Month: June 2015

I had an interesting revelation the other night.  It’s a lot harder to maintain a close relationship than I originally thought.  For me, it became obvious when I realized that I have drifted away from some of my very close friends after I moved south to Charlotte.  Nothing happened except that we just don’t see each other very often, and it gets easy to drift apart.  So then I realized, it’s not different in business.  If you don’t keep the relationship up, it will quickly drift to an occasional Christmas card.

I was once told that for every friend, they fall into one of a few different categories.  I don’t remember exactly the wording, but it was reason, season, and lifetime (or something like that).  The idea behind it is there are some relationships that are in our lives for a reason, and then move on.  Some for a season, so they are with us for a while, and then drift away, and others that last a lifetime.  While this is a very nice sentiment, I don’t know that it’s entirely true.  I think a lot has to do with how much anyone is willing to work to keep the relationship alive.  Take me for example, I’ve been away from MN and my close friends for nearly 6 years now, and as i look at it, I haven’t worked as hard as I should to keep in touch.  It can be a simple phone call or email, and we could still be close…  but often we let life get in the way.  We get wrapped up in our lives so much, that we can’t find 5 minutes to say hi, how are you doing?

Are business relationships really any different?  you make a friend, a prospect, a customer.  For a while, you are great at building the relationship, keeping it alive and staying close.  But after a time, you may come to take it for granted…  you may “give up” on them…  or you might get too busy with new prospects…

Just keep this in mind…  making a new friend, a prospect or a customer is a lot harder than keeping up your existing relationships.  Don’t lose what you have chasing something new.

Thanks for reading,

How valuable would it be for you to have your field technicians send you their expense reports directly from a Ipad or their phone?  After being at SAPPHIRE, and realizing that a chunk of the keynote presentation was dedicated to Concurr (SAP’s newest way to handle expense reports), made me wonder how valuable this would be in the service world.  We’ve had an idea for quite a while, and I wanted to float it out there, and see if there was any interest in a solution that handles this for the field service technicians.

Now the idea is that in many organizations I’ve worked at, field techs fills out a paper form and send it to finance or someone else to approve, then ultimately finance can charge those costs to the service order.  Would it be valuable to provide an expense entry either in SAP (or on a mobile app) that would allow your technicians to enter in their expenses, and take a picture of the receipt (if required).  This would send a message to the supervisor.  They would review the expense report, and it would be automatically charged to the service order.  Mostly likely, it would also need a printout, so it could be turned into payroll or whoever pays the expenses.

Is this something useful?  are their pieces that would need to be added?  I’d love to hear you thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

Well, let me tell you, I sure have been.  If you’ve been reading my stuff for any length of time, I’m sure you realize that when it comes to SAP skills, I’m top notch.  When it comes to sales and marketing…  well, it’s a work in progress.  Recently, I came to the conclusion that the reason I have to many issues around sales and marketing is that I project myself onto my customers.  What do I mean by that?  I automatically assume they think like I do.

For example, I’m not a big phone guy.  I’d prefer face to face 100 times over making a phone call.  Don’t ask me why… it’s just me.  So naturally, I assume that everyone else feels the same way.  So instead of calling potential customers, I send an email.  For any of you out there that don’t feel like dealing with vendors or just have too much noise in your life, I’m sure you realize how easy it is to delete an email.  Even if it’s something you really need or at least have interest in.  All of our lives are too busy…  so the path of least resistance is the delete button in our inbox.  What does that mean to me?  it means that all of those emails I’ve sent, and then wondered about, may not have even been read.

But, I’ve been talking to some of my sales friends, and they reminded that many people do want to talk.  It’s not being bothered to have a quick phone call with someone.  And a voicemail is far more likely to be listened to than an email.  Even if it’s deleted at the end, at least your chances of being heard are better.

Now this is just one of many examples.  The question you need to ask yourself is “what am I projecting onto my customers/prospects?”  The only way to have a chance is stop assuming they are anything like you.  Remember, you are trying to help them.  In my case, I’m offering a solution that makes lives easier and makes the bottom line healthier.  Who wouldn’t want to hear more about that?

Thanks for reading,

One of the things that I’ve really been thinking about a lot is why would someone want to buy my products?  It’s funny, because I’ve been working on these application for quite a while, and the sales and marketing stuff is finally starting to sink in for me :).  I’ve been building because I saw the need in places I’ve consulted at, or things my friends have told me.  But what is really important is why the customer would want to buy them.   Because of this, I’m trying to focus on what problems customers have, and then see if my applications might fit…  so I wanted to go through some of the most common things I’ve seen, and find out if they ring true for anyone else out there.

1.  SAP is too complicated for my service technicians to use.

• Why does this matter?  because in many organizations, this means that the supervisor becomes the lead data entry clerk for all of the service management information.  Imagine if you were supposed to be running a shop of technicians, but half of your day (or more) revolved around entering service notification, repair sales order, planning service orders, and even trying to deliver them back to the customer.  The alternative is bad data, incomplete data, or someone spending an hour a day to enter in 5 minutes of information because they hate dealing with computers, they just want to fix things.  And even if they are computer savy, they still need to enter data into the confirmation screen, the service order screen, perhaps MIGO to issue components, maybe Resource related billing to quick off the billing or the repair sales order to enter in the cost/price of the repair.  Is this how you want your technicians spending their day?
• What does this do to a service shop?  pretty obvious that it can’t run efficiently because either you need someone else to enter in the data, or you just come to grips with the fact that it will cost you an extra 5-10% in data entry to complete each repair.  Let’s hope your customers won’t care if you pass this cost onto them (ha ha).

2.  The service data is all over the place.  I have data in the notification, repair sales order and service order.

• Now, you can solve this by designing a form to printout that pulls data from all the locations.  But this means your team is tied to pieces of paper.  If you make changes anywhere, you need to get a new printout to your team, because they won’t see the change.  In some organization, this isn’t a big deal.  But for a rapidly changing environment where priorities can change daily or even hourly, this is a lot of paper, and also a lot opportunity for mistakes or late shipments.
• What does this do to your service shop?  well, first off someone has to keep printing off more things, but paper is cheap, so it’s no big deal.  But if you have significant setup time, and something changes that bumps the priority of a job, you might spend an hour getting something ready to be worked on, only to find out that the boss said to put this on hold till tomorrow because we have a hot job for our best customer.  Well, you may have just thrown away an hour of work.  What if this happens several times a week?  all because your schedule isn’t up to date and aside from a piece of paper, you don’t have any other way to find out if things have changed, unless you go digging into 3 different places in SAP.

3.  Scheduling the service orders in SAP is too time consuming.

• Again, you can fix this by running your shop in Excel.  Keep a list of all the jobs you have open and when you should be working each one.  After all, is there any benefit to keeping all that information in SAP?  Not really, unless you need components for your work order, or want to make sure your technicians are available when you need them, or want other groups to be able to see your information to let a customer know when the job is expected to be finished.  But hey, I’m sure you can make a lot of phone calls, and tell everyone to look at your spreadsheet, right???  I hope you read the sarcasm in there…  if not…  trust me, it’s there, and you don’t want to run your business this way.
• Again, this makes your service shop less efficient, because now you’re double entering information, or if you use SAP, you still need to go into each order and make a change in dates or rescheduling, check the component availability, etc.  No matter how you look it, it takes time for your supervisor to change the schedule around, because a new hot job jumped into line, and bumper 6 other orders scheduled for today.

These are just 3 of the things I’ve come up with companies commonly complain about.  I’d love to hear from you.  What do you hear customers complain about when it comes to SAP and service management?  What would make your service supervisor or service technicians more efficient?  what would make your director of service smile because you found an easy way to get 3-5% (or more) of your time back?

Thanks for reading,

Now, if you’re anything like me, you recognize how important warranty is to many (if not most) companies out there.  This is essentially money you have to set aside, because you need your customers to feel comfortable enough to buy your products and know it won’t break in 10 days after purchase.  In that respect, warranty is more of a marketing feature than a product feature, but it is a fact of business none the less.  Now, of the things that always frustrated me was that as a service person, how do I know I can trust the warranty dates on the products.  Because let’s face it, customers will always claim it’s warranty, no matter what.  And why do they do it?  because many companies either don’t care or don’t know if it really is warranty, so they do a free repair or send a free replacement.  Well, at the end of the day, it all comes off the bottom line.

This led me to the latest piece of development I wanted to start, but I wanted to find out if others thought this would be valuable, or has everyone already built their own solution to handle this.  The idea is to determine the warranty end date similar to the pricing tables.  If you aren’t familiar with pricing, think of it as a table (or series of tables) that are read to determine what the warranty end date (or perhaps master warranty)  should be applied.  The idea is that you can determine the products by profit center, material group, product hierarchy, or even material based on your own rules.  So you say the first table to look at is material number as the key.  if you find an entry, stop and apply that value.  If you don’t, drop down to the next table that is product hierarchy.  If you find an entry, stop and apply, otherwise move onto to table 3, and so on.  This gives you an incredibly flexible way to set the warranty dates automatically.

Now, in order to accommodate, my idea is that my customers will build their own structures (z tables, or pricing tables, doesn’t matter),  then just plug the tables into my configuration tables.  (It’ll take a bit of mapping, since the application will need to know where to get the data from (sales order, delivery, material master, etc.).  But then, my application will use the tables to set the dates on shipment, user registration, or even on repair.  IN order to avoid complex user exits, I’d design a program that can be run in batch.  I’d pick the most common scenarios (installation, post goods issue, registration) and make sure the dates could be set based on certain key changes.  For most organizations, a nightly run of this would be sufficient to handle the warranty dates.

I’d love to hear your thoughts or concerns…  and if this might be useful for your organization or someone you know.

thanks for reading,

So, naturally, I’m all jazzed up SAP HANA.  Less for the capabilities for me personally, but more for the ability to add the latest buzzwords to my applications.  Plus, I’ve heard enough details to make me concerned if all my applications will continue to run on the new HANA platform.  So for that reason, I want to build a HANA box of my own to validate that my stuff will work… and if not, figure out how much redesign will be needed if I end up with a customer on or going to the new platform.

So I talked to the organization that is helping me install a new EHP5 system (I’ve talked a little bit my headaches with that upgrade… but I hope that is close to finished).  Their recommendation was to build the platform on Amazon Web Service platform instead of buying my own hardware.  Being a bit of control freak, this naturally makes me a little concerned and a little curious to try it.  Here’s the big things…  I won’t have to worry about the maintenance or internet connectivity or any of that other stuff that gives me constant nightmares.  I won’t have to invest in my own hardware… but on the flip side, I’ll have to pay for the use hourly.  My understanding is that it will range from $1 – $5 per hour of use.  This portion could be a little bit of hassle, since I use contract developers, and I don’t know exactly when they will be working.  When you run your own systems, it doesn’t matter.  they can be up 24/7 (as long as I can keep them running). but in order to keep from wasting money, I’ll need to start the server when I need work done or I run the risk of big bills at the end of the month.

Anyone out there have experience with AWS?  anyone do it with an SAP system?  I’d love to hear any experiences or things to be concerned with.

Thanks for reading,

It’s funny, after the big conference, and putting so much time and effort into preparing, it can be easy coast for a couple weeks.  After all, I worked hard, don’t I deserve a break?  But luckily for me, I work a lot from home, so I get perfect little reminders all the the day of why I do it.  For example, after my little girl wakes up from her nap, she runs into my office and gives me a big hug (then usually requests a pistachio or whatever other snacks I might have).  Then when I my little boy gets home from school, he comes and chats a bit about his day (or the new lego he wants to buy).  It’s these little constant reminders that keep me working hard on both my day job, and my “night job”.

When I think back to the days of when I had to travel every week, Monday through Thursday, it really hits him how lucky I am and how much I want to avoid that.  It is so special to see my little kids grow up a little every day, and I don’t want to miss that.  With consulting, there’s no guarantees I can maintain the remote work forever.  But if I can become self sufficient in my software business, then I can dictate when I travel and how much.  So, working a few extra hours at night is absolutely worth it.

What makes it worth it for you to work so hard?  It doesn’t matter if you’re like me and you do it for the kids (which is really doing it for me), or you do it for your fun lifestyle, that big house you want to buy, or early retirement.  The important thing is to notice those reminders.  It will help keep you focused.

Thanks for reading,