piehlm – Page 24 – Paper Street Enterprises

Are you interested in learning how to improve you service organization?

While I know that service is often the red headed step-child of an organization, it doesn’t mean that things can’t get better. I’ve worked in enough places to recognize that the service group is often the last place any budget gets allocated to. As a result, I’ve worked very hard to help service organization improve themselves on a shoestring budget. One of those methods is my e-course that shows you some easy and affordable ways to cut cost or generate revenue within your service organization, all using standard SAP.

Service Management E-Course

If your service organization could use some new ideas, please check out this e-course. I would love any feedback, or even new ideas to add to the class.

Thanks for reading,

Why is SAP struggling???

My buddy Jeff recently sent me an article talking about SAP.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/13605479/1/struggling-sap-downgraded-to-underperform-by-jefferies.html

The general gist of the article is that SAP is struggling because it’s having issues getting customers into the new subscription model and the new HANA/S4 versions. I found this both interesting, and not surprising. I’d be curious to hear others take on this, but of the sampling of customers I know, HANA, S4 and the cloud are all things that many customers just don’t see the need for. Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone likes things to be fast, and everyone wants to be the coolest new platform. The problem is that is that the price tag of all new hardware, all new software, and potential ramp up of new skills due to changes in S/4 have a lot of customers hesitating to make the switch.

First off, look at the hardware. When you switch to HANA, you either need to look at going to an entirely cloud based model, like SalesForce.com or RAMCO. The problem is that SAP is still unproven in the cloud arena. It’s hard to stay say if the fear is warranted, but at this point, Salesforce has been doing this for a long time… SAP is trying to jump into the game, perhaps very late. So that means if you don’t feel comfortable offloading your ERP to the cloud, you need to pretty much replace all your hardware to switch from HDD to RAM. No small price tag associated with that.

Now if you look at the benefits, you get all the faster analysis, faster runtime on DB access, and possibly some new functionality… but it’s been hard to see much of S/4. Regardless, it’s a new learning curve for your basis person… and it may be all new for your business if you start moving toward all FIORI which is cool and possibly better, but it’s still new. That means you need a budget for change management now too. At the end of the day, many manufacturing companies just don’t see the need for it. It’s useful in the BI world, but for the general ERP, it’s just not cost effective for many industries.

Now, I’m sure that SAP will force this customers to change at some point… or at least make it “an offer they can’t refuse”, but in the meantime, many companies are look to continue business as usual.

Thoughts???

Thanks for reading,

Transporting a Reference Billing Plan

In my latest endeavor to document all of the pieces of service contracts I recently stumbled on an interesting problem. When you create a new billing plan type, you can create a sort of template. The problem is that the template is stored in the standard tables of FPLA and FPLT. Short story, you can’t transport this to QA or Production. You receive the following message:

Billing plan references cannot be transported. Message no. V1719. Billing plan references, created in Customizing, cannot be transported. Maintain the billing plans, that are used in Customizing, in the new system.

Thanks to the following SCN post I found the tricks.

First off, check OSS Notes: 135028 & 356483

Go to transaction SOBJ and there double click on object V_TFPLA_MU_TRANS, then in the details set the flag V_OBJ_H-CURSETTING for Current Settings.

Thereafter you will be able to use OVBM in your productive system.

I needed to remember this myself, so I thought I’d share it with you.

Thanks for reading,

Mike Piehl

Role: Founder and Chief Architect for JaveLLin Solutions and Consultant for Paper Street Enterprises.

SAP Expertise: Service Management and Variant Configuration.

Mike began working in SAP in 1995. He became an independent consultant with a mission to provide the best consulting knowledge in SAP Service Management and Variant Configuration. He focuses on helping small to midsized manufacturing companies implement and streamline their service and engineering processes. He has worked in many industries including mining equipment, telecommunications equipment, high tech manufacturing industries and more. In 2008, Mike began the journey into application design. Since then, he’s led the development of SAP applications that has evolved into a suite of products including Proximity, Broadsword and Renovation that focus on simplifying and streamlining the Service Management processes.

Read Mike’s Blog: Learning Things the Hard Way

Do you celebrate your achievements?

I’ve listening to a lot of Tim Ferris lately. His podcast is all over the board, and it turns out this is exactly what I needed. I tend to get so focused on a topic that it’s all I listen to, all I think about and as a result, I miss out on a lot of other ideas. Well, one of those ideas that I’ve heard a few times lately is that many people, myself included, don’t know how to celebrate their victories. It sounds so silly, but when I look at myself, every time I accomplish something I end up in a position of “what’s next?”.

I look back to college as a perfect example for me. All through high school, I had one solid aim in mind. Get myself into college so that I could get my engineering degree and get a job. Well, all the sudden I found myself graduating from college. I already had a job with an engineering company and ended up going into a sort of minor depression. It was so crazy to me… I finally had everything I’d been striving for for years. But the whole issue is that I didn’t know what was next? I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I accomplished my goals then found myself in a position of being lost. I didn’t have anything to aim for. I no longer had that overwhelming drive to accomplish something.

Looking back, I realize that I didn’t know how to enjoy my success. And unfortunately, I haven’t gotten past this. Instead, I just kept adding new goals, new objectives, new impossible missions to make sure that I always had a goal to drive to. I have found a couple of things that mildly help.

Write down all your accomplishments that you are, or should be, proud of and read it every couple of weeks.

It sounds a little egotistical, but by reminding myself of all the things I have done, it helps put things into perspective. It also reminds me that I have done a lot of things… I personally fall into the trap of looking at all of the things left to do. So forcing myself to look back and see all that I have done helps put things into perspective a little better.

Make a jar of “Awesomeness”

I haven’t done this one yet, but it’s an idea I got from Tim Ferris. The idea is very similar to my list. It forces you to take a few minutes, add something new into the jar and force you to look at the jar and see all the things in there.

Remember, enjoy your accomplishments. No matter how big or how small, if you don’t stop and enjoy the moment, what’s the point?

thanks for reading,

Could you benefit from Decreasing Repair Time and Increasing Productivity in Service

Are you customers waiting too long for their equipment to be repaired?
Do your technicians know the orders to work on first? Do they have everything they need when they need it?
Are your technicians wasting time entering operations and components for each customer repair?
Are you wasting your warehouse space on customer repairs waiting on parts?
Are you comparing planned cost to actual cost?
Is Quoting an In-House repair a manual headache?

I know these questions are silly because if you use Service Management in SAP, the answer is yes to at least one of these questions!!! Let’s face it, who doesn’t want to easily shave cost off the bottom line, or better yet get some new revenue channels coming into your organization. Well, I wrote a white paper to give you some ways to do just this. Now some well run organization may already be using all of these, but in general, most organization are not doing at least one or two of the items in this white paper.

Free Guide on Decreasing Repair Time and Increasing Productivity in Service

Thanks for reading,

UI5 – a nice way to Debug

The OpenSAP class has just shown me another neat little feature that I was unaware of. In addition to debugging using Chrome or Firefox, there is another UI5 option to get a cleaner look at all of the stuff going on. After you execute your application press the following keys:

<Control><Alt><Shift>s

it will bring up the following window.

You can then click into any of the options to expand what you can see and do.

I’ve finally got used to debugging in Chrome, but to me, it’s far from easy. You can’t complete avoid Chrome because this page won’t be very useful if your app isn’t even rendering. In that case, you will need to solve those issue first. But if you find your app isn’t behaving like you expected, you can use this nice little tool to easily work through the elements to see what’s going on.

Thanks for reading,

Using the Service Notification – My latest E-book

I’m pretty excited. I recently released my third e-book. I decided to take a bit of a different approach to this book. Rather than talking about configuration and how to set it up from a technical perspective, I focused more on data within the notification. My other 2 books heavily discussed how to configure the notification, so for this book I wanted to focus more on what is available to add to the notification, as well as give my person recommendations. If you happen to check it out, I’d love to hear you thoughts.

SAP Service Management: Using the Service Notification

I’m currently starting working on a book all about service contracts. It will end up being more of the end to end service contract manual (including configuration), but obviously, everything I learn from the notification book will shape the new book.

Thanks for reading,

Installing the SAP Cloud Connector

I recently had to reset one of my test systems. The same test system was where my cloud connector was installed, so I needed to reinstall it. Initially, the install went well, but for some reason, when I went to reinstall, it wasn’t working. I’m not sure if it’s because the Hana Cloud Platform was already configured to use it. But I found I needed to do the following.

Install Java SDK
Install the latest version of the cloud connector
Login:
1. Administrator
2. manage
Then, go to the access control tab and set up the system and services you want to be available.
go to the Principal Propagation and press refresh.

I believe in my case, step 5 was the key. Anyway, hope this can help you out,

Thanks for reading,

BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE – Updating Conditions

It’s rather amazing, after all the time I’ve been using the BAPI: BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE, I just learned something new. I was recently trying to do an update to a repair sales order to add lines automatically from a service quotation. The problem I kept running into was that no matter what I tried, the update of a condition didn’t work. It just kept adding a second line (and to make things worse, it was ignored in lieu of the automatically determined condition).

this took some digging to figure out, but I finally found OSS Note: 593246

The note explains that the LOGIC_SWITCH-COND_HANDLE = ‘X’ parameter allows you to simplify the whole condition process. By using this you no longer need to explicitly define something as insert or update (I or U). Instead, you skip entering the entire CONDITIONS_INX table. Instead, just enter in the basic fields of the condition that you need:

ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-ITM_MUMBER = ‘000010’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_TYPE = ‘PR00′
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_VALUE = ’10’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-CURRENCY = ‘EUR’

the BAPI takes care of the rest. I can’t believe I’ve never run into this before, but this one was worth capturing.

thanks for reading,

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