SAP Business Suite 7 goes on general release

The announcement follows a ramp-up process that reportedly involved more than 300 customers in 37 countries. SAP says large firms can now "achieve process excellence through the modular deployment of industry-specific processes that cut across application boundaries, ease upgrades and reduce IT costs with SAP enhancement packages". It also suggests they will get improved opportunities for growth, through insight gained from the analytics tools embedded within SAP Business Suite 7. Companies of all sizes and from all industries took part – including Centerpoint Energy, Centrica British Gas, Colgate-Palmolive, Dow Corning, Hindustan Unilever, IBM, Natural Oil & Gas and Roche. Says Abbe Mulders, CIO, Dow Corning: "The business objectives we set for our SAP Business Suite 7 implementation have already been met, including better visibility into manufacturing processes, increasing overall productivity and improving customer response times." Meanwhile, SAP board member Jim Hagemann Snabe points to the new system's modular functionality and some 150 enhancements, which he says are aimed at improving, for example, process collaboration and shared service capabilities – enabling users to manage complex financial and supply chain processes more easily. "The general availability of the new SAP Business Suite marks the arrival of a clear path forward for companies that struggle with the high cost and complexity created by disparate applications and middleware solutions," explains Hagemann Snabe. He also cites: enhancement packages, aimed at helping customers to reduce cost and complexity by getting future functionality without upgrading; so-called 'Value Scenarios' that focus on solving industry-specific business issues with end-to-end processes; and expanded industry-specific functionality, including enhanced supply chain and warehousing processes. "With the new SAP Business Suite, we continue to deliver on our promise to provide customers with market-leading services and solutions that deliver extraordinary value in today's business environment," says Hagemann Snabe.