“I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.”

Global Bike Incorporated (GBI)

This past year, I have had the great opportunity to help develop a fictional bike company working directly with SAP at Grand Valley State University. A small team of Grand Valley’s interns, including myself, were given a basic story on how the Global Bike Company (GBI) would run, but the rest was left up to us. The purpose of GBI is to provide a basic, but realistic, learning environment for students to use across the world. In the future, GBI will also be used during SAP’s Integration of Business Processes (TERP 10) certification.

Before configuring our SAP system, we had to research the processes a bike company uses and find realistic data to fit our company. Having the freedom to pick the materials, customers, vendors, and all other forms of Master Data, gave me a great understanding of why companies need to use a large ERP system such as SAP. Once we had come up with some of the necessary master data, it was time to start implementing our research into the system. Not too long into our implementation, I learned the value of SDN and other online resources to help solve the many error messages we ran into. As a fairly new user to SAP implementing GBI was (and continues to be) a daunting and challenging task, but now more than ever, my excitement and passion towards working with SAP has been solidified.

After struggling through some of the basic financial accounting and procurement processes, it became clear that this experience has taught us an incredible amount of technical and business process information very quickly. This new knowledge soon carried over into my collegiate studies allowing me to see the ‘big picture’ within my marketing, accounting, finance, management and many other classes. These courses not only focus on their individual contributions to the business field, but they offer a connection to one another as well as showing the importance of SAP. My experience in the classroom at Grand Valley can be best described by Confucius, who said “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand.” Yes, it is important to hear facts and information and to learn through our professors, and even better if we are able to see these ideas in action, but through Grand Valley’s unique opportunity to create GBI, I’ve been able to put the ‘do’ in action and through this I understand the usefulness of SAP in the business world. 

Currently within SAP, we have completed some basic processes in FI, CO, MM, PP, WM, SD, EAM, HCM, and CS modules. This has been an outstanding experience for me and at Grand Valley State University, we are continuously trying to improve and develop GBI into an excellent source of learning for SAP across the globe.