395Business Excellence through Variations Using SAP
comprehensibility and exibility were satisfactorily addressable in SAP because of its repository-
oriented architecture (in this chapter, we will mainly focus on the functionality aspects of this repos-
itory rather than the technical ones, which also are substantial). Fundamentally, this was not much
different from the trend of parameterized packages that had been gaining ground among application
software packages since the 1980s. The main difference was the extent or degree of parameteriza-
tion: SAP was parameterized to an extreme. It was this property that enabled it to be exible enough
to be congurable to requirements suitable to several industries.
The difculty in implementing SAP a ...