Case: Sap America

Case: SAP America

1. At the time of the case, why has SAP America grown so rapidly? What challenges have been created by the company’s explosive growth?

The reason of the rapid growth of SAP America was due to the launch of its R/3 product. The R/3 product was equipped with the capability to update the data in the entire enterprise synchronously and seamlessly. These capabilities made it popular to the customers. Therefore, R/3 product has occupied the leading position of the C/S market of world’s enterprise information systems in dramatic speed.

After the explosive growth, SAP America faced the pressure from both interior and exterior. As to the internal pressure, the company encountered the problem to coordinate different billing criteria and training strategy in different regions. In addition, the public opinion made the market perceive that R/3 was an extensively costly implementation. While the economical and time costs of R/3 is twisted with the costs of affecting the major culture and organizational changes associated with redesigning. SAP also faced with the external pressure brought out by its competitors. The competitors’ development of new products was almost powerful enough to cover the capability of R/3 as they desire to replace R/3 in the market. As SAP’s main focus was on high end market in the past, it also faced the challenge to expand their business scope to mid tier market. SAP had to shift its strategy since the mid tier companies highlighted more on the adaption to the market and the replacement of their competitors rather than pursuing to optimize themselves. These features were widely divergent with SAP’s used customers, of which most were Fortune 500 companies.

2. What are the critical features of SAP's approach to partnering? What role has partnering played in the company’s success?

To expand the range of the partnership, SAP managed to work out the partnership issue by divided it into four types: alliance, platform, technology and...