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SAP Enhances Business Students Curriculum with On-Demand Technology

By Vinti Vaid
TMCnet Contributor

Curriculum restructuring by universities and higher education institutes is gaining precedence as business organizations and companies across the globe adopt on-demand technologies.

SAP AG in an effort to provide business studies students with a practical work experience, has announced the start of a pilot project that incorporates the SAP (News - Alert) Business ByDesign solution into the curriculum for universities taking part in the SAP(R) University Alliances program.

Through their global initiative SAP will be able to offer select university faculties’ access to SAP software and educational resources. This will help students gain practical skills in the application of state-of-the-art enterprise software to real-world business scenarios.

Instructors at 18 pilot universities in Germany, France, India, the United Kingdom, and the United States will now be able to support their curricula supplemented with innovative teaching methods and hands-on practice with business process modelling using the on-demand solution.

The on-demand solution has been designed specifically for small businesses and midsize companies who want to work with an integrated, complete business application without having to invest in IT infrastructure.

There is an increased emphasis on key concepts such as software as a service “SaaS (News - Alert)” for businesses in addition to the delivery of standardized on-demand solutions for small businesses and midsize companies.

The pilot project has pre-configured and country-specific versions of feature pack 2.5 for SAP Business ByDesign which will be provided to all participating universities.

Helmut Krcmar, professor of Information Systems at the Technische Universitaet Muenchen (TUM) said that most business graduates when starting out are short on practical experience because of which they take time grasping key business processes. He added that by incorporating SAP Business ByDesign into their studies, students are encouraged to create and their own company and design its business processes which provides them a window to see for themselves the inter-organizational relationships.

Daniel Pittel, business administration student at RheinMain University of Applied Sciences in Wiesbaden explained that the on-demand solution from SAP makes it easy to create and model a business with a friendly user interface as students can merge practice and theory, which helps boost both learning and motivation.

SAP Business ByDesign is a fully integrated business software that does not burden a company's IT landscape, since the solution is installed, maintained, and regularly updated by experts at an SAP data centre. SAP handles the software installation, maintenance and updates so that companies can focus on their core business.