Year: 2014

If you’re familiar with SAP service management, you realize the challenge of seeing the full picture of the in-house repair process.  If you don’t what I’m talking about, you’ve never tried to see the end to end service process in a single place.  Because SAP Service Management is a combination of plant maintenance and sales and distribution, this means that you have to try to get your reporting from multiple different places.  If you want to see the time it took from creating the repair sales orders to the time the customer sent you their item for repair, how do you do that?  Worse yet, how do you find out how long it takes between receiving the customer’s item and the time your service order is released?  Because you are often crossing modules, there is nothing out of the box to give you this information.

Now you may have a great SM person, who has spent countless hours working with your BW person to create this cube, so you can get some of these metrics.  In many of the places I’ve been, that never happens.  Often service is the forgotten department, always at the bottom of the development queue.  What if you could get all the information you could ever want or need on your repair sales orders?

What if you could all of this out of the box?  Well, you’re looking at it.  Our Service Management dashboard pulls together all of the information on repairs orders, including associated documents, status’ and when they were set, built in metrics to quickly see at a glance how many orders are open, received, in repair, and so much more.  If you use Service Management, your organization needs this kind of information.

If you’d like to learn more, check out demo of the Service Management Dashboard.

Thanks for reading,

As I work to develop my plan for my software business going forward, I suddenly find the need to do all these little (and not so little) clean up projects.  It’s partially procrastination, I can recognize that much.  But I also find that it is a kind of a symbolic thing in my own mind to consolidate everything into a single place.

Currently I’m working with my business partner to transition the entire software business over to just me.  This requires more headaches than I originally expected.  There are the legal ramifications, like the the business address, owner, etc.  There are the financial details like bank accounts, upcoming bills, and just general budget constraints, then there is software side of things.  I believe I mentioned it a while back, but I found that I made life hard on myself a while ago creating a lot of SAP “namespaces” for all the different software packages I designed.  Well, this turned out to be inefficient because it restricted me from good code reuse, and also just makes life more difficult in the general design path.  I spent a bunch of time last week, literally copying everything over to a single namespace (‘JVS’).  This is one of those activities that certainly wasn’t required…  but in some ways it turned out to be necessary to my own mental health.  It was sort of relaxing to just be able to focus on a mindless task for a few hours a night, and know at the end that now everything is under one umbrella for the software, as well as for the business.  It helped me relax and gain a little perspective on going forward.  It also helps put my “stamp” on it, so to say, that things have just evolved again.

So I guess my point today is that sometimes it’s good to bring things together, and the symbolic gesture of it can be helpful for the soul.

Thanks for reading,

Hello everyone.  I apologize for the inconsistency lately in my posts.  Between soul searching and planning, I haven’t been as diligent as I’d like.  Today I’m looking for your feedback.  About 9 months ago, we created this cool IPad app for the Production Supervisor.  My problem is that I haven’t really received much feedback on it.  I would really love to hear what you think of this application.  Is it easy enough to use?  do you like the layout?  you like the interface?

Proximity Production Supervisor

The driving force behind my request is that I’m in the early stages of designing an application for Field Service.  I’m planning on following the same sort of look and feel, but if it’s junk, or could be improved, I’d really love to hear about it before I start investing more cash in my next app.

BTW.  if you’re interested in connecting to a live system, email me at mpiehl@javellinsolutions.com and I’ll give you the address and user/password to try it out.

I really appreciate your feedback and thanks for reading,

I’m not gonna lie.  I’m disappointed that things haven’t gone better this year for the software side of the business.  The bright side is that consulting has been good for me this year, and has been able to keep funding my dream of the software business.  This doesn’t change the fact that sales aren’t where I wanted or even expected them to be yet.  Which unfortunately always comes back to the big question…  “Am I doing the right thing?”

So for me, this question is especially tough to answer.  I’ve been working on this dream for going on 8 years nows (In one form or another).  Looking back at all the time, energy, late nights, and of course cash that I’ve sunk into this dream, it’s incredibly hard to consider giving it up.  On top of everything else, for those of you that know me, you know that I have a VERY hard time giving up.  My personality tends to be the brute force, keep working, try harder, learn a new skill, and everything will work.  However, I just found out that my business partner has to step away, and I can’t blame him.  However, that does mean that it’s back to just me to fund the business, and drive the sales, contact the prospects, schedule the conferences and determine what I can afford to keep doing.

So right now, I’m initially going into cost saving mode.  I’m looking for ways to trim my expenses, and do a real analysis of what I need to be doing.  But anytime something like this happens, it’s not question yourself.  After all, I’d been trying this for a long time, maybe it’s just not meant to be.  I guess self doubt is a natural part of the game…  now, how to decipher if it’s just a little bit of self pity, or if it is reality hitting me on the head with a 2×4 🙂  I guess only time will tell.

But have no fear.  I intend to keeping putting out my ramblings and tidbits here on my blog, and I think I’m on track for a mid-November release date of my E-book.

Thanks for reading,

Well, things are going along pretty well, but I recently took a look at all of the outstanding work I wanted done.  Several key pieces, I had slotted to complete before year end, so I could get them certified by SAP.  Well, it seems the calender has got away from me, and I’m creeping into the end of October already.  Now this isn’t the end of the world, and there is plenty of time, but for the first time ever, I have help doing this development work.  This is a GREAT thing, unfortunately, it means that several objects that I want to add pieces to are already under construction with one of my contractors.  My good friend Jer warned me about this, but I thought I’d have more time before it actually impacted me.

So, why am I writing about this today?  first and foremost, it is essential to have systems in place to help you manage what is going on, and who is working on it.  Now, I’m still small, so this can all be managed with a simple spreadsheet.  And Thankfully, this has helped to stop me from jumping right into my next idea, since if I did, I’d end up getting either my work, or my contractor’s work overwritten when it got combined.  So, what do I currently track:

• Specification number & description – for those of you who are non-techy, this is just the “thing you want done”
• what’s the status of spec – a great reminder for me if I haven’t written the spec yet.
• Who is the developer
• what status is the change in
• Main object touched
• Priority of the list

So today’s advice, is to make sure you track (and look at that tracking sheet) before you jump into something.  Don’t fall into the trap that I tend to fall into.  “I’m too small to need to worry about that yet”.  Once you have more than I person doing the same job, you need something to properly manage the workload.  You might just save yourself a big headache.  Now, I still have the challenge of getting everything done, but that’s for another time.

thanks for reading,

Well, as many of you know, I’ve really been focusing a lot of time on writing an this e-book for SAP Service Management.  I was extremely excited, because I thought I was nearly done, ready to start publishing and be able to refer to myself as the “the guy who wrote the book on SAP SM”.  Well, it seems I didn’t do my homework very well.  Now, I did finish all the content for my book, and I even gave it a first round of editing, proofreading, and found a couple sections that I missed.  But, where I dropped the ball was some of the basic things needed to publish a book.

1. A Title ( you may have seen my previous post asking for feedback).

2. A cover – as I found out as soon as I started looking to publishing on Amazon, iBooks, etc. is that you need a cover.  It sounds to simple…  but since I’m the furthest thing from artistically gifted, means I need help with this.  Unfortunately, my favorite graphic artist is booked solid.  So now I have no choice but to delay my publishing.

Now, this isn’t the end of the world, but after spending time off and on over the past year…  I was ready to release this baby.  And now I find out I’m on hold, because I didn’t do my due diligence on what was required in order to publish an e-book.

Live and learn, and as always, I hope you learn from my mistakes and get those pieces started early.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I was starting to work on designing a cover, when it hit me, it’s hard to have a cover until you know your title.  I’ve had an original working title for a while, but it’s pretty boring.  However, since this is a How-To book, maybe boring is ok…  but i doubt it.  So today, I’m asking for your help.  I’d love to hear your ideas on a good title for this book.  Keep in mind, my plan is publish on my website, as well as in amazon, iBooks, etc…  so it needs to be something that people will find.

My book is a how to guide on configuring SAP Service Management.  I walk through many of the pieces of configuration, explain what you need to do to get Service Management up and running quickly.  IN addition, I cover all the advanced pieces, so when you have things configured, you can start tweaking.  I even cover the questions you should ask during blueprinting, and some advanced topics.  So, here are some of the “working titles” I’ve come up.  Let me know if you think one of these is a winner, or you might have a great spin on something already in there.  Here’s my thoughts in no particular order.

1. How to Configure SAP Service Management the quick and easy way.
2. Configuring SAP Service Management, A How-To Guide
3. SAP Service Management: Your guide to a quick implementation
4. Setting up SAP Service Management
5. The Consultant’s Guide to SAP Service Management
6. SAP Service Management from A to Z
7. Everything you ever wanted to know about SAP Service Management, but didn’t know who to ask.
8. Getting Started in SAP Service Management

Looking forward to your feedback,

Thanks for reading,