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This article will explain in detail what the competitive strategy of SAP is, and the content of the article is of high quality, so the editor will share it with you for reference. I hope you will have a certain understanding of the relevant knowledge after reading this article.

Competitive Strategy of SAP

The editor tries to analyze the competitive strategy of SAP by consulting some historical materials on the Internet, combined with on-the-spot visits and exhibitions.

More than 30 years ago, five German engineers who were dissatisfied with IBM's product strategy resigned and founded SAP. This year, SAP has become the most famous business software company in the world, with the largest market capitalization in Germany, higher than old German enterprises such as Siemens and Bosch.

In the early days of SAP, IBM sold mainframe computers to Fortune 500 customers, giving away software at random or by customers themselves. But the five SAP founders saw the advent of the software era, an once-in-a-century opportunity that meant a radical change in the way business works.

In a stage when a huge market is awakened, how to satisfy customers with the fastest speed is the best strategy at that time. Whoever can meet the market demand at the fastest speed can develop. What IBM sees is more about the sales of equipment and the customized demand that comes with it.

In order to achieve the fastest speed, SAP uses standardized modules to meet the fast strategy, rather than getting caught up in the solutions of individual major customers. This is the key to deciding to grow and grow in the early stages of an industry. If we stick too much to the satisfaction of individual major customers at this stage, we will lose the opportunities brought by the whole era.

SAP can not only rely on standard modular software to be what it is today, the strategy must be a combination, and a combination of mutual support. Thanks to IBM's work experience, SAP engineers are equipped to deal with compatibility issues between hardware systems and operating systems that have not yet been fully standardized. This ability, if not always working at the forefront of the computer industry, is impossible to have. In order to achieve maximum compatibility, SAP does not use the industry star C language to develop the language, but uses the internal programming language developed by itself. Although this language is not as popular as an industry standard language, it is precisely this popularity that has become a deficiency. In order to meet the versatility, C language must find a balance for all kinds of uses. On the other hand, SAP is a development language specially designed for commercial software, with more focused stability and compatibility, and customer experience is what SAP is most concerned about. On this issue, it reflects the German people's high degree of rationality and single-mindedness.

SAP's third strategy is to develop in partnership with leading companies in the industry. The core of the management software is the process, which is the result of a high degree of understanding of the industry KNOWHOW. It can be said that management software is the carrier of management concepts and methods, and its core competitiveness lies in whether it can represent the best practices of the industry. SAP took full advantage of the historical window of its first entry into management software development, giving up to meet a larger number of small and medium-sized enterprises with larger market capacity, and focused on the leading companies in the 21 most profitable industries.

Strategy is choice, and choice is not only to decide which path to take, but also to give up the possibility of other paths.

By focusing on leading companies, SAP has acquired cutting-edge development and management methodologies in these 21 industries. In SAP's own words, the core is three words:

Understand 、 Identify 、 Simplify

That is, as a management software provider, the key is whether SAP can understand the core needs of customers (industry), identify key issues, and help customers simplify their business. This process will eventually be solidified into day-to-day process collaboration through SAP software, thus reducing management costs.

Practical information on the development process of SAP

I think the most important of these three mantras is Simpify, that is, to improve efficiency and reduce management costs by helping users simplify business processes. When SAP does this, his customers will no longer consider whether SAP's software is expensive or not, but will turn to consider how much extra profit and cost savings will be brought because of the adoption of SAP.

This shift in customer thinking enables SAP software prices to maintain a considerable profit. With continuous profits, all other tactics can be carried out. Use the best treatment to find the best employees, give the most relaxed working environment, give play to their maximum innovation ability, so as to continuously obtain more core competitiveness for the company.

When introducing the SAP campus, the introducer joked that the kindergarten for employees was the most critical department in the area. Because so that children can work in SAP right after graduating from kindergarten.

Of course it's a joke. Just like the case shared in class some time ago, it is the same practice as the American Silicon Valley software company on the other side of the ocean. The investment in setting up a kindergarten is far less than the productivity loss caused by employees taking their children to and from school. This is a well-designed investment, not just a welfare.

Similarly, the forests, playgrounds and beautiful office environment around SAP headquarters are all designed to enable this group of world-class talents to create innovation as much as possible.

Praise of SAP excellent staff

With the emergence of new technologies and tools such as mobile phones, cloud computing and even drones, SAP has always been thinking about how to deal with these technologies more effectively and use these technologies to create value for customers.

SAP shows the changes in the environment and the company's decisions in various historical periods.

In recent years, SAP has transformed itself from the image of the service provider of the industry's leading enterprises to serving more small and medium-sized enterprises. According to Dr. Peng, 70-80% of SAP's current customers are small and medium-sized enterprises. This is due to the ease of deployment and sales of cloud services to SAP.

At the end of the visit, a passage on the SAP display board attracted me:

SAP's discussion on man-machine relationship

SAP gives a wonderful explanation of the role of people at work:

In this exhibition, we show some technological advances in the digital world. We expect that they will bring great impact and changes to our daily life in the future.

In fact, we would like to discuss the "human role" in this process. Technology should neither be overly superstitious nor undervalued. On the contrary, it is becoming more and more clear that the future is the combination of people and machines and giving full play to each other's best advantages.

This is a principle of using intelligence as an enhancement tool and is the core intention of this exhibition.

In fact, I always had a worry before I interviewed Dr. Peng. With the continuous emergence of new technologies, the competition of business management software is becoming more and more melee.

From a technical point of view, SAP faces at least the following types of competition:

1. Digital technology: giants such as Siemens and Dassault precipitate and manage manufacturing knowledge through models, and when people become familiar with model-based work, the commercial software based on the model has enough ability to replace the existing management software.

2. Artificial intelligence: artificial intelligence companies led by IBM analyze repetitive, boring and error-prone scenarios in business processes, and use intelligent assistants to help people deal with more and more complex processes, such as predicting trends from daily communication words, booking itineraries, adjusting business order, and so on. This kind of intelligence makes the experience of workers better and better, and management software will increasingly rely on the assistance of this kind of artificial intelligence.

3. Internet e-commerce platform enterprises: mainly enterprises such as Amazon and Alibaba, with huge amounts of data on the consumer side, which can clearly predict the demand trend of consumers. If this information is fully utilized to reverse transform and open up the entire supply chain, it will also be a revolution in the software industry.

When I read the passage SAP, the answer to these concerns was already known. It clearly conveys the core value of SAP, that is, how to use software to give full play to human innovation in the work scene. SAP believes that models do not represent all the knowledge that human beings have, and collaboration is still the most critical element in work scenarios. Similarly, artificial intelligence can not replace human innovation and decision-making ability. Consumption data is actually a kind of input to the manufacturing process. If we want to get through the whole supply chain, we need enterprises like SAP who have a deep understanding of specific industries.

As long as the work needs to be done with human collaboration, SAP has its role as a collaborative software expert. What's more, from this year's exhibition in Hanover, SAP is not only working with partners to build an ecology, but also actively developing its own related module products.

Taking a comprehensive view of the development process of SAP, strategy is not only a goal, but also a series of combined actions combined with its own advantages and abilities. In the process, I gradually found the true value of SAP itself. This is of particular reference significance to the development of Chinese enterprises.

Key conclusions:

1. Strategy is not a slogan. With the vision, mission hype, the customer did not understand, first excited themselves, can not solve the problem. Strategy is action.

2. Strategy is not a thing, or a point. It is untrue that too many of our business cases simply attribute a company's success to an initiative or a historical turning point. Strategy is an organic combination of a series of actions.

3. The strategy does not remain the same all the time, but changes with different stages and depending on the environment. It varies from when to pursue scale and when to pursue experience. SAP is constantly adjusting and changing from the initial standardization module strategy to the service focus industry leader enterprise strategy, as well as today to the cloud computing strategy and partner ecological strategy.

In any case, it is more important to focus on the customer than on the competitor. SAP's innovation comes from interaction with customers, not from competition with competitors. Staring at the opponent every day, playing mahjong is OK, but it is not good for the long-term development of the enterprise.

5. In any case, the strategy must first achieve profits, and only with profits can more strategic combinations be carried out.

6. Talent is always the most precious wealth engine, not the cost center.

On what the competitive strategy of SAP is shared here, I hope that the above content can be of some help to you, can learn more knowledge. If you think the article is good, you can share it for more people to see.

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