Year: 2015

If you are like many organizations using SAP ERP to do your service processing, you realize that the process has a lot of steps in order to get things done. Many organization end up drowning in all that data processing leading to a slower process to complete customer repairs, or incomplete or inaccurate data. The 2nd piece of that is especially damaging because instead of proactively working to avoid customer down time, you spend all your time in a reactive mode.
This is why we created Renovation. A simple web application that allows you to create notifications, manage notifications and manage repair sales orders.
I’d love to have your feedback, so please try out Renovation, and press the Feedback button when you’re done.

Use login:  JVS

Password:  password

I can’t wait to get your feedback.  Thanks,

Mike

I recently came up with a really cool idea. I want to start pushing out the address from my web application, Renovation, in some blog posts and email campaigns. Before I start pushing it out, I really wanted to get a feedback mechanism in place. I wanted to capture some feedback, get some ideas, or even hear if someone thought my stuff was awful. Being the geek that I am, my mind instantly went to complicated solutions.
Adobe Interactive Forms
Building windows in web dynpro
Building custom tables to capture responses
etc…
I floated this idea to some of my programming buddies.

Thanks goodness my friend Edward emailed me with a simple solution. Why not just use a web application outside of SAP, and call it from a button within my app. DUH!!! interactive forms, windows, all of these things require extensive development, and a learning curve. once again proof, that being creative is no substitute for seeing the obvious 🙂
Thanks for reading,

Now, in my world, I can’t count the number of times I’ve learned a hard lesson. Sometimes it’s painful financially, sometimes it’s a loss of time, and sometimes it’s just a bruised ego. But so many times I’ve walked away with the “consolation” statement of “at least I learned not to do that again”. But, at the end of the day, how many of us really learn that lesson?
Let me give you some examples from my business adventures. Let’s start with the obscene amount of money I’ve spent to be a vendor at several tradeshows. My first “real” show cost somewhere in the ballpark of $18k. Luckily, I had a partner at the time to split the expense, but it doesn’t make it any cheaper. We decided to do a trade show, having never attended it, didn’t have any prospects at the time to talk to, and knew nothing about what we were getting into. We had our little table, and no trinkets to give away except some pens and notepads. We walked away with practically no leads, and a big wad of cash missing from our pockets. Now, if we had really learned anything from that experience, we would’ve realized that you can often get as much out of attending a show as you do being a vendor. Instead, our take away was that we needed to “look bigger”. So we went back the next year, spent even more money, bought a fancy booth, give away slinkies and got some interest (leads) for our stuff. We walked away feeling this would be much better. After all, people stopped by, they seemed genuinely interested… but at the end of the day, none of those leads ever panned out.
Again, should’ve learned that we aren’t ready for the big shows yet. But instead of focusing on smaller shows, I decided to go even bigger and be a vendor at SAPPHIRE. After all, that is the show that attracts the people that can sign the checks, right?!? Surely, this was the mistake all along =)
so, without having attended a SAPPHIRE ever, I laid down the cash again, and got few leads, little traffic, and big disappointment. Only now, am I finally looking at the “real” lessons I should’ve learned.
1. never present at a show that you haven’t attended first.
2. Don’t bother with a huge show unless you have someone to close the deal with.
3. If you aren’t presenting at a show, what’s the point? The presentation is your infomercial that people voluntarily (or at some smaller shows have no choice) hear all about your best features.
4. When you’re just starting out, spend your money wisely. Until you have a solid name out there, don’t think that showing up for 3 days at a show will instantly give you credibility.

Now, this is just one small area. Now, think about your past. How many times have you paid a high price in $$$ or time, and said, well, at least I learned something from it. The important question you have to ask yourself is why didn’t I think it through in the first place. Take it from me, try to plan ahead instead of paying for a lesson like I did 🙂
thanks for reading,

This is a concept I’ve heard before, but I never took it to heart until recently. The book, The Lean Startup talks a lot about this concept. If you’re not familiar, let me give you the basics. The idea is that instead of developing the entire solution, testing it so it works perfectly, adding every feature you need, instead, you build a scaled down version. You include only a handful of features that you believe will be the most useful to you customer.
Now, if you are anything like me, you must be instantly skeptical. I mean, afterall, I’ve been in the industry, and I know exactly what customers want. Right?!? 🙂 (if you don’t know me well, trust me when I tell you, I used to believe that. ha ha ha). I look back on my first product, which is all but scrapped now. I had a great idea, that no one asked for, but I believed as soon as someone saw it, they would instantly see the value, just like I did. That experiment was a blessing and a curse. It launched me into the business world… but no one ever wanted it. The up side is that I learned a lot of new skills (like basis and web dynpro), and there are pieces that I’ve been able to re-purpose into my newer products. But, looking back, if I had built a MVP, I wouldn’t have wasted so many months building something that no one even knew they needed.
Don’t get me wrong, if you are building something that some one has asked for, by all means, do it 100%. But, if you are in my world, build the basics, add a few buttons, and leave the rest to demand. Inevitably, what I think customers want isn’t necessarily what they want or need… which could mean months of development that will be thrown away…
thanks for reading,

I recently read (well listened) to a book that one of my good friends (thanks Justin) turned me on to. It’s called the Lean Startup. Well, I instantly could relate to the author of this book. He worked in software, was a developer, and had a hard time letting go of his ideas. It hit a little too close to home, to be honest with you 🙂
Well, one of the big concepts he talks about in the book is the “pivot”. This simply is changing what you are doing. Now, this could be as simple as who you market to, or some functionality within the product that is missing or not needed. It could also mean going in a totally new direction.

Right now, I’m taking a hard look at what I’m doing, and realizing, it might be time for a pivot for JaveLLin. I’ve been working really hard, for far too long on my SAP solutions, and I’m just not getting the traction that I expected. So, now the soul searching begins… where would I go next… some of the ideas include a platform independent solution, or maybe walk away from the service world completely. Anyway, I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have… or any good areas to begin looking into. I’m far from done with this endeavor, but I need to be looking to the future. I’d love your thoughts.
thanks for reading,

Well, last week I was a sponsor at the MN ASUG. The conference was a very mixed experience. First, the good part. I got to catch up with so many colleagues that I haven’t seen in many years. It was actually quite impressive to see all the Ex-ADC folks that have ended up at one of the many SAP shops in the twin cities. Like always, fun to catch up and see familiar faces, and relive some old stories 🙂
IN addition, the conference had quite a few attendees there I didn’t know from the past.
The drawback was a rather interesting layout at the Marriott. They setup all the vendors in a hallway, using both sides of the hallway, with food tables in the middle. While this did drive traffic, it was made things very cramped. Would I go back? absolutely, but I do hope for some improvement in the layout.
For all the familiar faces, thanks for stopping by to say hi. It was great to catch-up, even if ever so briefly, and I hope to see you again.
Thanks for reading,

well, let’s just say that networking is often the bane of my existence. It usually happens once every couple of months. It being some random thing that makes one or more of my systems start behaving in a strange way. Well, just recently, it hit me again. one of my many machines suddenly couldn’t connect to my sap systems, it couldn’t connect to my JaveLLin Solutions website, but everything else was fine. I fumbled about playing with adapter settings, checking boxes, unchecking boxes, restarting my machine and on and on… All the while trying not to pull my own hair out.
finally, I took a look at the host file:
\windows\system32\drivers\etc\host
Well, for some odd reason, my SAP address and my javellinsolutions address were both pointing to some random IP address.
It says the file hasn’t been changed in 3 years… but I find that hard to believe, since this system was working fine last week.
Strange… anyway, be on the lookout if anything strange like this happens to you.
Thanks for reading,

Well, in my continuing adventures with HANA, I’ve found some interesting things. If you don’t follow me regularly, you might not remember that I built an EHP7 box, on top of a HANA database. Well, I’m sure my hardware is part of the issue, but so far, I’ve found that my HANA box is unstable, to put it bluntly. Now, I’m only running on 64GB of RAM, so this might have something to do with my issues, but what I’ve found is that I can use the box for a couple hours, and then suddenly I start getting short dumps all over the place. The only solution is restarting the box. Now I understand this is a new technology, and I’m running on very limited hardware, but for the amount of data that I’m accessing, and the number of transactions I”m running, you’d really think that 64GB should be sufficient for my development needs.
The basis guy that installed it for me, is looking into it. But so far it seems that my options are bigger hardware, upgrading the Suse OS (which isn’t free) and then upgrading HANA with more patches. Well, I’m on the verge of having to invest money the software behind my HANA box, so updating my brand new hardware isn’t really an option. I guess, the next round will be to see what happens with some later Suse patches and then HANA updates.
On the software side, it’s identical to everything I’ve seen in the Oracle DB setup. I haven’t seen any massive performance improvements, or any new functionality. I guess I’ll have to wait and see what the new Logistics can offer, and of course, I’ll be very curious to see if anything was done for service. 🙂 but that will probably have to wait until my S/4 box gets built.
Thanks for reading (and if you have any suggestions to improve my HANA box, please let me know).

Tomorrow is the Minnesota ASUG, being held in Minneapolis. I know there is a lot of SAP in MN, so I hope you are planning to attend. I’m sure there will be some great information, and at least one great vendor to talk to 🙂
Hope to see you there.
thanks for reading,

Well, I’m a self taught ABAP’er, so this might be obvious to many of you out there. But today, I found out just how painful an inner join statement can be. I was doing some code to extract deliveries for a group of sales order. So, I put together a select statement using inner join of LIKP and LIPS. You would think this is nothing too major. When, I executed it, and it ran for a couple minutes (this was entering about 300 sales order line items). The total volume in both LIKP and LIPS was under 10,000 records. So, obviously, this seemed poor, to say the least.
So, I tried the first trick of adding an index to LIPS for the VBELV & POSNV fields I was using to link the sales order. No change.
Then, I decided to break up the statement into separate reads (putting the values into internal tables). Suddenly, the time from 143 seconds, down to about 2 seconds. Incredible.
Now, to my programmer friends, is this a case that the inner join can’t take advantage of an index? or are inner joins really that costly in ABAP. Regardless, I have a new initiative in my code, to start checking every inner join, and replace it with multiple reads of a single table. If this performance is at all indicative, well, then I can make some big improvements in my code 🙂
Thanks for reading,