Can you remember the first time you heard of SAP

For me it was my first day on first job right out of University.  I showed up, went through orientation, and then was shuffled off to the SAP implementation kickoff meeting. One other new hire (right out of University as well) and myself were going to be the developers assigned to this next generation ERP project.  I had no idea what SAP even was before that fateful day. 

Hi Thomas that was awesome, but I wonder how you could have copped then. But for I heard and saw SAP 5 months ago on my first Accounting job as a profession, it’s was so new to me and looked complicated and with 1 to 2 days training of introduction at the office I went through alot of tough times performing my duties with sap through the end of the contract job.

I made alot of wrong posting and double posting which got me into issues with the supervisor and the Financial Controller, and I couldn’t take my time to do researches on sap and learn more because I and my other 3 colleagues had to input all the data starting from January to September form the previous software to the new software which is SAP Business One within 3 months.

My career in SAP began by chance, through a common connection. Before that, SAP was the 3 letters on the back of F1 cars' rearview mirrors 🙂

For me it was 2003 and my boss said hey I need you to read about this thing called SAP so when you return to the US you can do the implementation there. Mind you I was a web application developer and never even heard of SAP, the closet to “ERP” for me was the MAPICS system. Needless to say I read, learned and ended up working for SAP and never returning to the US for the implementation 🙂

In case anyone is wondering, they did the implementation and successfully completed it on time. 

All we know about that implementation. Everybody has heard about it. A flawless one, completed in time.

Sadly, the unicorns who made it went back to their home behind the rainbow and they were never seen again.

I did an internal (small) project at my university as intern, and we were using a file based storage and the task was to switch to a DB based storage, we were going to use some freely available small db (I think it was going to be mysql, but not absolutely sure). But then my boss told me that the university is going to implement "SAP" in some future, so we should do something with "SAP" to be future-proof. A quick research revealed that SAP was some system using SAP DB. So, SAP DB it became. My internship ended before the implementation on SAP DB started, but I followed them for one or two years. At that time we had not the slightest idea what SAP was, nor that using SAP DB didnt make us more nor less future-proof in the sense of compatibility with the "soon to come SAP Implementation" 😄

My first contact with actual SAP was in 2007, almost a decade later.

I tried to get a job at Mercury Interactive (later bought by HP) and they were all ready to hire me but my current employer wouldn't let me out of my contract. At first I was VERY disappointed, but I stayed where I was for another few months and then got a job offer at SAP, which was the best thing that could have happened to me. When I interviewed was the first time I had ever heard of the company. 

P.S.: When I came, I was clueless, and I had heard that there were such loyal employees that their baby's first words were "ABAP" 

It's great Job.

Mine might be a bit different than the above.   I heard about SAP at my job.  They needed me to go train to use it.  And they needed me to be a part of the first training group.  I was 5 months pregnant.  I went to boat camp which was 4 weeks.  It was an interesting time.   I got the flu while I was there, and I found a med center.  (I had to because I didn't know which over the counter medication I could take.)  They let me go and told me what I could take.  I got better that weekend.  Went back to training, and finished with a certification test.  Which I proudly passed.

When we went live I had just returned from my 6 weeks off after having Nate.  I then was spending the nights most nights helping to fix everything that didn't work right.  Yes, we had an implementation partner.   And that is quite another story.

So I doubt very much that I'll ever forget when I "heard" of it.

Ruthvik, that's a great question!

For me, SAP was the enemy 😀

I ran the competitive team at a small French startup called... BusinessObjects. So I spent my days coming up with arguments about why we were a better business intelligence solution than anything SAP could offer (I remember being slightly awed at the depth of loyalty of SAP customers). I guess we did something right, because SAP eventually decided the same and purchased us in 2007 -- and I celebrated 30 years with the combined companies this year! 😀

I was part of the SAP competitive task force! My team was building some special training so that we could connect to and report from BW data. We had just finished building all of the training when SAP acquired us. I don't think the training organization had ever been so prepared for an acquisition. 😀

Congratulations on 30 years!

Ode to SAP BW (where I started) and BOBJ (your first stomping grounds😍! 🙂

I was working integrating Actaworks into SAP when BO bought it. I remember some very good lunches... 

A friend of a friend worked at SAP near the Philadelphia airport around 1996. I only had limited knowledge on SAP -- and because of my Cognos reporting skills I was hired in 1999 as a BW consultant. So many years later I wouldn't have changed a thing. #lifeatSAP

I remember when the education offices were right by the airport.  It was very convenient for taking classes.  

That was the same in the UK, right beside Heathrow

I remember running courses there!

Not when you lived the other side of London!

Which kind of class were you taking? First or economical?

I took several courses there too; not a bad drive from Baltimore but not a spiffy location. Good ol' Essington. Later, I got smart and booked classes that were only available in, say, the San Francisco Bay area. 🙂

When I was in high school, working for an office supply company that rolled out SAP inventory management. The most memorable part of the training we received was to say S-A-P and not SAP.

I can't think that far back.

Perhaps it was '89,  Esso in Australia started to look at this German Software R/2.  Some of us hated the idea, the IT director came back from Germany wearing an SAP watch, and we started on our SAP journey. I then joined SAP in 93. 

For me it was when I'd finished my Classics degree at University College London and had started work (in the IT department) at Esso Petroleum on Victoria Street in London. After some weeks of graduate training (in COBOL, JCL and so on) I joined the Database Support Group (DBSG) where my very first task was to create a backup & recovery strategy for the (IMS DB) databases belonging to a project just starting out on the floor above. There were over 100 databases which was unusual, all with VSAM dataset clusters defined via IDCAMS. This project turned out to be an SAP implementation project, installing and configuring SAP R/2 4.1. When I finished my time in DBSG, I joined the project, dived completely into the SAP tech world, and have never looked back since. 

That was in 1987.

So nice to see all these stories.

I agree with you @former_member12794 - this is a great thread. Still overwhelms me the years, decades people have invested into the ecosystem, as well as how much they get back in return. I'm employed by SAP for 17 years now!

Working in R&D at a company called Fairlight (for their MFX3 product used for Audio Engineering) in Sydney and kept seeing these high paying jobs in the paper for something called "Sap". Then my high school friend Al Templeton started working at a new company doing large SAP OO custom development with IS-U who was hiring any good developer who wanted to learn SAP (at double my current salary!) so learn SAP I did!

Side note - This was OO in 4.0B so I believe Thomas' answer for when OO was introduced is wrong since we were productive at multiple customers (albeit using global includes and pushing the basis to the limit when compiling).

is that the same Fairlight that produced the CMI? Wowser. 

That's the one - used on many of the great albums of the 80's (but was being mostly used for audio in Movies by the time I got there)

Holy moly, you've known Al that long

I believe we went live with 3.1H.   Prior to that RPG and homegrown (mostly) Data3.   If there was OO - I would never have known.  Too busy learning everything at once.

Hello everybody! Greetings from Guadalajara, Jalisco (Mexico).
The first time I heard of SAP was in 2006, I was hired by a pharmaceutical company (PiSA Labs) as Microsoft .net Developer. As part of the onboarding process we had a training in SAP as "Users", days later I had an introduction to ABAP by one of the Senior SAP Developers that was about to leave the company, it turned that one of my colleagues and I were replacing him. My first ABAP assignment was changing a label in a SAPScript, I remember that I used to hate the editor (we were running R/3 4.5B). A few months later I was hired by IBM as SAP ABAP Developer and it completely changed both my career an my life. 😃

Interesting question - I first heard about SAP when I was on my placement year at University. I was working at a UK Bank and they were implementing SAP for HR back in 1999/2000 and my department was going to be working on the Basis implementation work. I had a job offer from the bank for post-University and would work on the project, although I wanted to go back home - so did not take it. Who knew that 2 years later I would land in the Basis field anyway and that over 20 years later I would still be working in the field.

Interesting read everyone!

I moved to Heidelberg in 1998 and I applied in April 2000 for a job at the daughter company of SAP called "e-sap.de" ... and that was the first time I ever heard about SAP. And finally, my first day was May 1, 2020 and I am still here 😁

"May 1, 2020"?? I bet you were much longer with SAP than just two years @sveabecker 

oops! Good catch @Vitaliy-R ! It's of course May 1, 2000!!! 😅🎉

I heard about it in 2005 when I was in the university, SAP decided to invest in my city (Sao Leopoldo, Brasil) and they opened an office inside the university later in 2006. 

How big is the Sao Leopoldo office these days, do you know?