In the sense that I do not consider myself to be a foolish or gullible person (i.e. a sap), I wonder what I would be getting if I opted for any sort of SAP Shipping Systems? Actually, both Webster’s and the Oxford dictionaries give four meanings to sap”:-
1. A liquid found inside trees and plants.
2. A foolish person.
3. A small club or bludgeon
4. A tunnel dug under fortifications during warfare.
I guess tunneling needs a system; but, I do not see how tunnels could be shipped?
Ah, It’s An Acronym
To the ear, a sap is a sap and has to be one of the four above; however, to the eye, SAP is not quite the same as sap (true, it should, perhaps, be written as S.A.P.). Maybe, SAP is a lazy way of writing ASAP – as soon as possible systems make sense; but, why would you want to ship them? On line searching will reveal some 170 other possible SAP’s; most, like “Substance Abuse Professional” do not gel with SAP Shipping Systems. Enlightenment comes when you uncover a data processing, computer geek, acronym – “Systems Applications and Products”.
So, What Are Systems Applications and Products?
There actually is a German company called SAP (Systeme, Anwendungen, Produkte); it was started in 1972 by some ex- IBM employees in Mannheim, Germany. Today, they claim to be the world’s largest inter-enterprise software company and the world’s fourth-largest independent software supplier. In layman’s terms, I am led to believe that SAP systems are sort of like the threads that tie together and integrate various programs to act together as a total system for a particular set of circumstances – such as; across the board monitoring and control of all operations carried out within a single particular business enterprise. A word processing program is basically designed to meet the needs of an individual writer rather than the company that is employing him to write. Whereas, with a SAP program, his writing will be integrated with all the company’s other business and operational planning programs.
By the way, SAP Shipping Systems are not the methods used by SAP and other software developers to get their SAP programs distributed to their customers. What this really means is to use SAP to fully integrate the programs, used for dispatching your goods to your customers, with all the other IT systems operating within your business. If you ship goods; you could be a sap if you don’t use SAP Shipping Systems.
