Business

well, I realized recently that I’m about due for a dose of self help :). Between the stress and trouble sleeping, I really should have figured it out sooner, but you know me. I have a few staples when it comes to focusing myself, and today was Brian Tracy. It’s funny, because his advice is so spot on for me, yet I still forget it and get caught up in bs of everyday life. Today, I thought I’d lock it in my own head by telling you.

Take responisibility. Those simple words can really make a difference. Brian talks about the psychology of it, but I’ll give you the short version.  By the simple act of taking responsibility for everything in your life, you can’t blame anyone else for you problems. This takes anger, blame, etc out of the equation.  And let’s face it, when you’re honest about it, you are responisible.

Lets use yours truly as an example. I’ve been involved in projects where I’ve become very frustrated because I was being micromanaged. While I don’t deal well with style of management, I had to stop and take stock of myself. It’s hard to know where to start. First off, I accepted the contract. While I may have unaware of the exact players and how thing would unfold, it was still my choice. Next, and probably much more useful, I realized that if I was more open about exactly what I was doing, what my plan was, and how I was going to accomplish it, I wouldn’t have given any reason to be scrutinized. It didn’t hit me until the other day when my wife asked me about it, and I responded with “well, they never asked till now”. That’s a mistake on my part, as well as a huge learning opportunity for me.

All of. This and more didn’t sink in until I heard the phrase “take responsibility”.   Sothe next time you’re angry, frustrated, or start to blame someone else for your problems, step back and really look at it objector. It’s not always easy, but trust me when I say it’s a far more productive way to live your life.

Thanks for reading,

Well, like so many things, time has a way of getting away from.  I swear, I was just thinking that I have like 5 months before the conference, and now it’s like 3 weeks away.  While my day job still consumes a good chunk of my time, I’m working to find time to finish all my last minute preps for the conference.  To complicate things further, I’ll need to travel the 2 weeks before the conference.  So, this past week was a mad scramble to take care of all the last minute details.

Some of the things I never gave thought to include shipping anything I don’t want to ship on the plane, taking care of last minute reservations for my team, getting shirts for the team, and packing up all the little things like business cards and odds and ends, and all the other little details I never gave any thoughts to.

Let me tell you, there are so many things I didn’t factor in when it comes to conferences.  It’s interesting, and a bit scary.  If you have never exhibited at a conference, try to talk to someone who’s been there…  if you are thinking about it, feel free to ping me.  I’ll give you any pointers I can.

Thanks for reading,

Well, thanks to Deven who pointed out this next tip.  Since I didn’t want to forget it myself, figured I’d post it out here for everyone’s benefit.  If you are in the business of doing a lot of third party operations on a service order, you might quickly realize that purchasing dates often change.   While you vendor may quote you one date, often things slide.  This can become very troublesome if you do proper scheduling of your service orders.

Well, if you update your control key (SM03 is the common one), you need to make sure you select the scheduling checkbox.  This will help keep your service order dates in sync with the purchase order.  Keep in mind, I’m sure you still need to run rescheduling to keep things up to date (and for that, might I recommend looking at our Proximity application, which allows you to do mass rescheduling 🙂 ).

Thanks for reading…  and thanks to Deven for teaching me another new trick,

Wow, has this turned into a royal pain, with no good solutions I might add.  Here’s the situation, I have a RFC designed to extract some data to a new IOS app I’m building.  So far so good.  In my structure, I have one field that is NUMC (it’s the IBase number).  Silly me, I thought SAP would be able to cover any of the standard data type with the EDM data type.  Well, it turns out that NUMC isn’t really covered properly by any of their scenarios and will either throw an error in the Gateway designer (SEGW), or when the actual service is called.

I spent about 4 hours digging, experimenting, and swearing, to come to this conclusion.  At the end of the day, this post is the closest answer out there.:

http://scn.sap.com/thread/3712829

In a nutshell, it tells you that you have to remove the link to your structure (if you started with one) and redefine the NUMC data type to something else.  It’s not the end of the world, but it is still a hassle that SEGW or the OData can’t figure out a way to make this standard data type work.

Thanks for reading,

Well, for those of you that have followed me for a while, you know that marketing and sales are all new to me.  I’m an engineer/programmer at heart.  So I’m really good at building things… I busy learning how market and sell these items 🙂  Well, as I was on vacation, it hit me…  maybe I need to lower the risk for a new customer to try out my stuff.  So for that reason, I decided I’d do a monthly charge for my stuff, rather than forcing a big up front fee for the software itself, and then a yearly maintenance for each year afterward.  Maybe when I get big enough, I won’t have the same offer, but I’m just starting.  So for example

Now of course, it’s a slight up charge from paying for the whole year up front, but you aren’t locked into any commitments.  If you decide after playing with with the software for a month that it won’t fit your needs, we part as friends.  As long as you pay for the monthly support, you will continue to receive all the updates and new functionality I add to everything.  Overall, I think it’s a pretty good deal.  And if you were interested in all 3 applications, I’m sure we could work out an even better deal. 🙂

so, my marketing experiment continues.  Thanks for reading,

Hello everyone out there.  I’m actually calling for help.  I have an EHP4 system, that I’d like to upgrade to EHP5.  Like everything, I could probably fumble my way through it, but it’ll take way more of my time that I’m willing to invest.  I’m not looking for a speedy turn around, this could be done over the course of a couple of weeks.  I totally expect this to be the sort of thing that you’ll spend an hour a night, then wait for the system to do a bunch of stuff, then come back the next day to kick off the next steps 🙂  I can provide the files, access to my system, and we talk about your hourly rate.

Let me know if you can help me out.

Thanks for reading,

I just stumbled upon a handy transaction.  I was having issue with one of my gateway services.  I had to do some cleanup (well, quite a bit of cleanup) because all of my date and time fields in my entity were giving me a hard error.  So I cleaned up my entity, went back to the rest client for testing, and I got the same error.  That’s when I found that the gateway contains a cache…  and I’m not quite sure how often it clears itself.  So then I found: /IWFND/CACHE_CLEANUP

you can execute this to clear everything, or just a single project.  As soon as I ran this transaction and re-executed the command in the rest statement, and everything was happy.  It’s simple, but damn handy for me 🙂

thanks for reading,

One of the things I often notice about myself is that I’m incredibly busy, all the time.  The problem is that what I’m often busy doing is the wrong stuff.  For example, I just looked at my to do list.  I have programming tasks, personal task (these are must do:D ), marketing tasks, plus some other things…  While some of these are vital, it’s often good to stop and do a sanity check on what you should be doing.

Now Perry Marshall often talks about increasing your hourly wage.  There are things you can do that earn you $10/hr, $100/hr, $1000/hr or more…  Now the problem I have with this concept is that you often still have to do the $10/hr tasks unless you have a fully staffed business.  For example as a small company, I can’t really afford for someone to write this blog for me, someone to enter in my day to day expenses, or someone to take the trash out for me on Tuesday morning.  I have allocated some funds to pay some programmers to help me, but even that takes up my time because I have to write the specifications, test what they did, report back any errors and repeat.  This does help, because I’m not down in the trenches figuring out why a select statement returns too many values.  So when you can afford to have people help you, I totally agree about delegating out the things you aren’t good at, or that you can easily train someone else to do.  The problem is when you’re small, you don’t always have the funds to pay someone else…  that means your stuck doing it yourself.

This makes it even MORE important to scrutinize your to-do list.  Because there will always be things you have to do (say submit your taxes, or pay your contractors)…  they may not be $1000/hr tasks, but until you’re making enough money, you HAVE to do them.  So the remaining tasks better be getting you toward making that money.  For me, it’s meant that I have to focus on the upcoming SAPPHIRE conference.  It’s not what I’m best at…  but right now, it’s my best upcoming shot at getting prospects, and without prospects, there is no $$$.  Anyway, make sure what keeps you busy is worth your time.  It might be that you need to delay it for a while, and pick it up again in a couple of months.  I had to do that with blogging…

Thanks for reading,

My new favorite marketing guru, Perry Marshall, introduced me to the term head trash.  It’s a simple term to explain a very complicated concept.  Head trash is all of the things we do to sabotage ourselves everyday.  It could be a fear of failure, it could be worrying about what other people think about you or your products, or it could be something far more ominous because you can’t put your finger on it.  I happened to think of this post because lately I think I have plenty of head trash surfacing.  For the rest time I’m battling with insomnia.  Literally, can’t stop thinking when I try to crash for the night.  It took me a while, but I finally realized that I must have issues to deal with 🙂

Personally, I still struggle with the fear of poverty.  It’s a ridiculous fear, but it drives me to keep going and going.  I know I have more under the surface, but I’m still working on figuring them out.  Everyone has something that holds us back.  The question comes down to if we can find a way to overcome it.  Much of it revolves around spirituality and self improvement.  Personally, I found something that I’m toying with.  It’s called Sozo…  and it’s more religious than I normally tend to personally, but a lot of it “feels” right.  So it’s worth a try.

The first step is recognizing that something is holding you back.  So…  what’s holding you back from accomplishing your dreams?

Thanks for reading,

Well, this is a headache I haven’t dealt with in a long time (and I had to go digging to remember how to fix this).  So I thought it might be something useful for any one else looking :).  Now, here is the scenario.  I had a configurable material that has a material variant of the same KMAT on the bom.  (the idea was to have MV’s created without all the options and kept in stock to expedite getting orders out the door).  All of this was fine, until we got to sales order costing.

We kept getting the CK877 error, Sales order costing not possible for recursive configurable materials.  Well, I know for a fact, that it works (it’s been working with a bunch of the material variants created months ago).  So, after some digging, I came to find that for a group of new MV’s created, they all had a low level code of 000.  Now, I don’t claim to understand exactly what these codes are or how they are calculated, but I do know is that adding a 000 onto another 000 will cause issues somewhere down the line when it comes to VC 🙂

Now, in order to “fix” this problem, we located an old dummy BOM.  This happened to be a group BOM (not sure if that makes a difference or not).  I added all of the new MV’s to this BOM saved it (and then deleted it off just for cleanliness), and magically, the low level codes got updated to 001, my sales order costing error disappeared.  FYI.  MARA-DISST will hold your low level code, if you need to do a quick check on a group of materials.

Hope this can save you some major research in the future.  thanks for reading,