Since this is my last post before Christmas, I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas. I hope you have a great time with friends and family and enjoy some much deserved down time.
Thanks for reading,
Looking for Quiet???
I started meditating earlier this year, and I found one of the hardest things to do is “quiet my mind”. I’m not even 100% sure I know what that would feel like. The thing I do recognize is that even when I try to focus on something, I am constantly interrupted by other random thoughts. It could be anything. What do I have to do today? did I take meat out of the freezer for dinner? I wonder if we have any plans for Saturday? and on and on and on.
I had an interesting thought recently. I was up early walking the dog, and not feeling my best because I had a little too much fun the night before with friends. Funny how quickly a few beers hits you when you get older 😉 But the thing I noticed was that when I was “recovering” I didn’t have nearly as many thoughts floating in my head. Then it hit me that while I was enjoying those beers, I also experienced a lot less thoughts running through my head. So it made me wonder, is that why so much drinking happens in our current world? With the constant onslaught of technology, texts, phone calls, emails, linked-in, Facebook, and hundred other things all fighting for my attention, is it possible that alcohol provides a bit of relief from so many distractions? I’m not saying it’s the right way to handle this, but it brings up an interesting point of view. Even when you drink for “liquid courage”, it really just turn off all the thoughts that tell you not to do something? Could this be part of the reason why drinking is prevalent in our society? I can’t answer that, but it some interesting food for thought.
The idea of getting in control of our own thoughts is liberating and challenging. Try an experiment. Just sit down for 2 minutes and focus on your breath. Just sit there and don’t think of anything else but breathing in and out. Can you do it? I can’t. I’m getting marginally better, but I can’t stop the thoughts. The best I can do is not chase them like a dog chasing a car 🙂 I recently heard someone say that if you want to get some water, you must first have an empty glass. Well, isn’t that same for our minds? we need to have a little bit of open space in order to really experience anything.
I know this is random, but as the holidays approach, my mind seems to go a little more random 🙂
Thanks for reading,
Finding some Passion
One of my favorite movies of all time is Fight Club. There is a monologue in the movie that talks about what Men are looking for. And Edward Norton about how Fight Club becomes the reason to cut your hair short, or trim you nails. Well, I think the reason that I love that movie is because it rings so true. Everyone is looking for something they can be passionate about. Buying a new set of pillows, or even a new TV become hollow and empty after a short time. The movie hits on the fact that we are all consumers that think just buying the next gadget, or bigger house will finally make us happy. And the simple fact is that for most of us, buying something, making more money or buying that bigger boat won’t make us happy. It will leave us empty and just looking for the next thing to fill the hole, even for a moment.
Why do I talk about this? Well, a few weeks ago, I mentioned that I’d love to play flag football again. I said it in passing while driving the kids somewhere. Within a few minutes, my awesome wife found a league local to me. I did some homework and signed up. I even got my good friend Brice to join me. Well, last week was our first game. We got smoked!!! And you know what? It didn’t matter. I was so happy to be out there playing, that I didn’t even care about losing. I was out there competing and loving life. I found some of my passion that I lost long ago. And let me tell you, this is like my Fight Club. I find myself working out and stretching daily now, to help me prep for the next football game. I even traded in my slinky for a football as my thinking toy at home 🙂
So… why do you care? why am I writing this? because finding your passion is the most important thing in life. Maybe you are lucky and already know what you are passionate about and enjoying it daily or weekly. Or maybe you are more like me, and you lost your passion somewhere in the hustle and bustle of daily life. Don’t know where to start? look back at your life before spouse and kids. What did you love to spend your time doing? If that doesn’t help, go all the back to being a kid on summer break. What did you look forward to you doing? I’m sure it wasn’t buying new furniture or expanding the deck. But maybe it was building birdhouses or playing softball. Good luck finding your passion. Finding this first piece for me was huge. Now I’m looking for more 🙂
Thanks for reading,
Getting Leverage on Yourself
Is there anything in your life that you know you should do, but aren’t doing it? Maybe it’s something simple like flossing your teeth every morning, or more complicated like executing your marketing plan and talking to 5 new people every day. It doesn’t matter what it is for you. We all have something. It’s often a little thing we are capable of doing, know we should be doing, and if we do it there will be a genuine improvement in our lives. But somehow, it never seems to happen. Sure, you might do it for a week or two, but then you end up traveling for work, go on vacation, or just get “busy” and before you know it, we stopped doing the thing.
So, what’s the solution? It’s called getting leverage on yourself. I got this concept from one of my many self help gurus. The idea is that you need to pick something painful. It could be financial, it could be cleaning someone else’s bathroom, or giving away some favorite possession. You find a good friend, someone that you can truly trust and explain to them exactly what you need to be doing. You then tell them what you are going to do and how often, and what happens if you skip it for even one day. Then you make them process to hold you to your word. Let me give you an example…
Let’s say you really want to learn a new skill. It will require you to take some online classes. But the problem with online classes is that you can work at your own pace (which means years to finish a single class). So you tell your best friend that you are going to do one lesson per day until the class is complete. You will email them each day telling them what lesson you completed. If you don’t email every day, then they should cash this $1000 check. And here’s the important part. Hand them a check, made out to them. Tell them if you fail, the $1000 belongs to them, cash the check immediately. The $1000 is arbitrary, but you need to make it something that hurts. Something that will light a fire under you ass to stay committed. After all, doing one lesson a day isn’t that hard, but it’s not as easy as sitting on your ass after work and watching TV.
I’m personally in the process right now of figuring out what I really need to be doing and I want to try this. How about you? do you have something that could dramatically improve you life if you would only commit the time to do it? If so, give this approach a try.
Thanks for reading,
Time Flies
Why is it that the closer we get to the end of the year, the faster time seems to move? If you are anything like me, you might be scratching your head wondering how it can be less than 2 weeks to Christmas and 3 weeks to year end. It probably has something to do with the incredible pressure we put ourselves under to get everything right. Between gift buying, travel plans, holiday decorating, projects at work that MUST be done before the end of the year, holiday parties, helping the elf on the shelf land safely in a new spot every night and perhaps meal planning for a family get together.
Now, throw all this on top of our every day duties like meals, house projects, kids activities and more, and you end up with a recipe for massive stress. I always say I’m going to start early next year, but I know the truth. I won’t start any earlier next year because life is already so jam packed, that it’s easier to get myself worked into a frenzy and spend a couple weeks stressed out to get it all done.
So, why I am talking about this? Well, first off, since I’m scrambling to get things done, it seemed like an easy topic to write about. Second, and more important is that we all need to take a breath and do our best to ENJOY the holiday season. We spend so much time stressing, that we forget about really matters. For me, that’s family. Ten years from now, no one is going to remember the picture on the Christmas card we sent, or the presents we gave. What they remember (I hope) is that we remember each other. We took the time to be with family, have fun with friends and maybe even enjoy a few minutes of peace of quiet (in my house, not likely, but maybe you in your home).
This is advice is for me, but maybe you can get something out of it as well. Take some time to enjoy what matters most in your life.
Thanks for reading,
Service Management – Quoting with DP80
I was recently helping out in the configuration for DP80, and came to realize some limitation within the quoting mechanism. First, let me give you the basic scenario. I was creating a notification, then generating a service order. The service order is then planned, and DP80 is run to create the quote. Here are the limitation I found
- If you need to make adjustments to the quote, you cannot just run DP80 again and get the “delta”. The only way to requote is to either manually update the quote in VA22 or delete the existing quote, then run DP80 again (and you must manually refresh the data). This means that capturing the original quote is impossible.
- Upon creating the quote, it must be approved within the service order. This isn’t a huge issue, however, if your service technicians aren’t dealing directly with the customer, it adds another layer of communication in order to get the quote approved and the allow the service order to be processed.
- Upon accepting the quote, a debit memo is automatically created. If you model is fixed bid, this is generally fine, but in the event that the quote changes upon further inspection, there is no way to re-quote, so it will require manual work to send a new quote to the customer for any changes. At this point, it means that the debit memo request must be manually updated to match the manual changes in the quote (did you notice a not of manual in that???)
- If you want to use DP80 & DP90 for the same order, be aware that you will get 2 separate debit memo requests. DP90 cannot update the existing debit memo request generated from accepting the quote. DP90 doesn’t recognize that document, so it generates a new DMR. This means that you either have to manually delete/reject all line items from the existing DMR generated from the quote, or you will have a duplicate documents, one that will never be processed. To me this is likely to become confusing if not handled properly every time.
These items are not show stoppers, but they leave room for improvement in my opinion. Enhancements for Renovation??? Perhaps 🙂
Thanks for reading,
Service Management – Installed Base
I was recently revisiting how the installed base works within in ERP 6.0. I certainly found some things I liked, and some things that were disappointing. For any of you experts out there, perhaps you can tell me if I’m missing something in configuration (I looked, and found nothing). So, let me tell you about my finding…
Transaction: IB51 allows you to create a standard installed base. you select your type of IB and simply press enter. Here is a sample screen shot of a quick IB that I put together.
What I like is the ability to add most any type of object into the installed base. I can add straight materials, equipment, functional locations, Documents, Text or even other Installed Bases. Very cool, because it can truly be a repository of most anything you might have at a location.
Now, it got even a little more cool, when I looked at transaction IB61, this allows me to copy from a sales order or a production order and bring in the items automatically into the installed based. A very handy tool.
Now, for the con of the Installed Base. The number one thing I was missing was the ability to assign partners to the Installed Base. I have become a big fan of attaching partners to equipment records, functional locations, notification etc… suddenly not having that option left me feeling a bit naked. You can assign a single address, and probably work some hokey methods to tie text to a partner number. But why not just integrate the option. Oh well. It could be worse. In addition, installed base does not fix the issue of having to manually maintain everything when something changes. So, just like the serial number hierarchy within the equipment record or functional location, if you make any changes, you have to manually do the adjustment in the installed base. The most common example I run into is that a customer sends back a piece of equipment and for one reason or another, a new unit is sent to the customer and the old number remains at the plant (or gets scrapped). You must manually go into the installed base and make the swap if you want to keep things accurate.
Overall, it’s not bad functionality, if only I could assign partners to it. If you know what I’m missing, please comment on this post. I’d love to know 🙂
Thanks for reading,
Service Management – Status Profiles for the Repair Sales Order
Adding a simple user status profile to an existing order type is a handy trick. My particular application is to come up with an easy way to determine if a service quote has been accepted or rejected. There are a lot of potential ways to cover this handle this, but being able to avoid bastardizing any existing fields, or having to deal with straight text brought me to this path.
Let me give you the quick basics on how to do it yourself.
You can find this in SPRO–>Sales and Distribution–>Sales–>Sales Documents–>Define and Assign Status Profile
The first step is to create the status profile. Check out my SM e-class if you want more details on how to do this.
Next, you need to assign this profile. You can choose to assign it to the header or the to item. After you make that call, simply add the profile to the field: Status Profile
It’s that easy.
Thanks for reading,
Service Management – Equipment Structure
I wanted to talk about something that is relatively simple, yet immensely cumbersome in practice. That’s right, the equipment hierarchy. When I say the equipment hierarchy, it may also be known as the equipment structure. It is the process of linking serial numbers/equipment records into a structure or hierarchy. The principal is very simple, and I’m going to walk through the process. After the process, I’ll explain what makes it all so cumbersome (if you haven’t already experienced the pain).
If you go into any equipment record and go to the structure tab.
in the bottom portion, you’ll find the button: 
to structure the hierarchy.
On this screen, you simply enter in each equipment record that belongs at this “level”.
Now you can see that a structure exists. If any of the equipment records in this list had their own equipment hierarchy, you’d see the Sb-Eq box checked.
Now at the top of the page, you’ll see the button: 
and it will bring up the entire structure report.
My example was pretty simple, but it would also show functional locations, and would show the entire explosion. So, pretty easy, right?
now, the problem comes into maintaining this. Up to this point, I’m not aware of any automated way to capture the hierarchy. Say for example, have a production order with the top level material being serialized, and you use several other serialized components to assemble it. You must now manually create that structure (now make it worse, and say it’s a production order for 50, you have to repeat the process 50 times). The issue becomes complicated because you may issue 50 serialized components to make 10 finished goods. Which 5 items went into which finished product??? Without a high amount of diligence, it becomes highly manual and extremely difficult to maintain automatically. I’ll be talking more in the future about some methods to begin capturing this information.
Thanks for reading,
Service Management – Equipment vs. Serial Numbers
I get this a lot from customers, “What is an Equipment Records?”. Normally, my answer is always the same. It’s equivalent to the serial number. After spending a few minutes playing with the configuration and looking at the output, I realize that my answer isn’t completely accurate. So that’s why I wanted to talk a little about this on the blog.
First, let’s take a look at the serial number.
Now, the biggest thing to take into consideration is the category. Based on the configuration behind the category, will impact if there are other tabs that show up. For example, if you chose a different category that included Configuration, you would also get the configuration tab (for Variant Config info). But in general, you won’t get a lot more than what you see right here.
Now, let’s contrast this with the equipment record:
Notice all of the extra tabs and buttons you get by default. Some of these views are configurable and can be turned on/off if you choose. While much of this information is manually populated, you still have it all available, and with some of my upcoming tools, I plan to provide functionality that will allow for some automatic generation of things like serial number structure, equipment (as-built/as-maintained) BOMs, etc…
So there you have it… why equipment is more than just a serial number. My personal feeling is to always use an equipment, and let the serial number profile drive it automatically, but if you truly have no need for any additional data, just stick with the simple serial number structure. I hope this helped you… it’s actually helped clarify it in my own head…