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SAP Code Inspector

Well, after applying many OSS notes to get to the program SYCM_DOWNLOAD_REPOSITORY_INFO applied.  Then I loaded up the index to run the program.  This took almost 2 weeks in my small system to create this index and burned up over 50GB of space to build it.  All of this, only to find that this program downloads a list of all the objects.  No list of bad code…  UGH.

The good news is that I found when looking closer at the presentation, is that there is a transaction called SCI or SAP Code Inspector.  This was really what I was looking for.  I learned another tidbit as well.  My really only system couldn’t run the code inspector.  So I ran the transaction in the my EHP7 system, which had a higher basis level.

When running SCI to see if your code is HANA compatible, you need to run the variant FUNCTIONAL_DB or FUNCTIONAL_DB_ADDITION.

This is the SCI transaction.  You have to create an Object Set:

Here, the easiest thing to do is to enter the Package.  For me, I entered in the custom packages I created, since those are the pieces I cared most about. Then save.

Then

create the Inspection.  Enter in the check variant, and the Object Set you created in the previous step.  Then save and execute.  Now you are ready to see what code needs to be corrected.  We will talk more about the results in a later post.

Thanks for reading,

Discover Yourself or Create Yourself?

I started a new book this past week by one of my favorite self-help guru’s (Tim Ferriss).  He had a line early on that really grabbed me.  He said something to the effect of do you want to discover yourself?  or do you want to create yourself?  Why this hit me so profoundly is that to discover something is to go back into history.  It’s figuring it where you came from, why you are the way you are, what got you here today.  All of this information can be valuable…  or can be just another excuse to stay where you are.  Afterall, my hard childhood, my lack of finances, my lack of experience, or whatever excuse you choose to latch onto, becomes the glue that holds you in place.

Now, if you flip that question around and focus on creating yourself, this means that it doesn’t matter where you are now, where you came from, etc.  It’s a future direction.  Perhaps some of those limiting factors in your past could hinder you from getting where you want to go…  but I guarantee, if you pick a direction in the future, even if you don’t make it to 100%, you will surely move in the right direction.

I’m making a conscious effort to create myself, not discover myself.  Let’s face it, I know my past well enough… but now I want to pick where I’m going to 🙂

Thanks for reading,

It’s OK to treat yourself

It’s funny, since I got married, and especially since I had kids, I find that all of my efforts (and my money) go toward keeping everyone else happy.  A buddy of mine (Thanks Brice) convinced me a week ago that I really need to treat myself occasionally too.  Granted, I go on vacations and other fun excursions, but it’s not often that I do anything for just me.  So this past weekend I finally decided to replace my old 2003 VW Passat with a new(er) car.  I’m pretty excited.  It has this nice clean interior, I can plug my phone into and play music without using a cassette adapter 🙂  It doesn’t have any scuffs/dings from scraping the side of the garage…  you get the idea 🙂

So am I just writing this to tell you about my new car…  not entirely.  ha ha ha.  What I really wanted to say is that it can sometimes be difficult to give yourself permission to treat yourself.  I know that it’s a struggle for me.  Even now, I look at it and spend too much time thinking about how quickly I can pay it off, or how best to juggle finances to minimize my interest payments.  When I really just need to recognize that I work hard, I save a good amount of money for the future, and it’s OK to just enjoy life.  And I think that’s the real message…  Enjoy your life.  Don’t enjoy it so much that it costs you any future happiness, but if you cover the things you need to do, it’s OK to enjoy life today too.

Thanks for reading,

 

Happy Memorial Day

I hope you have a great day today.  Try to take a little time out from your great BBQ’s and other fun events to remember those you lost.  I know today is primarily a day to honor those that lost their lives in the service of our country.  I like to add my own spin on it and use today to remember loved ones I personally lost as well.

For me, it’s my Grandpa.  Some of my earliest memories are with hanging with my grandpa in the basement of their Wausau home.  Sometimes it was just watching TV, or him making me a fancy “cocktail” at his bar.  I loved doing everything with my grandpa.  He’s been gone for many years, but clearly no forgotten.

Happy Memorial Day.

The Future of SAP Service Management

I heard an interesting tidbit of information at Sapphire this year.  Namely, that SAP is looking to phase out service management as we know it, and replace it with some sort of hybrid between S/4 and CRM.  The concept that I heard is that they are looking to leverage the multiple database features of HANA to have both systems live on the same database.  This would eliminate replication of data and allow them to pick of a “best of breed”.  For example, they could take the best of CRM and have it live side by side with the best of ERP.  I would guess that using the CRM SD portions for order management along with a seemless mix of the PM portions within S/4.  It’s all a wait and see game.  The below blog is a little old, but seems to speak to the same sort of approach.

https://blogs.sap.com/2015/07/15/sap-s4hana-and-other-sap-solutions-strategy-and-roadmap/

Unfortunately, I’ve been able to find little else in this thread online.  So I guess it’s a wait and see game.  My professional opinion is that it will still be a long time out before we see a solution any different than was introduced back in 4.6~4.7 days.  Even S/4 1610 offers no changes from the original service management concept.  Perhaps SAP is looking to finally update the process, but it all remains to be seen.  And since service is not S/4 Cloud or Leonardo, it will still take the back seat for a little longer.

Have you you heard any more details on this?  Would love to learn more.

Thanks for reading,

SAP and Blockchain?

A presentation that caught my attention (and based on the attendance, it caught a lot of other people as well) was SAP and Blockchain.  Overall, the presentation covered how Ariba was looking to utilize blockchain.  Now, I’m far from an Ariba expert, but this presentation was interesting to me for multiple reasons.  For anyone that knows me well, they probably know that I have had a recent fascination with blockchain.  I find the overall technology interesting, but I’m still struggling to come up with a good use of blockchain that doesn’t involve the financial world.

If you don’t really know what blockchain is, or if you think blockchain = bitcoin, then you are in the majority.  I think most people don’t really get the concept, and it took me reading multiple e-books and online articles to finally get a “reasonable” understanding.  I’m still far from an expert, but think of blockchain as another database.  The biggest difference is that blockchain is peer-to-peer (so like napster/bittorrent).  What makes blockchain different is that you cannot delete anything.  Whatever is entered into the chain is there  forever.  So there is no chance of “rewriting” history.  This is especially important in the financial world.  It makes audits easier, it allows transactions to happen with few or no middlemen validating the transactions (and taking their cut along way).  It may also set the stage for allowing “micro-transactions” and allowing anyone to afford a bank account because there will be so little overhead in the transactions.  All of this is done using state of the art encryption to keep the data safe and only releasing the data needed and nothing more.

Ok…  so now you have the briefest of overviews on blockchain.  So where does SAP fit into this?  Well, I just learned that Ariba, which is an SAP product that is used for supplies to talk to eachother.  Well, it turns out that Ariba is with a product (that I’ll be looking into) called HyperLedger.  The idea with HyperLedger is that a lot of big companies are using it, so they “might” be able to set the standards in blockchain communication.  This is could be good or bad.  Blockchain pride itself on trying to revolutionize the financial world (and more of course).  Depending on the plan, things like HyperLedger could make it more powerful, or could obscure the real purpose of blockchain.  I guess we need to wait and see on that.  SAP’s plan is to be able to track all the different transactions from supplier to supplier to customer.  The idea is that by tracking where everything comes from, industries that rely on manufacturing, will have a better way to validate that the manufacturers are using “legitimate” components, opposed to knock offs that will reduce quality.

According to the Ariba guy that gave the presentation, this will become a “free” add-on to existing customers and blockchain will become an added benefit.

I’ll be watching this anxiously.  I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks for reading,

SAP – Improvements in the Web IDE

Sapphire had some good information this year.  In type fashion for a big conference, you notice some buzz words drilled into every presentation.  Among those were Machine Learning, Leonardo and S/4 Cloud.  The good news is that if you dig through the hype, you could get some good bits of information.  One of those pieces I got in a presentation that talked about the challenges and wins of building mobile apps in UI5/Fiori (whatever you like to call it).

I can’t lie, I felt a good hearing that other larger organization had many of the same challenges I encountered trying to build a hybrid app.  Keep in mind, when I say hybrid, it simply means that it works within the web browser and more importantly on any mobile device (Apple, andriod, etc.).  SAP provided a Hybrid Application Toolkit(HAT) that was an incredible challenge to get installed and use.  I struggled with version mismatches for days.  This presentation talked about the exact same challenge, and happily SAP is listening.  The newer versions of the Web IDE will include the full installation of the HAT in the cloud, eliminating the hassle of installing it yourself.  In addition, they are promising faster compile times.

This still won’t solve for doing anything more complex, like I usually try to do 🙂  but it will get you much closer to a usable system.  I’m not sure what version of the Web IDE will include these changes.  I’m hoping it will be included for any SAP version that can handle the HCP connection.  Certainly, I’ll be trying again soon, just to see 🙂

Thanks for reading,

SAP – Preparing your Code for S/4

I recently listened to a presentation from some developers that talked about preparing your development objects to move to S/4.  This obviously got my attention, since I want to move my add-ons to be on S/4.  Here’s what I learned.

Apply OSS Note:  2185390

For me, this was a bit more time consuming that I expected.  Because my system is behind the times, it means I had to apply a lot of notes before I could finally apply this one.  So it took me a few hours to gather up all the notes I needed, get them applied.

Next up, you need to create an index.  Here’s what the OSS note tells you:

Before Custom Code Analyzer (program SYCM_DOWNLOAD_REPOSITORY_INFO) can analyze your custom code, an up-to-date where-used index for customer objects as well as SAP objects is required in your system. Custom Code Analyzer will check whether the where-used index is up to date as first processing step and will raise an error log entry if it has to be updated.

In order to update the where-used-index for customer and SAP objects, run program SAPRSEUB as background job in the system to be analyzed.

Currently, in my system, I’m running the index.  It’s been going for almost 12 hours now.  Certainly due to my hardware, but regardless, give it some time.  Once that’s done, you can run the download repository (listed above).  It will give you a zip file listing the areas you need to look at.  I’ll be doing a follow up post on some of the common things I need to fix once I can run the program.

Thanks for reading,

 

SAP – Finding a transport from an object

I recently had the challenge of trying to figure out what transport made a particular change.  Normally, I can count on some sort of naming convention, or even who might have made the change.  In this case, I had nothing to go on except the object.  Well, I did a little searching and found something that I didn’t know about.

Transaction SE03 has an option to Search for Objects in Requests/Tasks

within that you can even specify the IMG activity you want to track.  Saved me a lot of effort.

Thanks for reading,

Inspiration from Life is Good

You really can find inspiration from unlikely places.  Hanging at Sapphire in Orlando and it’s getting to be the end of the day.  I glance up at some big screens and see 2 “granola” looking guys on stage.  I don’t think much of it, so I find a seat and start going through some emails.  Next thing I know, I start getting sucked into this talk by these guys.  Turns out they are Bert and John from Life is Good.  I confess, I’ve seen the shirts around, but really had no idea what the appeal of them was, so like so many things in life, I dismissed it and moved on.

Listening these 2 brothers talk about how they started their t-shirt business with 25 shirts (I think).  They had no business experience and didn’t even have a plan, but they had a purpose.  They wanted to help people.  More specifically, they wanted to help kids.  They vowed to give 10% of everything they made to kids charities.  And their brand caught on.  Inevitably, you’ve seen the shirts or hats, or maybe the book.  But what inspired me is that they did it all because of a purpose.  A need to help kids.

For me, it’s a kick in the ass to figure out how I can be that passionate about something.  It’s really just finding what the passion is…  but these two brothers are living proof that helping others pays off in so many ways…  not just a good bottom line, but a sense of making a difference to people.

What’s your passion?  (I’m still looking for mine 🙂 )

Thanks for reading,