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Paper Street Enterprises – Origin Story

Paper Street Enterprises – Origin Story

Well, Marvel has really capitalized on super heroes, and when they run out of stories going forward, they go backwards and tell you where they came from.  Because of this, I thought I’d do a little post to tell you my origin story 🙂

In 2006, I had spent the past few years working for Deloitte and then SAP.  I spent so much time working with other independent consultants.  They started to take me under their wing and show me just how easy it was to be independent.  All the things I was scared of including insurance, medical benefits, 401k etc had been shown to me to be so easy to handle on my own.  So, I went online and started my own company.  One of the first things I needed to figure out is what I should call my company.  Of course, there was the simple of name of Mike Piehl Consulting, but I didn’t like that approach.  So I went to my favorite movie, Fight Club.  In that movie, Ed Norton and Brad Pitt have the Paper Street Soap Company.  Well, I wasn’t making soap, so I decided that Paper Street Consulting would be perfect.  I submitted my name and got accepted.  (To this day, very few people recognize the reference, but I don’t care… still love that movie).

Once I had my company formed, I did my homework to find out what insurance I would get (health, business, life, etc.) and I started looking for my first contract.  I spent maybe a month looking, but it was no big deal, I was finishing up a client in California, so I was still employed.  When I accepted my first offer, I gave my notice and started my adventure.

Needless to say, my first contract was no piece of cake.  The work was easy, but the logistics were awful.  First off, I accepted an AI (or all inclusive) contract.  This meant that I got an extra $23/hour to cover travel, lodging, food, etc.  In my head, this looked great.  I was traveling to AZ and it was May.  Well, little did I realize how much prices fluctuated depending on the season.  When I did my research, everything was cheap since it was summer in Arizona.  Well, with each passing week, prices kept creeping higher.  I had already accepted the contract, so I needed to figure out how to live on a budget.  I flew Sun Country from MSP to PHX every week.  I rented a room from a guy who also traveled, so we never crossed paths.  I went grocery shopping, bought a bed, some cheap linens and rented the smallest possible car from Enterprise.  I ended up making it work… but just barely.

Now, the biggest issue I had with this first gig was getting paid.  Payment terms were the biggest thing I paid no attention to.  It turned out it was net 30, from time of invoice, which meant 60 days before I got paid.  Well, I had enough saving to make this work.  The problem was that the company I contracted through kept telling me the “check was in the mail”.  At one point, I waited 4 months before I got my paycheck.  I did eventually get all my money…  but I exited the contract after 3 months and took a great local contract.  Believe me, I learned a lot about negotiating from my first contract.  If you ever think about getting into this game, feel free to reach out to me, I’d be happy to give you some pointers =)

Thanks for reading,

Happy Independence Day!!!

Happy Independence Day!!!

For all of my readers in the USA, please enjoy a great fourth of July.  I now live in the south, so it’s a guarantee I’ll be hearing fireworks well into the night 🙂

I hope you all enjoy a great day off.  I’ll skip any political stuff today.  Just be thankful for the liberty we still have and be sure to enjoy it.

Thanks for reading,

Why is SAP struggling???

Why is SAP struggling???

My buddy Jeff recently sent me an article talking about SAP.

https://www.thestreet.com/story/13605479/1/struggling-sap-downgraded-to-underperform-by-jefferies.html

The general gist of the article is that SAP is struggling because it’s having issues getting customers into the new subscription model and the new HANA/S4 versions.  I found this both interesting, and not surprising.  I’d be curious to hear others take on this, but of the sampling of customers I know, HANA, S4 and the cloud are all things that many customers just don’t see the need for.  Now, don’t get me wrong, everyone likes things to be fast, and everyone wants to be the coolest new platform.  The problem is that is that the price tag of all new hardware, all new software, and potential ramp up of new skills due to changes in S/4 have a lot of customers hesitating to make the switch.

First off, look at the hardware.  When you switch to HANA, you either need to look at going to an entirely cloud based model, like SalesForce.com or RAMCO.  The problem is that SAP is still unproven in the cloud arena.  It’s hard to stay say if the fear is warranted, but at this point, Salesforce has been doing this for a long time…  SAP is trying to jump into the game, perhaps very late.  So that means if you don’t feel comfortable offloading your ERP to the cloud, you need to pretty much replace all your hardware to switch from HDD to RAM.  No small price tag associated with that.

Now if you look at the benefits, you get all the faster analysis, faster runtime on DB access, and possibly some new functionality…  but it’s been hard to see much of S/4.  Regardless, it’s a new learning curve for your basis person…  and it may be all new for your business if you start moving toward all FIORI which is cool and possibly better, but it’s still new.  That means you need a budget for change management now too.  At the end of the day, many manufacturing companies just don’t see the need for it.  It’s useful in the BI world, but for the general ERP, it’s just not cost effective for many industries.

Now, I’m sure that SAP will force this customers to change at some point… or at least make it “an offer they can’t refuse”, but in the meantime, many companies are look to continue business as usual.

Thoughts???

Thanks for reading,

Do you celebrate your achievements?

Do you celebrate your achievements?

I’ve listening to a lot of Tim Ferris lately.  His podcast is all over the board, and it turns out this is exactly what I needed.  I tend to get so focused on a topic that it’s all I listen to, all I think about and as a result, I miss out on a lot of other ideas.  Well, one of those ideas that I’ve heard a few times lately is that many people, myself included, don’t know how to celebrate their victories.  It sounds so silly, but when I look at myself, every time I accomplish something I end up in a position of “what’s next?”.

I look back to college as a perfect example for me.  All through high school, I had one solid aim in mind.  Get myself into college so that I could get my engineering degree and get a job.  Well, all the sudden I found myself graduating from college.  I already had a job with an engineering company and ended up going into a sort of minor depression.  It was so crazy to me… I finally had everything I’d been striving for for years.  But the whole issue is that I didn’t know what was next?  I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.  I accomplished my goals then found myself in a position of being lost.  I didn’t have anything to aim for.  I no longer had that overwhelming drive to accomplish something.

Looking back, I realize that I didn’t know how to enjoy my success.  And unfortunately, I haven’t gotten past this.  Instead, I just kept adding new goals, new objectives, new impossible missions to make sure that I always had a goal to drive to.  I have found a couple of things that mildly help.

  • Write down all your accomplishments that you are, or should be, proud of  and read it every couple of weeks.

It sounds a little egotistical, but by reminding myself of all the things I have done, it helps put things into perspective.  It also reminds me that I have done a lot of things…  I personally fall into the trap of looking at all of the things left to do.  So forcing myself to look back and see all that I have done helps put things into perspective a little better.

  • Make a jar of “Awesomeness”

I haven’t done this one yet, but it’s an idea I got from Tim Ferris.  The idea is very similar to my list.  It forces you to take a few minutes, add something new into the jar and force you to look at the jar and see all the things in there.

Remember, enjoy your accomplishments.  No matter how big or how small, if you don’t stop and enjoy the moment, what’s the point?

thanks for reading,

Using the Service Notification – My latest E-book

I’m pretty excited.  I recently released my third e-book.  I decided to take a bit of a different approach to this book.  Rather than talking about configuration and how to set it up from a technical perspective, I focused more on data within the notification.  My other 2 books heavily discussed how to configure the notification, so for this book I wanted to focus more on what is available to add to the notification, as well as give my person recommendations.  If you happen to check it out, I’d love to hear you thoughts.

SAP Service Management: Using the Service Notification

I’m currently starting working on a book all about service contracts.  It will end up being more of the end to end service contract manual (including configuration), but obviously, everything I learn from the notification book will shape the new book.

Thanks for reading,

Installing the SAP Cloud Connector

I recently had to reset one of my test systems.  The same test system was where my cloud connector was installed, so I needed to reinstall it.  Initially, the install went well, but for some reason, when I went to reinstall, it wasn’t working.  I’m not sure if it’s because the Hana Cloud Platform was already configured to use it.  But I found I needed to do the following.

  1. Install Java SDK
  2. Install the latest version of the cloud connector
  3. Login:
    1. Administrator
    2. manage
  4. Then, go to the access control tab and set up the system and services you want to be available.
  5. go to the Principal Propagation and press refresh.

I believe in my case, step 5 was the key.  Anyway, hope this can help you out,

Thanks for reading,

BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE – Updating Conditions

It’s rather amazing, after all the time I’ve been using the BAPI: BAPI_SALESORDER_CHANGE, I just learned something new.  I was recently trying to do an update to a repair sales order to add lines automatically from a service quotation.  The problem I kept running into was that no matter what I tried, the update of a condition didn’t work. It just kept adding a second line (and to make things worse, it was ignored in lieu of the automatically determined condition).

this took some digging to figure out, but I finally found OSS Note: 593246

The note explains that the LOGIC_SWITCH-COND_HANDLE = ‘X’ parameter allows you to simplify the whole condition process.  By using this you no longer need to explicitly define something as insert or update (I or U).  Instead, you skip entering the entire CONDITIONS_INX table.  Instead, just enter in the basic fields of the condition that you need:

ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-ITM_MUMBER = ‘000010’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_TYPE = ‘PR00′
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-COND_VALUE = ’10’
ORDER_CONDITIONS_IN-CURRENCY = ‘EUR’

the BAPI takes care of the rest.  I can’t believe I’ve never run into this before, but this one was worth capturing.

thanks for reading,

Want to improve your service management implementation?

A while ago, I wrote an E-Course to demonstrate some simple things you could do today to help your service business become more efficient and more profitable.  I recently found that when I changed over my website I lost the links to this, so it had just been sitting idle (shame on me).  So I went through and checked the links and made sure it was still valid.  Well, like so much of service management, very little changes.  Including the easy things you can do today.  You don’t need to buy anything, you don’t need to make radical changes (you might need some business approvals to start new programs, but hey, they don’t really cost you anything).  For those reason, I hope you check out my E-course.

Service Management E-Course

As always, if you have any questions, just let me know.  Thanks for reading,

 

 

SAP Gateway – debug

Well, in taking the OpenSAP class, I learned a new trick.  This may be old hat to you hardcore developers, but it was new for me.  This trick is especially helpful when testing from a REST client.  I personally use Postman, but it really doesn’t matter.  Simply add the following statement to the end of your service call:

?sap-ds-debug=true

Then execute the call, and you will get a much nicer look at exactly what is sent back from your request.  It gives you the opportunity to look at things while clicking on links to see what exactly is happening.  It even provides links to other entity sets you may be calling.  Just a little tip to make life easier for you.

Thanks for reading,

How Mobile do you want to be in SAP???

I recently talking with friend Jeff, and we started going down an interesting tangent.  We started talking about all of the mobility that SAP is driving to.  Between Fiori, Personas, UI5 etc, SAP is really trying to give it’s tired old look a face lift.  Far be it from to argue that SAP is ugly.  Then the recent news of the SAP/Apple partnership made me ask the question the whole concept.  I realize that we are living in a mobile world, and everything does things from their phones.  But how much of your enterprise business can really be done a mobile device?

Now, there is the obvious things like field service, mobile sales teams, and perhaps in some industries there is even a smart enough customer base to give your customers the possibility to create their own sales orders or service requests.  But for things like production, finance, HR, purchasing etc, how much work would ever be done mobile???  I would love to hear some feedback on this.  How mobile is a company willing to be?  and how much are they willing to invest in it?  I just personally see it in such a restricted place that you would ever need a mobile app on your iPhone to interact with SAP.

Now, I’m all about the cloud, and for my personal world of service, I’m all about mobility.  But in my humble opinion, why you would need anything more than a web application (FIORI) for most businesses in most areas.  And when you do, just make it a Hybrid application.  Then you get the best of both worlds without redesigning the wheel.  It’s true, if you do some native, you can make it look however you want.  And if the app is customer facing, I totally understand.  But how many things will be customer facing?  and how many of your customers will be downing a new mobile app to do business with you?  I personally find myself clearing out a lot of apps a week or two after I install them.  I realize it’s much easier to go on a browser with a real keyboard.  It’s novel, but for me, not practical.

What do you think?  I’m just out of touch on how important mobile is?  or this just a buzz word that SAP is trying too hard to capitalize on?

Thanks for reading,