More SAP Processes on Front End PC

Question

Hi all
It seems to me that as PC's get more and more powerful --sometimes more powerful than the application server itself  the old 3 Layered Architecture level might not be the best use of resources.
For instance in classical SAP a lot of time is often spent in reading data from data bases into internal tables, manipulating the tables via sorting / filtering etc etc  and then creating a list / or display -- all of these tasks using Central Processing functions..
Maybe we should start looking at using the processing power of the PC itself for a lot of these task --especially where no data base update is required
For example data could be downloaded very quickly on to the users PC where it can then be queried and manipulated. Network load is not usually an issue these days.
Given the thrend of "Persistent Objects" it would seem this would be the way to go -- retrieve the object(s)  from the SAP server and then do all the queries locally.
Not everything could be done this way  - you still need "Classical Batch Work"  but certainly a huge amount of stuff could be done on the users front end now.
When SAP R3 first appeared PC's were not very powerful,  the Net as a business tool was hardly recognized and network connections were often painfully slow.
Now it's totally the opposite. --It seems almost a crime to sit at an 8GB RAM dual processor PC simply to look at a sales order (VA03) or create some reports.
Cheers
-K

Answer 1

I think, that strategically there are other approaches already on the market.
Not everyone uses FAT clients, I know quite a few companies, who use very old PCs and connect to a Citrix or Terminal Server farm instead of distributing everything locally.
The management of a huge number of PCs is becoming more and more a nightmare, given the fact, that more and more dependencies are added to run your SAP applications (speaking of Adobe SVG viewer, Flash, Java Runtime etc.) This nightmare would even become bigger if one thinks of synchronizing different steps of a transaction on a different PC. Out of my experience, it´s often just lazyness of the users, that make systems slow by quering just too much data. If you have a system with > 10 years of data and users are quering that data by NOT entering a "from" date, I can just say, that lazyness
I agree with you, you don´t need a FAT client to display something in VA03, you don´t even need a full PC to do that, a Termina Server session is sufficient for such users.
Markus