What's the difference between SAP IDES and BBP?
Both BBP and IDES are pre-installed data packages in an SAP system, containing things like fictional companies, customers, and other sample data.
The big difference is that BBP is a much smaller dataset.
Instead of thousands of available customers or vendors in IDES, BBP only includes a few dozen of these data entries.IDES was available for SAP R/3 and SAP ECC releases.
BBP is a new inclusion, starting with S/4 HANA.
The SAP IDES (Internet Demo & Evaluation System) consists of a set of basic configuration settings for all standard SAP modules and also includes large amounts of sample data (i.e., customers, vendors, companies, transactions, etc.).
IDES was first released in 1995 and was available for SAP R/3 and SAP ECC releases.
However, IDES no longer exists for the new SAP S/4 HANA system.
It's been replaced by SAP BBP, or Business Best Practices.
BBP packages (Business Best Practices) are quite similar to IDES – they also include basic configuration settings, sample master data, and sample transactions. The big difference is that BBP is a much smaller dataset. Instead of 1000 available customers or vendors in IDES, BBP only contains a few dozen of these data entries.
SAP Best Practice (also known as SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, or SAP RDS) is a standardized content database designed to support implementation projects with ready-to-run business processes. These are built upon the comprehensive and flexible model that the SAP Best Practices team has developed from implementations in over 50 countries with more than 10,000 customers.
If we log into both ECC and S/4HANA systems and check out, say, company and customer data, you'll clearly see the difference:
IDES Data in SAP ECC
BBP Data in S/4HANA
So, we can see that the massive volume of sample data in IDES has been significantly reduced in BBP.
Perhaps SAP realized that you don't necessarily need thousands of customer and company data records – a few selected sample data records are likely sufficient to test, experiment, learn, and work in an SAP system.
What do you think?
