Well, you may have read my “origin story” for Paper Street Enterprises, but I figured it would be fun to tell you about how JaveLLin Solutions started. The initial idea for the applications started about 2008. That was when I first got the stroke of genius (or masochism) to build applications to help companies better run Service Management. In my head, it all seemed so simple. I would just build my own SAP system, then build an application and sell it. Ugh… if only reality were that kind. I spent the better part of the next 3 months downloading, installing, running into errors and repeating. All of this, just trying to build my first 4.7 SAP system. I gained a whole new appreciation in this process for basis people. I also acquired a distinct hatred for anything basis related 🙂 Of course, that hatred would grow as I attempted to build more systems… but I’ll save that for later. Once I finally got a working system, then I needed to put my first idea into practice. My idea was to build an out of the box application that a company would use to provide a call center for their customers. The idea was to build a web application that the end user could register their products, submit help desk tickets and more. Easy right??? Not hardly.
Since I knew nothing about web programming, I had to figure out how to build a BSP (at the time, SAP’s go to method for web stuff). So, I got the book, did all the exercises and slowly learned how to write a BSP application. That took several months, and them my first disaster struck. My hard drive crashed, and I had no backup of the virtual server that all of my worked resided on. I had not only lost my coding work… but now I had to go back through the entire SAP installation process. And then I needed to do all the system configuration (including building master data from scratch so I had something to work with). I admit, my concepts got better, but it set me back multiple months. By the time I had a product I felt good about, I had spent the better part of a year burning all my free time. (Now, to top things off, I was recently married, so that meant free time was in short supply, so things kept moving even slower). But I was not deterred. I had a plan. The next step was to become an SAP partner. I did some homework, but not enough looking back. I managed to spend a LOT of hard earned consulting dollars to become a partner and then get my application certified. If you curious about my opinions on certification, check out my post about it from a couple years back.
As time went on, I built more and more applications. Unfortunately, my focus was too scattered. So I’d built WM apps, VC apps, Service apps… and none of them were really cohesive. I got my first sale, which was my dashboard for service management. It was loosely based on some SAP developed dashboards for shipping. I thought it was all down hill from there… That was when I came up with a plan…
But I’ll save that for tomorrow,
Thanks for reading,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike