Adding to the disruption, the implementation of certain modules of our SAP system in the U.S. caused us to lose some market share.

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Almost all companies use Excel somewhere in their financial close, but many run multiple Excel spreadsheets, often with the results from one cascading into the results of another. (See story on Imagine Software below) If a company has 20 spreadsheets feeding an SAP system, can it be sure that all the calculations in each are accurate?

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Earnings per share have risen at an average 11% rate, excluding discontinued operations, since he took over, but slipped below 9% last year as Cooper struggled with flagging demand in Asia and the implementation of an SAP software system in its Power Systems division.

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One such company is Bethesda based Virtustream who along with its customer, Florida Crystals Corporation, recently announced the first production deployment of a SAP ECC HANA System.

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And we were able to do it without incurring the costs of an ERP system like SAP ECC, which, in the end, was simply too big for a company of our size.

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For example, our global, single-instance ERP system runs 53 country payrolls on the SAP ERP Human Capital Management solution and our SAP NetWeaver Portal supports over 2 million members of the SAP Community Network.

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America's tax system is riddled with exemptions, deductions and credits that feed an industry of advisers but sap economic energy.

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"Enterprise system integration is a complicated business dominated by massive software companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and IBM, which in turn are supported by thousands of boutique consultancies, " said Craig Materick, chief software architect at ThinkFlood.

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