piehlm – Page 22 – Paper Street Enterprises

How do you puzzle and what does it say about you?

Random, I know. But the other night I was working on a puzzle with the family. At least it’s better than TV all the time. ha ha. Anyway, I realized that my method of working on a puzzle is always the same, I flip over everything and find all the edge pieces. I don’t pay any attention to the other pieces, I don’t do any sorting, and I don’t start looking for matching. I’m looking for the boundaries. Once I have those in place, I can start working on the insides. Now my wife is very different. She picks a landmark piece in the puzzle and works to put it together, then build it outward from there, or jumps to an entirely different area of the puzzle.

Since I know myself pretty well, I realized this is actually quite indicative of my personality. I look to find the constraints first, then work inwards. In my daily life, this usually means I figure out all my “edge” pieces. I find all the things I can’t do, I have to work around, or I have to fit within. From there, I go about finding my solution. My wife on the other hand is much more creative than I am. (I’m the doer, she’s the one with the ideas). She always has random ideas, creative solutions, or somethings I just look at and scratch my head about? The difference is that she doesn’t stop to look at what is possible, or what fit within “reality”, she just has the idea and works it out from there.

Personally, I strive for more of her approach. When you constrain yourself, you instantly stop looking outside of the box. I quickly build the box, and often struggle to move beyond it without some guidance from my friends. Now, I know that a puzzle isn’t a perfect analogy, since you “can’t” do anything outside the box, but just looking at how we focus on things can open us up a bit. So I had the revelation that I need to stop focusing so much on the what the limits are, and rather just focus on the solution. Like in the Matrix, some rules can be broken, some can be bent. You often don’t know until you try… What’s your method for putting together a puzzle???

Thanks for reading,

We are not all Maytag Repairmen

I recently did an interview with my friends over at Titan Consulting. They put together a pretty nice little piece about service management. Namely, how costly it is to get service wrong the first time. They also give some food for thought on areas to focus on to avoid those costly mistakes.

Check the article here. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

Service Contracts – the latest e-book

I’m pretty excited. I recently finished my 4th e-book. I feel like I’m starting to get into the swing of things. This E-Book is personally one of my favorites that I have done. Maybe because I keep learning more about the process, or maybe because I think this topic is poorly covered out there, that I think it will be very useful to a lot of people out there.

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/652520

This latest book is all about the service contracts. I went back to my original book and focused heavily on the configuration side of how to set up. Of course, you can’t configure something if you don’t know what you need. So the book covers blueprinting, it walks you through the different service contract processes and throw in some complicated topics like billing plans and revenue recognition. If you like this book and find anything missing, or anything you think could be covered in more detail, please let me know. I would be happy to make additions or clarifications. My goal is to make this a useful reference guide to veterans and novices alike. Please check it out and let me know what you think,

thanks for reading,

Product Registration

Early on in my adventures to create products in service management, I created a web application designed for end users to input their own information. I learned a lot from that initial product, and it gave me a lot of good ideas. At the time, the product never really took off, so I set it on the shelf for a while. As I explore the whole new UI5, responsive technology suddenly makes me wonder if this is something to revive. My brain has been focusing a lot on warranty lately, and the concept of product registration was something I designed into my old application. It worked very simply. Once someone logged into the application, they could register a product. All they needed was a serial number, material number or equipment record. Every business is slightly different, so I kept this generic. They could search SAP to see if the serial number existed. If it did, they could register it to themselves.

Upon registering it would assign an end user partner to the equipment, and it had the option to assign warranty start and end dates as well. As an added feature, within the scope of the application, you could see all products registered to you (or your company) and select them from a list if you needed to submit a notification.

If you don’t currently use SAP capture your registrations, what sort of data are you losing? I’ve worked at companies before that still receive the little postcard registrations. This is great, but someone needs to manually key these into the system. If you don’t do any sort of registration, do you know all your end users? if so, no big loss. If not, you could be losing out on the ability to market directly to the people using your product. If you use registration within SAP, you have that reporting capability available to you.

What I’m curious about is if this is something your organization would see value in. If so, I’d love to hear from you, and I’d be open to moving the original “Rapier” up on the priority list to be converted to UI5 (it is currently in ABAP Web Dynpro). I look forward to hearing your thoughts,

thanks for reading,

Setting Warranty Dates – A new option

One of the things I have always wanted to see from SAP is an easy way to set warranty dates. They have gone out and built up a lot of automotive functionality, namely ACS-Warranty, the Warranty Claims “module” etc. But I have yet to find an easy way to enter in the dates. So, my mind naturally wonders how it could be done better. So a few months ago, I blueprinted what I thought could be a great solution. I wanted to find out if you agree, and if so, do you think it is worth developing.

What if warranty dates worked just like pricing in SD? Now, if you aren’t familiar with how SD pricing works, let me give you the high level. pricing contains a series of tables, each of the tables has different and/or more fields. let me paint you a picture.

Table 1 – material number

Table 2 – material number, product hierarchy

Table 3 – material number, pricing group, product hierarchy

and so on… within SD pricing, I can group and sequence these tables in such a way that if you find the value in a table, you stop and return that value. if not, you keep dropping down to the next table until you find a match. so if I group these tables 1 = table 3, 2 = table 2, 3 = table 1. Then table 1 will be my most generic, and last resort. Typically there are fewer entries in the most specific tables despite the fact that it is more specific. This is because there are usually only a handful of “special” cases that drive different prices.

Now, what if we could do that with warranty dates? have it use this same concept to be as generic or specific as your business needs. If your company (or any customer you have worked with in the past) could benefit from something like this?

Looking forward to your responses. Thanks for reading,

Setting Warranty Dates for new products

A challenge I always seem to encounter in SAP is setting warranty dates. Now, in my world, I’m very familiar with what to do with the warranty dates and how to process things, but one of the biggest challenges is getting the warranty dates set properly in the first place. In my travels, I’ve done this 4 different ways, often depending on the business or development resources available. Here are the options I’ve done in the past and I’d love to hear your experience.

Write a user exit at the time of post goods issue. This will work, especially if you follow simple warranty rules. The gotcha for this always ends up being how to set different dates by product line, hierarchy, material type, etc. You typically end up with one or more custom tables to hold this information. But this falls apart if you need to get more complicated than material number (prod hier, or whatever). Perhaps you offer 12 months on everything in a product family, except for you most mature product, which you offer 18 months. Short of adding in new product hierarchy, or listing each material individually, you end up writing a lot of code that may or may not change.
Product Registration: Method 1 is great if you start the warranty clock as soon as you ship it. What happens if you deal with distributors that may hold your product for 1 – 6 months before the end user purchases it. You can’t very well your end user it’s out of warranty if they just bought it and it’s been sitting on a shelf for a while. In this case, you need to resort to product registration. If you users are willing to do this, I love this approach. However, this requires a lot of up front work. You typically need a user website capable of allowing your customers to register a product. This means you need to be capable of creating new customers on the fly, adding partner types to an existing equipment record, and then setting the warranty dates. You also typically need to add a front end to login, or even create new users in the system to even allow an end customer to do this. It’s a big up front effort unless your business has already done it.
Create a background program that looks at all the of the serial numbers shipped, PGI’d, etc, and then using similar logic to the user exit, load in the correct values. This approach is very similar to #1, but offloads the heavy lifting until later rather than doing it as the delivery is going out the door. This approach is typically better, since warranty information is not critical as a product leaves the door. You typically have at least a week before you should need to worry about it 🙂
Manually entering the data/skipping it. All too often, this ends up being the approach that businesses take. Why? it’s too much development to get the data in when it might never be used. So they may run a report monthly to show all the equipment with blank warranty dates, and in someone’s “spare time”, they might enter in the data. Let’s be honest, this means you might as well skip it, since the warranty data will be so hit or miss that data is not trustworthy.

Now, something to consider regardless of how you set the warranty dates (or master warranty) is: What happens if you don’t have a simple time based warranty? as soon as you need to track hours of usage, miles, tons moved, or whatever, you now need to track a whole new level of warranty data. Measurement documents are great for this… but they carry their own overhead. For example, how do you get the numbers? do you have technicians that can see each piece of equipment and regularly report back the latest values? Are your customers willing to give you numbers on a daily, weekly, monthly basis? If you can’t get something to give you these numbers, you end up with a product that appears to infinitely under warranty. Great for your customers, not so great for you.

Now, all of these methods can work… but is there a better way? I’ve been thinking of developing something into Renovation/Proximity to help with this. Before I invest my time, I want to make sure there isn’t an easier way to do this that I may have missed. Would love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading,

UI5 – Gateway Service Debug Timeout

Well, I recently had some trouble connecting my services to a template in the WebIDE. So like any good developer, I tried a whole bunch of things, then moved over to another system. And when it still didn’t work, I started fresh. Well, can’t pinpoint what exactly changed, but now things are working better than ever. Of course, when you start fresh, something else inevitably pops up. This time, when I went to debug my gateway service, it kept timing out after 30 seconds. This was something I hadn’t encountered before.

Seems like I’m not the only one. I happily found a post that explained what to do. The short story is that in HCP, I needed to add another parameter to my destination.

ClientReadTimeout = 30000

Interesting that this didn’t occur before, so I can only guess that a change occurred in HCP recently. Either way, now I have 5 mins of debug time, instead of 30 seconds. So I’m back in business again.

Thanks for reading,

Netweaver Gateway – Beware of changing versions

I recently ran into a new error when working through the Netweaver gateway. Because it was occurring on a new service, it left the door wide open to possible pieces I may have missed on the service. Well, after some digging, I realized that I had developed the service in one system, and was deploying it to a newer system. Since I had used structures, I bad the bad assumption that it would automatically update if the structure changed.

Well, it turns out, this is wrong. When SAP generates the service, it creates interfaces that take a snapshot of the structure, but they don’t use the structure itself. In the newer system, the structure contained 8 new fields, and until I generated the service in the new system, the service kept failing.

So, remember, structures used within a type in a Gateway Service are snapshots, not dynamic. So if you are having a strange error, sometimes it pays to regenerate the whole package.

Thanks for reading,

Dealing with Anxiety… a new approach for me

I woke up this morning, and realized I had slept through my alarm. It wasn’t terribly late, but my morning ritual includes taking the dog for a 30 minute walk, getting breakfast ready for the kids, emptying the dishwasher, and if time permits, a little bit of personal time for myself to exercise and meditate. Well, I woke up late enough that all of the personal time got used up, and then to compound things, I looked at my to-do list. Well, it had 20+ items I “wanted” to get done today. Now, for me, most of the items on the list aren’t critical. I won’t go to jail, get fired or lose my family if they don’t get done, but the more things get put off, the bigger the list gets. To top it off, I’m probably slightly OCD in respect to lists. I have this overwhelming NEED to check items off. At least I know how to motivate myself to get things done. ha ha ha.

Well, all of these things made me extremely anxious. Not the way to start my day, and to make things worse, I usually look forward to time with my little girl (who always seems to wake up before the rest of the family). But today, I had the jitters, butterflies in my stomach, whatever you want to call it. That list and waking up late just knocked me off balance. So instead of enjoying my morning with the family, I couldn’t sit down… I had to try to cross a few items off the list. Instead, I checked my inbox and added a few more items to the list making it even worse. Like my usual morning routine, the family eventually headed out the door and I went up to my office to start my day. Normally, I would try to knock off a few of the easy items on my list, just to make the number look better. But today (I’ve been doing this for a couple weeks now), I spent ten minutes with the headspace app. It’s very easy, guided “meditation”. I used to think this was some sort of hokey thing that only hippies and granola people did. Damn, was I wrong about that.

Since listening to Tim Ferriss, I’ve realized just how many successful people include some form of meditation in their daily life. So, I decided to try it. Well, today after just 10 minutes, I’m far less anxious and I feel far less stressed. In fact, it’s prompted me to write this post now to further help me work through this stress. Amazing how small things, just 10 minutes can make a huge difference. Anyway, if you don’t currently do this, I encourage you to try it. Just do it for 10 days. (Sorry, don’t mean to sound like a commercial), but it might be worth it. I was for me.

Thanks for reading,

Service Quotations… Why are these so challenging?

I’ve recently been helping out a fellow service expert to navigate the ins and outs of quoting service. It really has lead me to the question “why is it so difficult?” Let me tell you where I’m coming from, in the ECC world, if you want to quote your customer for In-House Repairs, you have to jump through a lot of hoops. First, you have to decide if you want to go with a more manual approach, or do a bunch of “SAP sponsored” development. Each of these methods as merit, but at the end of the day, if you want send a quote to your customer, it’s not easy.

A while back, I did a post that explained the SAP approved method for handling this. It entailed new item categories, users exits, DIP profiles, and of course, a lot of form and pricing work. Overall, it’s a pretty slick method, but it requires a lot of ramp up to get there, and for non-SAP experts, it can look very cluttered and cumbersome. The long and short of it is that your sales order because both the sales order and the quote. Does it work? absolutely. Is it an elegant solution… in my opinion, absolutely NOT.

The flip side is to simply create a quotation with reference to the original sales order. This means that you basically have to enter in the quote from scratch. You will need your service guys to send you an excel, or you need to be fluent enough in reading a service order to enter in all the data. Minimal development effort… maximum effort from the users.

This lack of good options lead me to create a simple button in Renovation: Repair Order Execution. The button is simply Create Quotation. What isn’t simple is the cool functionality behind this button. First off, it checks for a specific user status on the service order to make sure the service department has finished updating the order with planned cost. Next off, it check how you want you quote created. Do you want the servicable material as an item on the quote? do you want all the items that would have come from you DIP profile? do you want to pull from a sales bom? Then it pulls in the items on the order, and then adds the unit costing for each thing, so that EK02 condition will show you the cost. Then, to let the service department know what’s going on, it changes the user status to show that they are waiting for the customer to accept or reject the quote.

If you are interested in a better way to quote for service, check out Renovation. Just email me, and I”ll be happy to set up a demo.

Thanks for reading,

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