Business

Happy New Year.  If you’re like me, you’ve spent the past few days cashing in on the last of your deductions for 2014, paying off those last minute bills, and finding a little time to relax.  But that’s over now.  It’s 2015, and time to hit the ground running.  For me, it’s about a new beginning.  JaveLLin will now be focusing primarily on Service Management.  We will still provide the production execution products we’ve designed, but now the focus will be 100% SM.  Looking back, it has been an uphill battle, trying to do too much, spreading our resources too thin.  Now, we will be the end to end SAP SM solutions provider.

With the release of the E-Books, I hope to build some additional momentum in establishing myself as the SAP SM expert.  I’ll still be leveraging my Linked-In connections built in 2014, along with the connections I made at the SAP MFG conference.

In short, a lot of work happened in 2014.  In 2015, I need to capitalize on all the ground work we’ve laid.  I’m really excited that 2015 will be the year my solutions take off.  If any of you reading out there have any leads on a business that could use some SM help…  or if you know of some functionality that could be really useful, please let me know.

Thanks for reading,

I hope everyone has a great holiday and spends their time enjoying friends and family.  I know that’s what I’ll be doing.  I’ll be taking some time off from the blog until after New Years.

Please enjoy the rest of the year.

Thanks for reading,

 

Well, over the weekend, I had a little free time, and I wrapped up the first piece of Renovation.  The enhanced notification creation.  It was actually a refreshing break to walk away from writing specs and actually get back into coding.  I’m pretty exciting, because a few week back I had the idea to leverage all of the work I did for Rapier, which was designed to be an out of the box Customer Portal for service management.  Now, I’ve taken that to the next level.  It still has all the pieces for the cusotmer portal, but now I’ve added in the ability for it to be an internal tool, which looking back, is probably a much better place to start.

It’s designed entirely in ABAP Web Dynpro.  So that makes it available without an SAP GUI, you just call up the URL, and give it a shot.  Among the biggest advancement is the built in creation of “multiple serial numbers” in a single notification.  Notice, I put that statement in quotes, because if you go into the backend system, there is a parent notification that you give to the customers, and then X number of child notifications that house each individual serial number.  But it works like a create with reference, including building in the document flow, and it copies all of the pieces you want (If I missed any, just let me know and I”ll be sure to add them).

One of my biggest questions is if this needs to be an ERP transaction, given my business. Having the web app seems like a plus when deaing with the call center/customer service, but maybe if they are used to entering in notifications, I’ll need to provide action boxes to do the same thing.  I’d love your feedback…

If you’d like to see what I have, go checkout this url for firefox and safari:

win-erp.paperstreetenterprises.com:8010/sap/bc/webdynpro/jvs/rapier_1100

then over on the left side of the screen, select create a notification.

currently, it seems to be working best in firefox and safari.  it also works in chrome if you use this extended URL:

win-erp.paperstreetenterprises.com:8010/sap/bc/webdynpro/jvs/rapier_1100?sap-ep-themeroot=&run=N#

for internet explorer, something has recently changed, and I’m having trouble getting it to run.  I can only assume it needs another support pack update 🙁

Thanks for reading,

It always amazes me how I can learn something new all the time.  I really thought I knew most of the Variant Configuration tricks, but today I learned new one.  it’s a standard transaction in SAP to update the configuration of the material variant.  Lately, I’ve just used GUI scripting to handle the task, because it was the best way I knew of to make sure all the change pointers continued to reset the BOM and routing properly.  Well, today a collegue of mine showed me this transaction she found online…  so of course, I needed to check it out a little closer.  This transaction is pretty slick.  You can update a bunch of MV’s at a time, you can hit all of the plants it’s been setup in, you can even do it by KMAT and get all fo the MV’s.  Quite impressive, since I’ve got used to maintaining a list of Material variants and plants to update.

Just a note, be sure to uncheck “Only Display Selection” if you want it to be updated.  I’d prefer if that was labeled test mode, but since it isn’t, treat it like “test mode”.

Thanks for reading,

If there is one thing I can say that seems to be requested the most often from the call center, it’s the ability to add multiple serial numbers to the same notification.  All too often, a customer calls in and has 5 (or maybe 500) units they want to send in for calibration, inspection, or damage.  Well, in SAP, you don’t really get that option.  At least not if you want to have any sort of traceability on those serial numbers.  I’ve talked to some of my fellow SM friends, and typically, the best that can be done is creating a lot of notifications.  You can tie them back to a single notification that you can give to the customer…  but it’s a lot of data entry.

So, for this reason, we’ve built this functionality into our Renovation product.  What we do is give you a single screen interface to create a notification (we even let you customize exactly what fields and where they go on the screen), and we give you the option to enter in as many serial numbers as you want.  Then, in the background we create the master notification, then we create one “child” notification for each serial number.  Using the reference functionality, we keep everything connected in document flow.  This gives you complete tracking and history, without manually creating a notification for each serial number

.

If this sounds like something useful to you, checkout Renovation.  We are working to build a simple application that can be used both by your customers to enter in their own notifications, as well as make life quicker and eaiser for your customer service group.  I’d love to hear your feedback.

Thanks for reading,

I just learned a new trick.  I updated one of my columns to be longer, and for some reason SE16N just wouldn’t recognize the change no matter what I tried.  So I pulled up my friend Google, and did a search.  I quickly learned that you can clear the buffers by entering in:

/$SYNC

into the transaction code window.  Magically, everything worked 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Something I noticed a lot, is that when it comes to warranty, it can be very hard to keep this date updated in SAP.  You have the equipment record, which houses your start and end dates, and the rest of the system is great at using this data, but if you want to add information or update something, you have no choice but to go the equipment record and manually update it.  If you have a solid workflow process, and the people to do it, this isn’t a big deal.  But how many times do you repair a product, add an additional warranty( say 90 days for your repairs), but no one ever goes back to update the equipment record.  Now if the customer calls back, it appears it isn’t under warranty, and now someone needs to jump through some hoops to keep the customer happy.  All the while, it’s just a matter of master data.

Because of this, we’ve enhanced our Proximity Service Execution product.  We added the TECO flag, but gave it additional functionality (that of course, you can turn on or off), that will allow you to enter the start and end dates of the new warranty and get the equipment automatically updated.  Now it’s that easy to keep your data in sync.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this new enhancement,

thanks for reading,

 

Well, I just stumbled upon something interesting.  I’ve been banging my head against the wall trying to figure out why my Sold-To party would not copy to my service order.  I don’t remember ever encountering this before, but after some digging, I found there is a table called TPAER_PM.  This table defines by PM/SM partner determination procedure which partners should be copied.

Strangely, only some of my partners were selected by default for copy.  No idea why.  In addition, there is a report you can use RIPACOPY.  This report will copy all of your procedures and partners into the table.  You will still need to add an X into any column that you want to copy.  So make sure you visit SE16N and set these values if you want them copied from the sales orders.

Thanks for reading,