SAP FICO Consultant – Part 1: Access to SAP IDES

Getting familiar with SAP ERP system without having access to SAP system will be like getting driving license without driving a car. More importantly, if you are passionate enough like I described in the prologue and you will pursue SAP FICO Consultancy career it will be impossible without access to real system. You could read a lot of books and materials, watch many video tutorials and explanations, but without direct touch of SAP ERP you will certainly fail. It will be very good if you could find access to SAP IDES (Internet Demonstration and Evaluation System) system which will provide you with model company consisting international group with subsidiaries in different countries. With the help of IDES you could play and do case scenarios in environment similar to real international company. Most importantly, SAP Official learning materials are using the master data and the demo companies in SAP IDES.

Over the internet you will find paid and free accesses to SAP ERP IDES. You could simply try google. Here I will share several places which you could use as starting point.

1. Free access to SAP IDES. Consult Solutions – Request it here. It is free! (As at 24.06.2015 – The link is not working. This option is not available)

Fill all the information which is necessary, check the flags for FI & Co. You will receive an email with all the necessary information for login.  In addition you will receive information about how to login with SAP GUI and from where to download it.  It is tested and it is working as it should.

The con here is that you will not receive rights to customize the system, but only to play with the system as super user.

2. Paid access to SAP IDES. There are many paid solutions which you will find over the internet ranging from 30$ to 150$+ per month. Personally, I did not test any of them so I can’t recommend them. It is also very questionable whether or not their statement for licensed and legal access to SAP IDES system is really true.

3. Install SAP IDES on your own server. The best think that you could do is to install the SAP IDES on own server which will help to gain some knowledge and basics about SAP ERP System. You will also have clean and fully featured system where you will have full access to customization, configuration, etc.

• If you want to have legal SAP IDES system on own server you should be either a SAP ERP Customer or Partner.
• There is also another way which I would not recommend, but you could find the files over the internet.  Simply search for “sap ides torrent” and probably you will find the files and installation tutorials that you are looking for.