First of all let me thank the SAP University Alliances team to provide us a SAP Business ByDesign (ByD) Tenant, so that we could work fully operational in class doing our case studies and compare as well as analyze the differences between SAP ERP and SAP ByD.
Before we actually could work with the systems we had to transfer the basics of process-oriented Information Systems, Business Process Modeling with EPK as well as down to Requirements Engineering with UML.
After having theory and basics in place we first used three sessions for explaining the main concepts of SAP ERP, introducing SAP UA's model company GBI and talking about certain steps we need to do to eventually assemble the main parts for a bike. For those familiar we used the PP case study to showcase how the production planning process for a bike looks like. We also touched some parts of MM and SD.
The next three sessions were used to showcase SAP Business ByDesign. We therefore made use of a dedicated ByD Tenant which had Almika as a model company. (It's in manufactoring and professional services business) We ran through E2E Processes such as Order-to-Cash and took a look into the Executive and Financial Processes as well as the well-integrated Business Intelligence capabilities that are implemented. Using an iPad as an instructur doing certain approval steps during the case studies was of interest by the students, since I often didn't touch the ByD system through a browser, but rather by the ByD App.
In our last lecture we did a comparison between SAP ERP and SAP ByD by the following characteristics:
- Functional Scope
- Basic System Principles
- System Architecture
- Domains
- Market
I think the most valuable part has been showing both systems, SAP ERP and SAP ByD and then discussing and analyzing similarities and differences.
Certainly the students felt more secure navigating and using SAP Business ByDesign, but they said it was extremely slow to use. (This was mainly because the Internet connection wasn't always stable, but also reflects that almost no system beats an SAP ERP with having all graphical elements directly on their client through SAP GUI)
Next year we'll continue and advance even more the comparison aspect, since we felt the students did benefit most in this area.
