Systems, Applications, Products in data processing or SAP was originally introduced in the 1980’s as SAP R/2 which was a
mainframe system that provided users with a soft-real-time business application that could be used with multiple currencies
and languages. Later when client servers were introduced SAP brought out a server based version of their software called
SAP R/3, henceforth referred to as SAP, which was launched in 1992. They also developed a graphical user interface or GUI
to make it more user friendly and to move away from the mainframe style user interface. For the next 10 years SAP
dominated the large business applications market. It was successful primarily because it was extremely flexible. Because SAP
was a modular system meaning that the various functions provided by it could be purchased piecemeal it was an extremely
versatile system. All a company needed to do was purchase the modules they wanted and customize the processes to match
the company’s business model. SAP’s flexibility, while one of its greatest strengths is also one of its greatest weaknesses. We
will now turn to the audit issues surrounding SAP.