1. At the time, why has SAP America grown so quickly? What challenges have been posed by the company's explosive growth? SAP America's rapid growth during the mid-to-late 1990s had several reasons. Throughout the evolution, SAP America's parent company, SAP AG, wants to provide a better product based on evolving technology and changing customer needs, and therefore has consistently invested in research and development. 20-25% of SAP AG's gross sales were reinvested in research and development. In fact, almost a quarter of the company's employees worked in research and development. Adding to the point, they had no debt for a period of time and did not account for revenue until the product was delivered to customers. An important strategic decision made by Besier, the CEO (who believed that his products should be sold heavily in the American markets) European market), had to move away from the German model in several respects. One of the aggressive decisions he made was to put the entire sales force team on a commission sales plan, following which Chevron, R/3's first multimillion-dollar sale, proved to be a game-changer for SAP. As a result, SAP outperformed all its competitors by 300-800%, the success opened up other large customers for the company. In order to increase sales and the number of customers for the company, SAP America has established autonomous regional profit and loss (P&L) with their respective sales, consulting and training teams. This led each regional office to work on its own sales and marketing strategy to improve sales. To penetrate the market and build a base, they created an industrial strategy called ICOE, which acts as a bridge between the customer and product development organizations. When there is growth there will always be obstacles and challenges. There have been two main challenges for SAP America, one is within the organization (or) an internal challenge, the other is an external challenge (or) a challenge from competitors. The autonomy of the regional office led the company to have different approaches for the same problem, resulting in providing the same solution 4 times for 1 problem. It therefore appears that SAP America does not act as a single company. Resource utilization is also a key challenge for the company, as the training and development service offered by the company is not best used in one part of the region, however it is used more in other regions..