Simply put, SAP Industry Solutions are the secret sauce behind SAP’s phenomenal success! Although the SAP Enterprise Resource Planning system covers, to some extent, most business scenarios out of the box, most industries have very specific requirements that are not always covered but are covered by one or more SAP vertical industry solutions. In order to fully support their customers, SAP has, for many years, been developing specialized industry solutions, such as the IS-Retail Solution or SAP DFPS Solution.
There are more than 27 SAP Industry Specific Solutions and a significant number of solutions developed by SAP partners, such as the poultry solution, well drilling solution, and dairy solution.
These solutions contain additional industry specific functionality. Many solutions, once developed, also find uses in other industry solutions. For example, the Linear Asset Management solution, designed for the needs of the Utility Industry, serves the needs of numerous other industries with Linear Assets, such as, Railroads, Oil Pipelines, Roads, Bridges, Tunnels, to name but a few.
In addition to Industry Process Specific Functionality, there are also Industry Specific analytic capabilities in the form of SAP BW Business Content. Some of this content is freely available to the public and viewable on the web, some of it is maintained and only available from SAP partners and some of it is available on request from SAP.
One such piece of SAP BW Business Content with an Industry Specific flavor is Airline Route Profitability, which, although developed by SAP internally, is not yet publicly released. As it turns out, conceptually, route profitability is also very similar to measuring the revenue per passenger on a bus, or on a train, or on a ship.
Eventually, this content may be released for general use once it is proven in each of these industries.
As the functionality of SAP Industry Solutions is deep and rich, you need a tool to explore it, which SAP has conveniently provided for many years. That tool, the SAP Industry Solution Map Composer, can be downloaded for free here.
http://www.sap.com/solutions/businessmaps/composer/index.epx
This tool is really the primary tool I used as an Industry Principal to explain our solutions to prospects. But it is also very useful for finding the relevant KPIs of any SAP Business Process using a reverse lookup procedure. In addition, you can compose your own solution map using this tool and determine feasible software combinations by navigating from it to the Product Availability Matrix.