Business Framework Architecture

Abstract

In the mid 90s, SAP was heavily criticised by press and research companies because of R/3's monolithic structure, which was inherited from R/2, and because of its limited openness against other products. This became even more of an issue as SAP's major competitors like PeopleSoft and Baan announced in the meantime, that their products would be object-oriented. As a response SAP assigned an enormous research and development budget to redesign their R/3 system and to provide more flexibility for their customer base. Since the end of 1996 and the beginning of 1997 it seems that a big redesign and rewrite process is underway, to prepare the R/3 product for the future. The solution, which they came up with, is known as SAP's Business Framework Architecture (BFA).