting, increasingly global and information-based competitive landscape; and
· The advantages (over their antecedents and alternatives) of process-focused business engineering, object-oriented programming and design, integrated, open, and distributed client-server systems, the Internet as a business medium and of Web-based standards and protocols—as well as the challenges and issues inherent in these trends and paradigms.
Several cases, taken from Applegate et al (1999), gave a real-world perspective to these subjects, including the virtual corporation strategy of Verifone, the Singapore IT architecture initiative, the Xerox-EDS outsourcing agreement, and a historical perspective on the evolution of IS strategy (and related organizational changes) at Frito Lay starting from the early 80s.
In retrospect, this part of the course provided an excellent overview of enterprise IS issues; it encouraged the students to consider the complexity and challenges of managing enterprises and the systems so critical to their success. However, since the first half of the course was intended to lay the groundwork for the ERP focus of the second half—the more in-depth and technical study of a particular enterprise system—the subject of ERP should have been more formally introduced and discussed during this first part of the course, which would have provided a more fluid transition to the second.
As it was, there occurred an abrupt shift in content at the course halfway point, which was paralleled by equally abrupt changes in delivery mode and instructor: the US-based professor stepped aside and the Germany-based instructor introduced himself and his subject via an electronic presentation from the course Web page, complete with photograph and introductory voice recording (the course switched to Internet delivery largely without class meetings).
Figure 1: Greetings from
your professor in Germany
In the authors’ experience, many students—even IT students—are apprehensive to some extent about the prospect of Internet-delivered instruction. In this case the apprehension was heightened by the American students’ pending introduction to the largest and most sophisticated software system they had seen. Additionally, the students worried about possible language and even cultural issues (e.g., differences in academic systems and expectations) stemming from the instructor’s nationality. The American professor attempted to allay such anxieties, but since at the time he himself was relatively unfamiliar with ERP, SAP, and with the German professor (this was the first instance of their collaboration), he had limited success. The pervading feeling among the students at the outset of this new stage in the course was uncertainty, of beginning a journey into parts unknown. At this point their American professor was simply a fellow traveler.
2. Welcome to SAP
Like an elephant, SAP R/3, upon introduction, commands your attention. Students’ vague uneasiness was soon replaced by a much more directed emotion, the feeling one gets when opening an extraordinarily thick textbook in a completely new subject—a balance of intimidation (i.e., ‘how will I ever learn all this?’) and fascination. Instructors in SAP (and similar systems) would do well to recall this feeling in their own experience. The key to engaging students is to find ways early on to tip that balance in favor of the inherent fascination of such an ambitious, heavyweight program.
This was exactly the approach used by Professor Scheruhn, whose introductory presentations emphasized the business theory, goals, and practice of R/3. They described how industries applied the rigorous, best-practice-based, process and workflow-focused components of R/3 to reengineer how they conducted business (Business Process Engineering—BPE)—everything from tightening their supply chains to rationalizing their human resource practices. The professor presented an overview of the extraordinarily large spectrum of industry-specific components, had his students explore the abundant online information available at SAP.com, such as the solutions map and the impressive list of SAP customers across a host of industries (including several companies in Florida).
The readings (Curran and Keller 1998; Rebstock and Hildebrandt 1999; Scheer 1998) related ERP and R/3 to business engineering theory—including business objects, object-oriented design, and various forms of business, process, and system modeling—and to the history of SAP and its role in the BPE movement.
3. Lecture Methods and Approaches
The introductory and subsequent lessons were delivered via the Internet primarily through weekly electronic lectures in the form of Microsoft PowerPoint presentations. These presentations could be opened or downloaded from the course Web page, which contained relevant links, assigned readings, and assignments for the week (see http://www2.fh-harz.de/~hscheruhn/veranst/SyllabusISM6336.html). Each presentation began with learning objectives, and contained notes attached to most slides—notes with numerous references (and in some cases hyperlinks) to related and previous lectures and materials. This encouraged (and often required) students to review—most students found that frequently referring to slides from previous (and in some cases subsequent) lectures was essential to following the current lesson, as the content and concepts were heavily inter-related—and the considerable amount of information covered added to this requirement. Figure 2 represents one example of a such a reference (italicized by the authors), from the third lecture, which introduced the ARIS business engineering tool-set from IDS Scheer (http://www.ids-scheer.com/). This also represents a typical example of the complexity of the lectures (as well as a good sample of the German instructor’s generally excellent if rather dense, breathless, and charmingly idiomatic English).
This architecture – we are regarding it’s so
called Requirements Definition layer - is very helpful reducing the complexity
of business processes and understanding the corresponding database and
module structure (of R/3 like MM, SD-SLS,...). Weakness of this
architecture is that Business Objects e.g. like inquiry and the
corresponding methods are separated into so called Data view and Function
view. Therefore SAP has additionally implemented a special Business
Workflow adaptation of this architecture in R/3 consisting only of the 3
views Organization, Process and Business Object by concentrating function
and data view into the Business Object Repository (BOR) as shown on the last PowerPoint of ERP1b.
Figure 2: Lecture slide
example with notes
These lecture presentations were exceptionally well organized and thorough, providing a plethora of well-executed, informative diagrams, screen shots, and other helpful graphic and textual information (the reader can access these slides from the course Web page previously referenced). They obviously represented a tremendous amount of thought and work on the part of the instructor (whose dedication and involvement throughout the course impressed more than one of his students). Yet the very richness of this approach also presented procedural/organizational challenges for the students, especially when the presentations served as a guide to hands-on procedures involving connecting to an R/3 e-business scenario (lecture 5 – see Table 1) . The typical number of simultaneously open windows and applications on the students’ workstations tended to tax both the systems themselves and the students ability to manage their “learning-space,” i.e., their screens and windows. In the authors’ experience, this issue applies to most stand-alone Internet-delivered or computer based education—a challenge that accentuates the lingering limitations of PC technology, and indeed the prevailing Workstation / Windows paradigm itself. Given these screen size and memory limitations, one can imagine different approaches and enhancements to electronic education, such as dedicated, primarily text-based tablets (so-called electronic books), student workstations equipped with multiple integrated screens, as well as more structured and elegant use of frames and other screen-sharing and information-organizing technologies. Until such improvements become widely available, instructors should bear in mind the risk of this particular kind of information overload (an editorial note on the hardcopy alternative: expecting students to print out reams of paper is good neither for the limited student budget or the limited resources of the planet).
4. Lecture Contents and their Perceived Effectiveness
The ERP part of the course employed an apparent strategy of first introducing and exploring the theory of R/3, with the goal of providing students with an overview understanding of the system—its purpose, power, and potential—followed by more technical detail, and finally hands-on experience (via e-business scenarios). All this was designed to give the students, in just a six week period, an introductory familiarity and a degree of comfort with R/3 (and the interest to gain more in subsequent courses and experiences). In our view this strategy largely succeeded, at least in the case of well-motivated students. Table 1 summarizes this strategy in terms of specific topics presented and their sequence. Learning objectives are also summarized. The table presents the authors’ impressions in terms of relative level of detail (higher, moderate, or introductory) and effectiveness of the content in facilitating the students’ meeting of the stated learning objectives (highly effective, moderately effective, not very effective).
Note that this evaluation is biased (probably unfairly) toward the presentation aspects of the lectures; the required and suggested reading provided more detail (and made the lectures consequently more effective, at least theoretically) in many cases. But because the focus of this paper is primarily Internet-delivered ERP education, we chose to concentrate our evaluation on the online information (most of the reading material was in the form of texts on reserve at the FGCU library).
Lecture Title |
Main Topics |
Detail Level |
Learning Objectives |
Effective? |
|
1. Overview of ERP and R/3: |
Ø Application areas Ø Industry solutions Ø Models, Workflow, business objects |
Ø intro. Ø intro. Ø intro. |
Learn: > ERP characteristics |
> highly |
|
2. Overview: Plus: Teaching (& Learning) R/3 |
Ø R/3 architecture Ø ABAP development / External app.
Integration Ø Bus. Objects Ø Workflow Ø Teaching R/3 |
Ø moderate Ø moderate Ø higher Ø moderate Ø moderate |
Learn R/3: > technical characteristics |
> moderately |
|
3. Business Process Engineering – |
Ø Bus. Process approach Ø Workflow Ø Architecture of IS Ø Process models & views |
Ø higher Ø moderate Ø higher Ø higher |
Learn R/3: > bus. processes & characteristics > Learn ARIS, use it to create process models |
> highly > highly |
|
4. Business Process Engineering – |
Ø Data types, models, views, relationships Ø Organizational units and modeling |
Ø higher Ø moderate |
Learn R/3’s: > data & org. models |
> highly |
|
5. ERP and E- |
Ø Evolution of integrated bus. Solutions Ø E-bus. Scenarios (including MySAP.com
test drive) Ø Sales process integration on the Internet Ø E-bus workflow |
Ø moderate Ø higher Ø higher Ø higher |
Learn: > purpose and characteristics of e-bus. scenario Compare: > Customer vs. Employee roles |
> highly > moderately |
|
6. Sales Order Processing and Analyzing |
Ø Sales and Distribution Ø Case Studies: cust. master data, cust.
order processing via SAP GUI |
Ø higher Ø moderate |
None presented (see the following section for Web
board questions which provided additional learning objectives) |
|
Table 1: Lecture topics
5. Assignments, Discussions and Interactions
Though we have devoted several pages to discussing content and delivery mechanisms, in our experience the greatest amount of learning in any educational collaboration tends to occur as the result of the less structured and more spontaneous experiences common to all reasonably well-conceived and -executed courses. Examples include striving to understand and complete assignments, whether individually or as a team; discussing concepts and issues with instructors and fellow students; and engaging in exercises, presentations and scenarios. While facilitating this over the Internet requires some care and forethought, technologies such as electronic presentations, email, Web boards, and online chat do allow for fairly rich experiences of this kind. Our course serves as a case in point.
Assignments
Student assignments were listed on the course Web page, as part of each lecture. For the most part they required students to construct presentations using MS PowerPoint, which were then published on the course Web page, where they could be viewed by the instructor (and fellow students, and potentially anyone on the Internet). Assignment 1, for example, asked students to choose a particular R/3 business solution to describe (e.g., Customer Relation Management or Business Information Warehouse). Assignment 2 was as follows:
Students have to describe in
teamwork a sales business processes (as shown in the notes view of
PowerPointERP1b-16) using only! the 5 Business Objects, assigned attributes,
methods and events as specified below. Make sure that every business step
starts with an appropriate start event ( create new ones if required) of the
related Business Object. Be aware that describing the sales business process
same BOs might be used at different times with different methods.
Listed below these instructions were a number of business objects, their methods and attributes. Note that these directions offer little in the way of procedural guidelines or expectations, such as length, modeling approaches and tools to use, etc. This decidedly open-ended approach, which characterized most of the assignments in this course, puts the onus on the students to interpret the assignment in terms of what we have learned, and what we think is most important. The authors’ personally find this a challenging and rewarding learning process—we must grapple with and finally grasp the concepts in order to present them meaningfully.
But we are aware (and instructors should be as well) that while some students excel in this environment, others tend to get lost without extensive detailed instructions. Such was the case with a few of our fellow students in this course.
Subsequent assignments included revisiting the above assignment, this time using the ARIS tool (by means of a 40-day demonstration license); building data and organizational models; and carrying out employee role-based R/3 Business Workflow tasks while connected to R/3 via the Web (we carried out the scenario in the role of customers as well). This e-business scenario is detailed further and more technically in Scheruhn et. al (2000). As students we found it an enjoyable and illuminating hands-on exercise in exploring some of the requirements and potential of R/3-based e-business. It was also a chance to interact with an alternative to the MySAP.com Test Drive R/3 system: the transactions occurred through an R/3 Information Transaction Server (ITS) at Hochschule Harz.
Discussions and Interactions
A viable substitute for directed in-class discussion in Internet courses is provided by Web board posting, which has the advantage—in our view—of forcing students to articulate our thoughts in writing. Together with the fact that the discussion can happen asynchronously, allowing time flexibility, this encourages more thoughtful, considered contributions to discussion threads. This applies to instructors as well—as students we greatly appreciate and learn much from thoughtful instructor feedback. In our course the professor posted questions for each lecture, and added his own contributions to our response threads. Some question examples:
·
Discuss the issues involved in using ERP systems at mid-sized
companies. (Lecture 1)
·
Discuss the benefits of R/3 business objects in terms of attributes,
methods, events, tables, internal and external applications, workflow and
e-commerce. (Lecture 2)
·
Discuss the steps you went through in our e-commerce scenario. What is your order status, and what are your
open items? (Lecture 5)
In contrast to the Web board, the weekly online chats served a predominately social function. The professor seemed even more curious about his students than we were about him. Little meaningful discussion of course topics or concepts occurred via this medium. Yet its value has to be measured in social and psychological benefits. As students we found it reassuring to engage in friendly conversation with our virtual professor. For the majority of students, any lingering anxieties and doubts about the course evaporated after the first such chat.
It was reassuring as well that our virtual professor always responded promptly to our emails. He frequently initiated email exchanges himself, often inquiring, for example, whether we needed any further help or guidance with our assignments.
That we had both a virtual and an ‘actual’ professor for this course is a subject that deserves to be returned to here. It serves as a good point from which to discuss this concept of Internet-enabled virtuality. As students we have seen that a variety of such situations occur in education in the Internet age, in courses that are highly virtual and the many others in which the Internet functions as an occasional or supplemental medium. Moreover, the learning experience we have described here represents a good example of how these different situations often occur over the duration of a single course: though most of our ERP instruction transpired over the Internet, we also participated in in-class meetings and had access to an onsite professor.
Figure 3 attempts to capture some of the variety in the degree
of virtuality (i.e., dependency on and exclusivity of
electronic/Internet-enabled educational communication versus traditional means)
in education today. Each situation is
meant to represent a particular Internet-connected information/knowledge
exchange of some kind; interaction is indicated by two-way arrows, while the
clusters signify physical co-location.
It is interesting to note that each of the instances depicted occurred at
some point in our course, and also that this is only a small sampling of the
possible interaction combinations.
Figure 3: Various
Internet-connected educational interactions
In our course the purely virtual situations 1 and 3 tended to occur during routine or scheduled communications, such as lecture presentations, email inquiries, Web postings, and chats. Situations 2 and especially 4 happened most often when students faced difficulties or challenges, such as trouble understanding or completing an assignment or using an application. Since students often faced the same or similar difficulties, and also shared the same assignment deadlines, they frequently chose to interact in person rather than electronically. One of their favorite meeting places was the office of their American professor. There appears to be a lesson here about the human need/desire for physical proximity that applies even in educational situations and that no electronic experience—at least at the current state of the technology—can quite replace.
Situation 5, finally, represents perhaps the most interesting scenario—an elaborate virtual collaboration between groups of students in different universities on different continents engaged in R/3-connected e-business transactions. The potential for this kind Internet interaction—especially in IT and other kinds of technical instruction—has barely been tapped, and we suspect that it offers an exciting glimpse at the future of education.
SAP
R/3 LEARNING EXPERIENCES AND ISSUES: A Student Conversation
The following dialogue is a distillation of a series of conversations between the authors about their learning experiences with SAP R/3. These talks transpired as a result of their being enrolled together at Hochschule Harz University in Wernigerode, as well as interning together at Siemens Business Services in Hanover. The discussion extends beyond the subject of strictly Internet-based learning, and also includes a brief comparison of the different standpoints and requirements of other groups of learners besides general IT students—namely R/3 users and specialists (‘consultants’ in SBS terminology).
Figueroa: I think of my experience with learning R/3, especially over the Internet, as a kind of adventure, with a lot of interesting, even exciting moments, coupled with uncertainty, doubts, and some frustrations. My biggest complaint was handling all that information via my poor overloaded computer at home.
Foerster: In virtual classes you have new kinds of problems with learning R/3, which is a complicated system and takes a lot communication and personal effort. Also, the methods and technologies must be appropriate to the students’ tasks. And how do you ensure the effort and interest of students when they are located all over the world?
Figueroa: I have to say that Professor Scheruhn worked tremendously hard to give us the opportunity to learn quite a bit about R/3 in just six weeks. But it was challenging. R/3 is not a very friendly or inviting system to learn. Since coming here to Siemens I've had a chance to use the SAP GUI, including the newest version. And it still seems rather unfriendly, it is so spare and ... uncommunicative. It kind of just blankly stares at you with all that lurking, hidden power. It reminds me of when I was first introduced to UNIX. It seems to say, ‘Experts only beyond this point!’
Foerster: R/3 is difficult. It is not easy to learn on your own. When a learner is isolated, with little or no guidance, R/3 can be frightening, especially when you are in the system, looking around. When I did this I was very afraid of creating problems! But R/3 is also a good system to learn from the Internet. The system can be learned step by step: first you learn a business object and its methods, then the events which operate on it, then you learn another, and then the common tasks between them. Every lecture and assignment is like a piece of a puzzle and you can see the result at the end of the course.
Figueroa: But your own learning of R/3 started before you ever took a course in it, correct?
Foerster: I became interested in R/3 when a professor assigned me to write a paper about it. Later the professor helped arrange this internship at Siemens. Here I could look around inside their R/3 system. With time I became comfortable with it.
Figueroa: In my own R/3 education (so far) I went through a definite sequence of emotions and impressions. First came intimidation, fear, confusion, then gradually a level of understanding, comfort, and finally a dawning appreciation for the depth and even beauty of such an extraordinarily comprehensive system. I guess I finally got a sense of the intelligence behind it, the countless man-hours of thought and research invested.
Foerster: I understand what you mean. I admire the intelligence within R/3.
Figueroa: You’ve built an application in R/3, during your time here and also during ERP courses at Hochschule Harz.
Foerster: Yes, a small one, a travel agency application. It has an interface for customer information, and one for employees. Also a catalog of destinations...
Figueroa: Right. It looks simple, but then when I started clicking I found quite a bit of tables, data and functionality.
Foerster: It took me a couple of weeks to build it.
Figueroa: Speaking of your work here at Siemens, what else have your experiences taught you about learning R/3?
Foerster: I think there are some important things that must be considered in learning R/3. One is that to learn the system you need to have access to it. Also motivation is so important.
Figueroa: You have to be self-motivated.
Foerster: Well, if you are a user you may be motivated by your manager!
Figueroa: That is a good point. What about user issues with learning R/3?
Föerster: One problem I have seen is that users tend to learn R/3 in a very limited way, just learning a few tasks that they must accomplish in the system. This can be bad when something unusual happens. Then they don't know what is going on. They are not prepared because they don’t know the related tasks, the next step in the workflow and who is responsible.
Figueroa: Yet R/3 tightly restricts access to many users, so how can they learn more of the system without being able to really get into it?
Foerster: SAP has many views, online documentation, and ways of communicating with other users (SAPoffice for example) that all users can access. But you are right, deciding the level of access for an employee can be a problem, especially if you have employees whose roles will change, which is happening more and more.
Figueroa: You also mentioned that users—employees—are often resistant to or afraid of R/3.
Foerster: Sometimes they are afraid R/3 will take their job. Or they have been using another system for many years, and feel comfortable with this. As a consultant you have to first focus on the advantages for the employee, and the company.
Figueroa: Regarding learning R/3 as a consultant: I assume you must specialize....
Foerster: Consultants have to gain an overview of all or most R/3 modules, and acquire detailed knowledge of one module, perhaps two. One problem for consultants is they are usually so busy they may not learn new components and developments of R/3; maybe they are so much engaged with customers who are only interested in maintaining their old systems.
Figueroa: Perhaps this is another application for Internet-based R/3 education.
Foerster: The kind of information consultants need most is short detailed information, for instance about different modules they are not so much familiar with. Usually this kind of learning happens between consultants using email.
Figueroa: There are also some online resources that SBS consultants and interns can use, I understand.
Foerster: Yes, along with the freely available online sources, we have access to the SAPnet service system and to other R/3 info sources provided to SAP customers and partners. SBS also sponsors us to take SAP courses. It is a good place to do an internship. We are allowed the time and resources to learn, and we do real work in an actual R/3 consulting business.
Figueroa: In my own much more limited time here, I’ve seen that a lot of what the students are working on has to do with e-commerce. For instance, customizing and creating components to connect R/3 to the Web. One of these projects is a business-to-business procurement system utilizing Impress/OIS {Online Information System from Impress AG, http://www.impress.com/ , an Internet interface solution for SAP R/3 and other ERP systems}.
Foerster: This is of course the latest trend, though here in Germany I think we are perhaps a few years behind what is happening in America. Here e-commerce is just getting started.
Figueroa: One concern I have with this push to “Web-enable” R/3, to leverage all that potential for e-commerce, is that in a way R/3 seems fundamentally unsuited to the Internet paradigm, where thin-client solutions are all the rage. R/3 still strikes me as a rather cumbersome, inward-looking system, rather than the nimble, outward-looking one that e-commerce calls for. By inward-looking, I mean it is so focused on the internal processes and data of a single enterprise—especially on issues of integrity and control. Do you agree?
Foerster: I do agree to some extent. There is a problem. But SAP, companies like Impress, and Siemens are working on this. As you said, the potential is tremendous for using R/3 for e-commerce. It will be up to people like us (though now we are still just students) to help solve this problem!
CONCLUSION
Learning the complex ERP system SAP R/3 presents a major challenge to most people; doing so via the Internet adds further challenges. Yet this form of distance learning promises to grow radically in the coming years, because such strong arguments exist in its favor: it overcomes many of the time and geographical limitations of traditional education; it allows for using the best experts and teachers from around the world; it caters to individualized instruction and learning needs. In terms of SAP R/3, the need for teaching expertise led to the international collaboration that made the course described here possible—one that could only have been conducted by virtue of the Internet and its related technology.
In a sense, learning R/3 over the Internet is conceptually appealing. There is a certain symmetry, a process of reinforcement, in learning a multi-layered client-server information system by means of Internet-based information technology. This is especially so in view of SAP’s major e-commerce initiative (mySAP.com - http://www.mysap.com/), and the impressive amount of R/3 learning related information and technology SAP has brought to the Web (e.g., SAP online help, http://help.sap.com/, and the SAP virtual classroom, http://www.sap.com/education/index.htm).
Though there are certainly areas and issues that call for improvements, the course described here succeeded well beyond the authors’ expectations in conveying a thorough and thought-provoking introduction to ERP and SAP R/3, combining both hands-on experience with a big-picture view of what makes ERP such a compelling enterprise strategy.
It is hoped that this paper will serve as a small testament to, on the one hand, the viability of Internet-delivered ERP instruction (and of IT subjects generally), and on the other to the great promise of this approach for education of all kinds. In the first instance this paper, as well as the circumstances leading to its authoring (the course experience itself and the subsequent enrollment at a German university and an internship with a German firm by the American student, making possible his first visit to Europe), proves that students can be profoundly engaged and inspired—even in a difficult subject—via the Internet. In the second, the perspectives and criticisms are offered in the expectation that such noble and needed educational efforts will continue—and continually improve.
REFERENCES
Applegate, et. al (1999), Corporate Information Systems Management. Irwin/McGraw-Hill, Boston.
Curran, T.H. and Keller, G. (1998), SAP R/3 Business Blueprint. Prentice Hall PTR, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey.
Rebstock, Michael and Hildebrandt, Knuth (1999), SAP R/3 Management. Coriolis, Arizona.
Scheer, A.-W. (1998), Business Process Engineering, 3rd Ed. Springer, Berlin.
Scheruhn, H.-J., Johnson, David, and Rodriguez, Walter (2000). Collaborative Teaching of Enterprise Resource Planning on the Internet. Proceedings of the 4th Australasian Institute of Higher Learning Forum (Eds.: T. Byrne, P. Hawking, M. Rosemann, G. Stewart), SAPPHIRE 2000 Conference, Brisbane, 23-25 July 2000.
COPYRIGHT
Robert Fogle Figueroa and Merten Foerster (c) 2000. The authors assign to ACIS and educational and non-profit institutions a non-exclusive licence to use this document for personal use and in courses of instruction provided that the article is used in full and this copyright statement is reproduced. The authors also grant a non-exclusive licence to ACIS to publish this document in full in the Conference Papers and Proceedings. Those documents may be published on the World Wide Web, CD-ROM, in printed form, and on mirror sites on the World Wide Web. Any other usage is prohibited without the express permission of the authors.