Business

You ever have one of those days when nothing seems to go your way?  When it seems like everything you touch falls apart and your afraid to look at any new email?  Or get a bad feeling when the phone rings?

Well, we all have those days, and when the day is over, what really matters is how we rebound from those though days.  Even for me, it’s a constant learning experience.  The bad days for me often require a couple beers, and a good friend to vent to.  It’s hard to avoid the feeling sorry for myself.  But it helps to remember that everything that goes wrong, can be a learning experience.  It can be something to build on, a change to pivot, or a chance to reflect.  Bad days are limited, and good days happen much more often.

So, but the trouble behind you, and use it to drive you over the next hurdle.  Sometimes our worst experiences, turn into life altering improvements.  Find the good in every situation.  No matter what, it’s there… you might have to dig a little to find it…  but it’s worth the trouble.  If you need a shovel, let me know.  I’ll let you borrow mine.

thanks for reading,

In my travels implementing service, I find a constant gap.  The service technicians want more information without having to dig into multiple transactions to see it.  Take your standard in-house repair or plant maintenance event.  Rarely is all the information contained in the service order.  Sometimes there are attachments or pictures, sometimes long text held in the service notification, or even easier, you need to flip through 4 tabs just see the information you need to do the repair.

This gap led me to create my own app that I call service execution.  The idea behind of this is to see only the service/maintenance orders that are open and that you care about.  Then with a click you can pull up all the information about that order, and even perform common functions for the order, all from a single location.

Proximity: Service Execution

User:  JVS
Password: password

Please press the feedback button to let me know you think,
As always, thanks for reading,

I recently got a question from one of my previous clients.  Why should I do service in SAP?  This can happen sometimes after running the process for a while, realizing that it can be tedious and painful, especially compared to maintaining a spreadsheet.  So this was my answer, and I’d love to hear from any of you on some points I may have missed.

Let me be upfront, and say that the bottom line should always be the driving factor.  I believe in using SAP service management, but at the end of the day, if you can accomplish all of these same things in another way and cost less money and produce the same results, then the decision is obvious.

Everything comes down to integration.  While you may hear this as a buzz word for anything ERP, at the end of the day, it’s why someone paid a lot of money to implement SAP.  By working within the same software, it means that everyone is speaking the same language, seeing the same numbers and looking at the same data.  For service specifically:

1. Financial integration is one of the biggest pieces you get by using Service.  This means that your costs and revenues can be easily tracked by finance in the same ways they track everything else in the company.  If you stop using SAP service, then finance will be forced to manually journal all of the transactions.  Depending on the financial requirements, this will mean journaling every invoice and every material issue, as well as any costs related to an order.  Or maybe it’s just a couple of lump sums at the end of the month.  All depends on what finance is required to provide in the case of an audit.
2. Creating demands on other parts of the organization.  Production is the most obvious area that you deal with on a consistent basis.  By using work orders and adding the components you need, it allows demand to be centralized.  Otherwise, you end up having to create manual orders to generate production.  In general, it would work something like this.  You have a service job that you expect to happen in 1 months.  With SM, you enter in all the components you need on the work order, assign the date that you need things, and then begin production on all the long lead time items, and the rest come in later.  If you begin to manage all of this manually, you need to create production/purchase orders for each component on that order and you have to assign each order a date.  Now, let’s say the job gets delayed 2 months.  You either a) leave all the orders, tie up the inventory and have it sit in your shop until the job finally arrives, or b) you have to go into each order and manually change the dates.  If you use SM, changing the service order dates will update anything that isn’t already in the process of being produced.
3. Reporting – if you keep all the data within SAP, it means you can actually pull everything together to see what happened.  Sure, this can be done using vlookups in multiple spreadsheets, but how many spreadsheets will everyone be maintaining some small piece of puzzle?  Will warranty track all their requests in the same way that service does?  If you tried to look at all the calls that came in to see how many were warranty vs. service, would you be comparing apples to apples?  If everyone uses the same process, you are fine.  If you perform this in SAP, everyone will use the same process.  One of the reasons I built a dashboard is to demonstrate how you can use all the data in SAP to really see where your process performs well and where it needs fine tuning.
4. Process – while the process may seem over engineered, too complicated, or just plain overkill.  At the end of the day, SAP does reflect all of the things that really happen in the process, and they force you to document it.  This is extremely useful (in my opinion) because if you use spreadsheets to run the business, you are dependent on someone remembering to enter in the data.  SAP takes a lot of that away, because you can’t ship something out the door until you’ve completed it.  You can’t issue the components until they are available in stock, etc…  By forcing you to execute the process, it decreases the chance of skipping steps, or just not documenting things.
   It’s also why I built my applications, to help small shops to be able to use the system easier.  This way you can get all the benefits of accurate data, without as much overhead in the process.
5. Being able to run your shop your better.  Just because your shop is small, doesn’t mean that it can’t be run more efficiently.  I don’t care if you need to manage 10 jobs or 1000 jobs a month.  Being able to look at the system, quickly decide what is the priority for today, and see everything else that is impacted is much tougher to do a non-integrated system.  Being able to quickly drill into any work order to see the components, what components are still missing, who the customer is because you know this is a big account, and see all the notes, job data and the extact progress in the job, and then quickly do the same to the other 10 jobs screaming for your attention.  And most importantly, pass that information onto everyone that needs to know.
6. Last but not least… you are probably already using it.  So that would mean designing a new process, since you will have to determine all the SAP touch points that you will still need to be accounted for, plus I’m sure there would need to be some justification that the new process would be stable and reliable and less effort than the new process.

anything else you would include???

thanks for reading,

If you do repairs of your customers goods, how do you keep your warranty dates up to date?  This seems like a simple question, but if you use SAP, this simple question often comes back with a head scratch, or a simple statement like “we don’t bother doing it”.  Of course, you many not offer a warranty on your repair work, but many organizations do.

Well, if you are like many organizations I’ve encountered, you know that the process of updating warranty dates in SAP is either a completely manual task, or a development exercise. Now, the later works, but like everything, when you do development, you need to make sure it continues to work every time you do an upgrade.  Now, in general, the equipment api’s and bapi’s don’t often change, so usually, a quick test can reassure you the technical portion is working.  But, if you life in the manual world, how often do your technicians forget to update the warranty start and end dates?  Let’s be honest here, typically a technician is working on multiple jobs at once, and they are trying their best to accurately track time and complete work orders.  When they hit TECO, do you think they always remember to update the warranty dates?

Now you may be saying, so what?  Well, if your accounting department doesn’t care, then you’re in the clear 🙂  But most of the companies I’ve spent time with care very dearly about those warranty dollars.  They want to track how much free work is being given away, and ideally track down why it happened to help prevent it from occurring in the future.  And if your call center needs to rely on SAP to know if it’s under warranty, or worse yet, take your customer’s word on it, then you may be running into a lot of money going into the warranty accounts.

Why isn’t there a simple option upon TECO to enter in the new warranty dates, so no one has to remember???  If you’d like to hear how a way to simply handle this issue and start improving your warranty dates, let me know.  I’ll be happy to show you.

Thanks for reading,

Well, in a never ending quest to improve performance, I’ve stumbled upon yet another novice mistake I was making. I was doing select statements into views. In theory, views are great, everything is already there, I can do 1 extract and grab everything I need. I figured out, selecting data from a view is very EXPENSIVE.
So, my tip of the day, avoid views in your programming. If you only have a view, go to SE11, and see what tables comprise the views, and extract directly from the correct tables. Your users will thank you.
Thanks for reading,

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,