Business

This is a topic that is very near and dear to my heart.  One of the interesting things about service is that you often don’t even realize how important it is to your organization.  For example, when I first started my career, I thought I was going to be an engineer, building all these cool devices, and designing who knows what!  When I look back at those days, I realized that one of the things my engineering classes never really covered was to design things so they could be repaired (ideally, repaired easily).  It is very easy to design something on paper or your computer…  and not take into account the fact that it is nearly impossible to assemble because no one could even get their hand or a tool in place to tighten the bolts.

This is so often the case when it comes to service management.  Now, engineering is getting smarter about designs for manufacturing and service…  but often the system side is still neglected.  I see the same mentality in company after company that I consult for.  It’s the notion that they are used to “working around the system” because it’s “just the way things are”.  Being in the service world now, I realize just how painful that becomes for the service group, and more importantly, for the entire organization.  Why would it impact the whole organization?

Very simple…  whether you choose to believe it not, service is your best and easiest revenue source.  I know you are probably rolling your eyes… but hear me out.  Study after study talks about the cost of acquiring a new customer being 2 to 10 times more expensive than selling to an existing customer.  Take the low or the high estimate…  but I’d much rather cut out all the time, expense and pain of finding new customers.  This becomes especially true when all you need to do is keep your existing customers happy.  How do you keep them happy?  again, it’s a pretty straightforward formula.

1.  Make good products.  How does service have any impact on this?  well, if you’re collecting your data properly, you should have all of the market research of things you should be doing, as well as all of the quality information to tell you what you need to be doing better.  Often, this isn’t available until the product gets into the customers hands.  If you want to make the best products, you better be listening to the quality & service data.

2.  Give great service.  Want to keep your customers always buying from you, even if you are a little more expensive than the competition.  Stand behind your products and give your customers a great experience when something goes wrong.  If you can turn around a repair faster than anyone, offer a great warranty program, or provide your customer enough self service tools they will be happy to continue buying new products and coming back to you for any calibration, scheduled maintenance, etc.

I am a firm believer that service management, service processing, or whatever your organization calls it is the make or break factor in both of those points.  I’m sure there are more points…  but do you really need more than this to know that service is the key to a great organization.

Thanks for reading,

Well, the new Traction book I’ve been reading is forcing me to look at my endeavor as a business for the first time.  One of the first steps is to stop and decide what you want out of the business.  This is a time to be a bit realistic and a bit optimistic.  Consider this your goal.  Like every goal, it should be attainable, but don’t settle if you believe you can achieve more.  It’s strange, but something so simple is really more challenging than I expected.  When you force yourself to take an honest assessment of what you have, where your going and where you want to end up…  well, it’s eye opening.

So, how do you go about figuring out your 10 year plan?  Quite simply, just start writing.  You start with your objective.  Do you want to sell this and start again?  do you want to run this forever?   Then, you need a revenue number, it could be a sale price or a yearly .  Can you be $1,000,000 per year?  $10,000,000?  more?  Now’s the time to take a guess.  Now, you need to figure out how you’re going to get there.  What is your business?  How do you plan to evolve over the next 10 years?  Obviously, you can predict everything, but you need a game plan, a direction, a vision.  For example, I know that if I’m going to survive in the world, I need to be involved in the Internet of Things.  In what fashion, I can’t say yet…  but at least I have a vague vision 🙂

Now, fill in as much of your vision as you can.  How many employees do you have?  what is profitability?  Are you expanding into new businesses or industries?  Anything you want to happen, write it down.  Then refine it.  Based on the details are you numbers feasible?  Can you really get enough customers to make the revenue number?  Be honest…

More to come.  Thanks for reading,

Well, finally, I learned a trick in solution manager.  I have struggled with downloading support packs and patches.  Up till now, I had to deal with the hassle of entering a support ticket, and waiting for SAP to approve it.  what a pain.  Well, now that I have a working solution manager, I can finally take care of things myself.  So, here’s the trick:

option 1

1.In the left frame switch to Operations.

2.Then, choose the tab Change Management.

3.Choose Maintenance Optimizer.

4.Choose Create New Maintenance Transaction and select the system for which you want to download the patches and confirm at the end

option 2

Login to solution manager system run tcode SE37–>Enter the function Module: /TMWFLOW/MO_UI_BASKET_AUTHORIZ and press F8 ,Leave the default values and execute again now you can see maintenance optimizer screen there you select the files and click on confirm download so that you can start downloading

Pretty easy,

Thanks for reading,

As it was just the 4th of July, I can’t help thinking about the complete deception we give ourselves.  Please indulge me my occasional world outlook.  🙂  When you looked back at the fight for independence our forefathers fought to provide us.  The idea was to make us free from England.  The funny thing is that there will always be a master.  When we declared ourselves free from set of masters, it simply creates a void that will quickly be filled by the next willing master.  In our case, it was our own government, that our forefathers work so hard to keep simple, unobtrusive, and supposedly designed to protect our liberties.

The sad truth of it all, is that it seems most people long for that control.  While we claim to be the land of the free, we are quickly giving away all of our liberty in exchange for “security”.  or so we tell ourselves.   Good old Ben Franklin said it best “Those Who Sacrifice Liberty For Security Deserve Neither.”  Well, between the random wars, police actions, and conflicts we force our way into, all in the name of security, it should be painfully obvious that  security dwindles as quickly as liberty.

So please, remember that the struggle for liberty is not a republican thing, it’s not a thing…  it’s a personal thing.  So I hope you still want you liberty.  If so…  just pay attention to how easily it keeps being handed over willingly.  Just watch the news with a different perspective.  Put your political beliefs aside for a week.  If you truly look at everything in an unbiased fashion, it will incredibly obvious (and should be painful).  Step one is the realization.

Going back to one of my favorite movies, Red Pill or Blue Pill.

Thanks for reading,

Now in my opinion, one of the greatest things that SAP has added into the system is document flow.  this is especially true for SM.  If you’re new to SM or SD, you might not be all that familair with using document flow.  If you’ve ever visited an SD or SM document, you’ve most certainly seen this weird little icon:  .  If you plan to do anything in either of these areas of SAP, you’ll quickly realize it is your best friend.

Document flow in SAP is simply the connection to all of the preceding/follow-on documents.  In the in house service scenario, a type document flow may look something like this:

You’ll notice that in this picture I was able to see notification, the repair sales order, the inbound delivery, the outbound delivery, the invoice, and any other SD related documents.  What you also may have noticed is the distinct lack of the service order, but there is a service documents button.

Unfortunately, in the design of document flow and the table structure for capturing this, the service documents were neglected in the initial design, so the Service Documents button I believe was an afterthought.  It’s still better than nothing, and I’ll give you some tips for making the best of it.

The first big thing you need to know is, if you’re starting at an SD document (delivery, sales order etc. ) be sure to click once on the sales order (make sure it’s highlighted, and you’re good).  then press the service documents button.  This will bring up a new screen showing the service order and any of it’s related documentation.

One of the other issues I’ve encountered with document flow is the inability to see sub-service orders in the documentation.  The only way to see if there are sub service orders is to drill into the service order, and look for the structure button

You will then need to click this button to see the sub service orders.  You can then drill into the order and see it’s individual document flow.  As a follow-on to this topic, if you have a complicated doc flow, for example…

Notification

Now with a structure like this, you again, won’t be able to see everything depending on where in the structure you are at.  For example, if start at the service order (for quoting), you won’t be able to see the actual service order used for repair.  Instead, you’ll have to navigate to the notification, and then you’ll be able to see the structure below the notification, including the repair sales order.  The way the documents are laid out above, shows kind of how SAP structures them.  Since it is a pseudo parallel path, you have to work your way up to a common document before you can see the next path.  In this example, the notification is that common document.

There is a another big thing to remember when dealing with service.  You have to turn on the document flow for many of the items.  For example, purchase reqs, material transfer, etc. must be turned on before they will generate items in the document flow.  I HIGHLY encourage you to make sure these are turned on.  Not seeing the purchase reqs, or materials issued to a service order makes your job as a troubleshooter FAR more challenging.

Now that’s the basics of document flow, and if you’re not already using it, get familiar.  For me, it’s personally one of the best tools offered in the SD/SM module.

Thanks for reading,

I have to say, I’m pretty excited.  this new website is truly light years ahead of my old one.  Tuesday night I officially changed over to a whole new look and feel.  I would really love to hear your feedback.  If you have a few minutes, stop by, read a little, and maybe comment on your thoughts.  Feel free to respond to this post, or email me directly:  mpiehl@javellinsolutions.com

thanks a lot, and I can’t wait to hear what you think,

I got a request from a consultant friend of mine.  He was wondering about the best way to capture costs of installations.  In my experience, there are 2 very different ways of handling this, and much of it is related to the size/complexity of the installations and the amount of data you are willing to maintain in order to accomplish this.  Let me talk a little about the 2 methods.  In the end, both are great, but you should be able to look at the situation and decide which one fits your needs best.  Now, my quick disclaimer.  I am by no means a PS expert.  There quite probably many things I’m leaving out of the discussion, and I encourage you to talk to a PS expert if you think you need to go down that path :).

1. Project Systems.  This method is typically reserved for large installation (in my opinion).  The nature of project systems is that there is a lot of functionality, but there is also a lot of data to maintain in order to use it.  In PS, you can have multiple different cost collectors, full project tracking, production orders, service orders, purchase orders, etc.  all of these things traceable inside of a network/WBS.  I recommend this approach for anything that is large and may require any sort of planning functionality (for example, planning multiple service technicians, material reciepts, contractors, etc…).  Most importantly, if you need to track it like a project, it should be a project.  As far as costs/price go, usually resource related billing is used to track this since it is often a time and materials type activity.

2.  Service Management.  this is method is gonna be  the down and dirty method.  It’s a single service order (with the ability to make some sub service orders if you so desire).  It will still allow you to plan components and operations, but from a simple order structure.  You use this approach typically for anything small that doesn’t require a full project plan to coordinate (or if you want to do the project planning in MS Project and that’s good enough for your purposes).   The installation service order can be spawned directly from a sales order.  You can still use resource related billing for the cost/price determination in the sales order.

In my experience, the biggest thing you lose between SM and PS is the reporting and scheduling functionality.  PS is far superior in this respect, but if it’s overkill for your needs, you can get by with a much more simple approach in using the service order.

I hope this sheds some light on the differences.

Thanks for reading,
Mike

I recently listened to an audio book, another addition from Jeff, called SPIN selling.  The idea is Situation-Problem-Implication-Need Payoff is a way of selling.  One of the biggest take aways I got from the book is that selling big things is a lot different than selling little things.  I did a post that talked about closing not being the answer.  Well needs is the step you need to focus on instead of closing.  Here’s the idea.  Every customer has a problem… if they don’t, well, you might as well move on.  But just having a problem isn’t a enough.  Just because someone says “my car doesn’t get very good gas mileage”, doesn’t mean they are going to jump right up and go buy a new car.  Yes, they have a problem, but problems aren’t necessarily needs.  At least not directly.

This is where the needs conversation begins.  First, your customer must have a NEED for solution.  If they have a need, you have a chance.  This comes to the concept of implicit needs vs. explicit needs.  I’m still working all of this through my head (but as you may have noticed, I tend to think better after writing some stuff down), but the idea is that an implicit need is more like a problem statement while an explicit need tips over to the want or desire category.

Let me illustrate.  If we go back to the “bad gas mileage” example.  Simply stating that the car gets bad mileage is an implicit need.  Now, as soon as someone says, I need a car with better gas mileage, you have now jumped over to an explicit need.  It’s very subtle, but just admitting that you want or need something, buts you into a buying position.  Being a man and being an engineer, I often miss this subtle difference, especially when I listen to my wife talk about all the things that would be “nice to have”, like a new deck, a mansion on the water etc.  I need to manually flip the switch in my brain to not panic…  it’s just an implicit need.  Now, as soon as my wife starts talking about buying a boat, I know without a doubt it’s an “explicit need” at least in her mind.

Now, this applies in normal life as much as sales.  Pay attention to difference the next time you talk to friends or family.  See if you notice the difference.  it’s pretty cool when you can start to notice the difference.

Thanks for reading,

My new buddy Jeff turned me onto a new book (well, it’s new to me) called Traction.  The idea behind this book is to get a grip on your business.  Well, this is right up my alley.  Lately, Perry Marshall has been talking a lot about working “on” your business, not “in” your business.  Well, I am VERY guilty of spending all my time working “IN” my business that I often forgot about the business itself.  I’m so focused on writing blog posts, adding new features, and contacting prospects, that I quickly realized that I only have a “high” level plan at best for my business.

Now over my career, I’ve often gone back and forth about my goals for JaveLLin Solutions.  Sometimes I look at it as a self sustaining business that I can move me out of the consulting world, so I can pursue my dream full time.  Other times, I get more ambitious, thinking that in 5 to 10 years, I want someone to buy me out for millions of dollars, and finally I have the idea of building a business that I could leave to my kids (this one is a bit more far fetched, since who knows if my kids would be interested… after all, my oldest boy isn’t even 5 yet.  ha ha ).

My point is that my “plan” has been vague at best.  This new book is forcing me to sit down and decide what is my plan.  As the old saying goes, if you don’t where you’re going, how do you plan to ever get there?  or maybe you’re already there.  And I know that personally, I’m not there yet.  So I need to start focusing on what I want to grow this business into.  The book is interesting, and I’m sure I’ll be posting more about some of the ideas I’m getting soon.

But you need to walk away with this thought.  What is your plan?  are you waiting on social security?  a pension?  a lottery ticket?  or do you know what your goal is and at least have a direction for getting there?  if not…  do yourself a favor and spend some time thinking about it.

Thanks for reading,