How It All Began

So let’s go back to 2006, the Mozart year, in which Sigmund Freud would have been 150 and Kurt Gödel 100 years old. Berlin's new main train station went into operation, Serbia and Montenegro separated from the same-named confederation and became sovereign, the FC Bayern Munich won the German football league and the DFB Cup. Shortly after the German national football team experienced the "summer fairy tale" in their own country, Michael Schumacher finished his career as a Formula 1 driver. And: During the summer semester 2006, within the framework of the continuing education program VAWi at the University of Duisburg-Essen, the "dry run" of the first SAP course started. The birth of erp4students. With Prof. Dr. Heimo H. Adelsberger as its father, so to speak - to stay in the metaphor.

Prof. Dr. Heimo H. Adelsberger, at that time head of the chair "Economic computer science of the production companies" (WIP) at the University of Duisburg-Essen, is the responsible person behind the erp4students courses - and thus also behind the entire project. He has teaching and research experience of more than 30 years in the field of Integrated Information Systems: He was professor for „Computer Science and Industrial Engineering“ at Texas A&M University, professor for „Datamatintegrerede Informations-systemer“ at the Technical University of Denmark in Copenhagen, and for 20 years has been professor and head of the chair for "Information Systems for Production and Operations Management" at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Having started in the mid-90s, the Adelsberger chair has been one of the first - national and international - to use SAP-software in teaching on a regular basis; SAP-software related topics have since been the foci of bachelor and master theses. Nowadays, many previous students work for SAP SE or are consultants in the area of SAP ERP.

With great success, the first “test run” of SAP course was held as part of the Essen-based further education program VAWi (Virtueller Weiterbildungsstudiengang Wirtschaftsinformatik) in the spring semester of 2006! From then on, erp4students has been developing step-by-step up to the present day: After having started the program in Austria and the Netherlands, the TERP10 course was translated into English, making it possible to launch the project in the UK, Ireland and – two years later – in many more countries all over Europe. In 2010 students from over 40 countries were able to participate in the SAP e-learning courses. Today, the total number of participating countries is even higher than 100! In 2012, the TERP10 course was translated into Russian and shortly after into Spanish. Each year, more than 5.000 students are participating in the erp4students program.

Now you’ve got a very good impression on how and under which conditions the project has been developed. In one of the next posts ("erp4students grows"), we are going to explain erp4student’s development again and even more vivid, based on growth charts and detailed tables. With the growth of the project, of course, gradually more employees have joined the team, developed erp4students even further and helped to make the project what it is today. During the upcoming countdown and, actually, as part of it, we would like to introduce you to those people as well during the upcoming weeks. We also want former participants and some partners, with which we have worked together in recent years, have a chance to speak. So there is still more to come - and we hope you’ll enjoy it!