Year: 2014

As I was blowing out my sprinkler system today, in preparation for winter, it got me to thinking about preparing for spring.  While there is a still long time before I can start planting seeds in preparation for my garden, it’s still all about planning what is coming.  I have these cool plans for building a food forest in my backyard, and that will require clearing trees, order new plants and trees, and a lot of digging.  But before I can really do any of that, I need to map out my plan of exactly what I want to do.  Why am I talking about gardening in late fall?  Because a garden is no different than business.

Everything in a business is about planting seeds, preparing the ground, and being ready to reap the harvest in the coming months.  If your business plans things properly, you have a chance of a harvest.  If you half-ass it, well, you’ll end up with a half-ass harvest, or maybe nothing at all.  As I look at the evolution of my own business over the past 6 years, I can see where I obviously didn’t plan.  I went full speed ahead before I knew what I was doing.  Do I regret any of it?  hell no…  do I wish I had been a little smarter.. ABSOLUTELY!!!  The whole idea is to learn from my mistakes.

This past year has been an incredible amount of learning for me.  It has also been a year of planting seeds.  I’ve focused a lot of time and attention on building connections.  Between the SAP MFG conference, my Linked-In initiatives, and my soon to be published E-book, are all about planting seeds.  The biggest problem with planting seeds, is that you never quite know if they will grow into what you expect.  So, this coming year will be all about continuing to plant more and more seeds…  you may have noticed that more of my blog posts are promoting some of my own stuff.  Now that I’ve built my audience, it’s time to start showing them all the work I’ve been doing over the past 6 years 🙂

Now, the future is always in motion.  So who knows where my attention will go in the next 12 months.  But I have every confidence that a good chunk of my effort will be supporting my new customers.  Care to join them???

 

In my recent attempt to cut expenses, it’s forced me to take a look at a lot of the things I took for granted.  My relationship with SAP is one of the biggest expenditures I have each year.  For the record, I’ve been an SAP Partner and a member of their ICC program, which entitles me to one certification per year.  And for the price tag of 10,000 Euro’s a certification, I finally realized this required a bit more examination.

So, the process of certifying an ABAP Add-on, which is what SAP calls anything designed in ERP that isn’t an interface or smart phone application, is a lot like ISO9001.  If you’ve ever worked in a manufacturing company, you’ve probably heard of this.  The whole process seemed rather interesting to me.  The short story is that it certifies that you wrote down your process, and then follow what you wrote down.  This seemed like a strange thing to be proud of to me.  And I’m sure there had to more to it than that…  but SAP certification is a lot like that.  You give SAP your code, you tell them how to run it, what to test, what to press, and if it all works, they certify you.  They don’t really perform an in-depth code check, beyond what that AAK does for you (this is the software SAP uses to make their own Add-ons and support packs), they trust what you do.  After that, they give you some official looking paperwork and post you on their Add-on website, which I believe you need to be an SAP customer to even see, and until I certified my first application, never knew existed.

So…  that got me to thinking…  what is a certification really doing for my small business?  right now, certainly not 10,000 Euro’s worth.  Will I consider doing it in the future?  absolutely…  if a customer asks for it.  Otherwise, it hasn’t been something I’ve benefited from.  If there is anyone out there that has had any experience with certification, I’d love to hear from you.  Maybe I’m just not utilizing some resources that I was unaware of.

Thanks for reading,

While I was poking around Linked-In the other day, I found a great article.  It talked about the “Secrets to Winning Technology Sales“.  I highly encourage you to read this.  The article is pretty much an interview with someone that would purchase technology, software, etc.  While this is geared toward things I do, the information in the article is pretty universal.  I learned some new things as well.  There is actually a lot of good advice about how NOT to piss off a perspective customer.

I’ll keep this short and let the article do the talking.  Thanks for reading,

Do your production employees have a simple work list to use?  Can they see everything they are supposed to do?  Do they know what’s the most important task they should focus on at quick glance?  If not, you are not using your shop floor as effectively as you could.  If your shop floor personnel have to ask the supervisor, or jump through 3 or transactions in SAP to figure out that information, what is the chance they will do it every time?  The name of the game is to make the system as easy as possible, so they can focus on what they do best, make stuff.  The more time they spend in SAP, less time they spend on what is really important.

What if your shop floor personnel could log in and see this list, sort by most important at the top, and show all the information they need at a quick glance?  If you add notes to your production orders, you could also quickly double click on the X, and see exactly what the supervisor (or whomever) entered about the order.

This also applies to serial numbers, transfer requests and transfer orders.  You can pre-configure the list in the order that makes the most sense for you shop floor, and show only the columns your people care about.  If you think this could save you time, money, and make your shop floor happier, please check out this full demo for more details.

Thanks for reading,

In general, this is a pretty simple answer.  Of course not.  So why is it so complicated to move something from bin to bin, or Storage location to a bin?  If your warehouse is WM managed, there can be a lot of transactions  involved to simply move a part from bin to bin.  Between doing the initial material movement, then a transfer requirement, then a transfer order or transfer posting.  So, why would you expect your warehouse worker to be responsible for all of these transactions?

If this describes your warehouse, then you should check out WMigo.  This a solution that combines the standard IM (inventory managed) transactions with the WM transactions into a single movement.  Check out the demo for more information.

Thanks for reading,

Now, this is a question that I often struggle with while I configure a new implementation for Service Management.  When do you really need a new order type, versus just re-purposing an existing order type?  There are some obvious instances where you need a new order type.  For example, revenue bearing vs. non-revenue bearing fits that bill.  As a general rule, I typically aim for 4 different service order types for a facility.

• In-House Repair
• Field Service
• Exchange Order – this is optional if a company will use this process
• Sub Service Order – this is optional if needed for many companies

Now the line becomes gray when you suddenly start talking about warranty vs. non-warranty.  In general, many companies do not know in advance if something is warranty, so generally I do not split these up.  Even exchange versus standard in-house repair is often overkill.  I only break these up sometimes to give the service shop better visibility of what needs to be handled first, because typically you want to handle the customer repairs first, the exchange items second.

I’d love to hear your opinion on this topic.  I’m actually mentally battling right now on the best approach to take.  The give and take between less orders types and better visibility for reporting and prioritization.  Maybe I’m biased, since I’ve written a dashboard of my own, but I generally drift toward less order types.  What do you do?

Thanks for reading,

One of the things I’ve often found lacking in standard SAP is the ability to quickly change multiple documents at the same time.  Now there are some transactions like MASS or MMAM that let you change some things, but it often locked down pretty tightly at more organizations because there is too much power.  One of the places I’ve found this would be particularly useful is updating service orders by the supervisor.  Let me explain…

How often does your service supervisor have to go through 10, 20 or maybe 100 orders per day to update the service order?  It could be to assign the priority, the responsible technician, or maybe the start and end dates.  Regardless, manually opening each order is a waste of time.  What if you could have a single list of all the orders you care about, and you can just enter in the changes you want to make to multiple orders, and press execute to have it all taken care of?

Check out service supervisor if you could use this functionality, plus a lot more.  Currently, we support multiple fields for quick change including:

• Priority
• Person Responsible
• Accounting Indicator
• Planner Group
• Basic Start/Finish Date
• Maintenance Activity Type

All fully configurable, so you if you don’t any of these displayed or changeable, just set it in configuration.  This is just one of the many features in Service Supervisor.  If you’d like to find out more, please check out the full demo for Service Supervisor.

Thanks for reading,