I recently spent a week in Singapore.  This was my first visit to an Asian country, so that made it very cool.  But, since I’ve been lax on my blog, I realized that I haven’t taken the time to talk about what I learned.  Today I wanted to talk a little about market saturation…  or maybe not???

while I was Singapore, I was roughly 3 blocks from my hotel to the office.  The temps in Singapore are consistently in the 90’s and humid, so even short walks seem very long and very sticky.  Well, over the course of my walks I started to notice the number of coffee shops.  Three Starbucks, and at least 2 other “non-chain” coffee shops, all within a 1 block radius of the office.  Granted, there were several large buildings in the area, but regardless of the time of day, any coffee shop we went to always had a line.  Sometimes long, sometimes shorter, but always a line.  And since the time change was hell for me, we drank a lot of coffee.  That meant 8 or 9AM, noon, 2pm, even 6pm.  No matter when, always people in there spending money.

The realization came to me that not only did people enjoy coffee, they enjoyed the airconditioning, and the chance to escape work for 15 minutes to get some coffee.  The take-away this put into my head is that sometimes what you’re selling isn’t your product.  Sometimes you are selling an escape, an oasis, or a mental break…  the coffee is just an excuse to get there…

Thanks for reading,

Why is it that good habits takes so much effort, and conscious thought, while breaking that habit just takes a little procrastination?  I find myself in the middle of breaking one of my better habits, and that’s been my daily blog.  So first off, let me apologize for slacking off.  I realize over the past month or so, I’ve been very hit or miss on getting my blog posts out.  I have a million excuses, but none of them matter.  I’ve been pretty busy lately, meaning that I should have plenty to talk about.

Why do good habits take constant work to maintain?  I always grew up thinking that it was just the initial “21 days” or whatever arbitrary amount of time it took to build a habit, then it was just supposed to be automatic.  Well, I don’t know about you, but I’ve found it takes more making the good habit.  A habit certainly becomes easier the longer you do it, but all it takes it one change in routine to suddenly put me on the path to ruination.

For example, it all started in Feb, when I went on vacation for a week.  It was just one week, so shouldn’t be a big deal, but it started the slide.  It took a few days to get back into the swing of things, then I had to leave on a business trip.  That threw my schedule even further out whack.  And I find myself when I travel, that my habits are totally different.  I skip the little things like blogging, and spend more time on my “social” life.  🙂

What I’ve found is that no matter what “habit” you try to create, if it matters to you, you must consciously work on it every day, even on vacation.  If you don’t stay diligent, the habit you worked so hard to create quickly leaves the routine, and before you know it, the habit no longer exists.

Thanks for reading,

On a recent trip to Singapore to visit a client, someone in the airplane asked me what I did for a living.  I hesitated briefly.  I’ve been consulting for so long, that it’s hard not to say consulting.  However, I’ve come to realize that I have evolved far beyond a consultant.  I’ve become a solutions architect for SAP Service Management.  But that is a big title, and I’m not the kind of guy that goes for big titles.  So I kept it simple, I’m the Service Management Expert.  I design solutions and software to make life easier for service organizations.

I saw that not every company wants to implement CRM, Cloud for Customer, or whatever is the latest technology that SAP has added the newest features.  I wanted customers on standard ECC to be able to improve their service organizations without expensive implementations, new licensing, or adding additional IT staff to support new hardware.  (or something like that is my elevator pitch).

Now, if I haven’t put someone to sleep yet, the next question they typically ask is something like, how did you get into that?  Well, my journey has taken a strange path.  I started out a mechanical engineer with a knack for computer programming.  One thing led to another, and I ended up in SAP.  Service was often the forgotten module, so along with Sales and Distribution and writing reports and other code, I got put in charge of service.  I quickly came to realize that this area was the most interesting to me.  One thing led to another, and ended up consulting at many companies, in many industries to implement and improve service within SAP.
In the 15 years I’ve been doing service management (SM), I kept running into the same issues, over and over again.

• Reporting.
• Complexity for the Service Shop
• Lack of communication between customer service and repair shop

Reporting is such a challenge in service because it crosses multiple modules within SAP.  This meant that there were no out of the box reports to cover all the connections between sales, call center and the repair depot.  Every implementation always wrote custom reports, typically they were all similar to each other because the metric were usually the same.  At the end of the day, how long did it take to do certain steps, how much did it cost, and “why did it take so long?”

The next major issue was complexity of the process.  There were so many transactions to plan and complete a work order and the typical service shop technician isn’t interested in data entry.  They want to be fixing something, turning wrenches, running tests, etc…  who wants to spend half of their day just documenting what they did, how long it took them, and when it finished.

Finally, for in-house and field repairs, there needs to be solid communication between customer service and the technicians.  In most organizations, the service group isn’t the one that takes the calls, so if customer service doesn’t get all the information, the customer needs to be contacted more than once.  Customers hate this, it wastes time for customer service and delays the service processing.  Often times, it was as simple as the information that that customer service collected never got passed down to the technicians because it was held on another document within SAP that doesn’t get used by the technicians.  The solution, the tech now has to look multiple places to get the full picture.  Sound efficient to you???

Now SAP is a great piece of software.  It is capable of handling most any process in business.  The problem is that SAP, like any good business, is always evolving.  They make new products and want customers to buy them.  What’s the best way to do that?  Put the best functionality in the new stuff, and stop updating the old stuff.  This leaves a huge gap for customers that can’t afford to keep upgrading to the newest products, implementing the latest software or even keeping up with the latest and greatest releases.

All of these factors are why I built JaveLLin Solutions. I wanted to help the little guy, and I have found no matter how big the company is, nearly every service shop operates like a little guy.  I wanted the service shop to focus on fixing things, not entering data.  I wanted the service managers to be able to have accurate data about their shop to make informed decisions.

Thanks for reading,

On my journey to move my new UI5 app to the HCP, I figured I’d no longer need the tomcat server that I had connected.  I really didn’t think I was even using it.  Well, when I couldn’t get anything to work with my HCP, even after I installed the cloud connector, I figured I better check and see if it still worked in my local settings.  Strangely, nothing worked.  I couldn’t get anything to correct or do anything.

As soon as I readded my Tomcat server, my local system began working again.  While this still hasn’t solved my cloud issues, it did give me a valuable lesson.  Don’t disconnect things just because you “think” you won’t need them anymore 🙂

thanks for reading,

Well, I knew that things could only be easy for a short amount of time :).  As soon as I attempted to move my eclipse application to the cloud, I was instantly met with challenges.  let me walk you through some of my attempts to make this work and the issues I encountered.

1. I attempted to copy the existing application, then just overwrite the files.  No luck.  I ran into errors every time it attempted to display the project output.  It was related to not being able to read my services.
2. I went into eclipse, and set up the hana server using: https://help.hana.ondemand.com/help/frameset.htm?60ab35d9edde43a1b38cf48174a3dca2.html  This ended up with the same results, but at least got me closer.
   1. Like everything, even this took a while to get the setting correct (mostly because my version of Java was too new)
   2. Once it uploaded, I could at least try it in chrome to see the errors.  I thought it had to do with my proxy/simple proxy.  So I did multiple changes, and kept uploading and trying again.  some of errors included
      1. Mixed Content.  I had HTTP and HTTPS (because my services are NOT HTTPS).
      2. Wouldn’t connect to the service, generic 401 http error.
      3. Invalid proxy
      4. and on and on…
3. After some additional reading, I’m going to attempt using the cloud connector.  Stay tuned to the next round of trial and error 🙂

Thanks for reading,

Well, before I was ready to jump fully into the HCP world, I needed to play with it a little first.  I was pleasantly surprised that SAP has some great tutorials provided to give you the basics of using HCP.

https://hcp.sap.com/developers.html#section_5

I went this through application, and it really was pretty slick.  I liked the WebIDE, it was much like working within Eclipse, only the template generated most of my code for me.  Granted, I admit to not always knowing exactly why I was doing something, but I know I’ll figure it out the hard way when I go to apply my services and code here.  In general, I was really impressed with the templates available.  The easy layout made it pretty quick and painless to build the shell that I built “manually” within eclipse.  This approach is great for building a static application.  Of course, I can never do things the easy way, so my application is dynamic and based on configuration tables.

Next up, lets see if I can move my app to the HCP.  Wish me luck!!!

Thanks for reading,

Well, I’ve been working on UI5 within Eclipse for a while now.  I’m feeling pretty comfortable with how to do things, how they interact, and I’ve managed to completely replicate my original iOS application for production supervisor and make it as flexible as my GUI based applications.  I’m feeling pretty good about myself, so that meant it was time to challenge myself yet again.

Now, having an app isn’t any good if you can’t run it anywhere but locally.  So I started doing some investigation into making it an application, but I realized, the real power would be the cloud.  I’ve had an item on my todo list for a few months to figure out how to leverage the cloud.  So here I am.  I talked to a friend of mine, and he recommended I check out the HCP, Hana Cloud Platform.  Luckily for me, they have a free trial account that you can use as a developer.  So begins my newest adventure…  building a cloud application…  Stay tuned, my headaches have just begun 🙂

thanks for reading,

Well, I think I started this exploration a couple months back now.  After playing with things, it’s starting to fall into place.  I think it’s nearly doable… of course, I just found out something new today that changed everything.  First, let me recap what I’ve done so far.  First off, got an antenna.  It works GREAT on one TV, my upstairs TV gets nothing, and the bedroom TV is OK.  But, at the end of the day, sports is about the only thing local that I’ll care about.  So if it’s good on one TV, I’m fine.  Next up, I ordered a Roku.  Heard great things about them, so gave the Stick a try.  It works great.  I love that I can easily move it from one TV to the other (while I test).  I also setup my Plex Server.  I personally love this because I have all of my movies in a digital format and I can watch them easily on the Roku (or even through their website).

My latest revelation was doing the SlingTV free trail.  let me just say that I was very disappointed with SlingTV.  The service works fine, but the interface is awful.  You can’t save shows that you like to any sort of menu, you have to page through everything.  You the on-demand content is weak at best for the shows I care about, and you can’t save anything.  I even talked to my wife, and she told me that she didn’t really care about the live TV aspect.  As long as we can DVR what we want, she’s happy.  So today, I started looking at buying a DVR for the antenna.  Tablo DVR’s seem pretty nice, but you are talking $300 for the box, and another $50/year for the guide.  Still cheaper than cable, but it’s another big expense to deal with.

Then I stumbled upon Playstation Vue.  (keep in mind, I haven’t tried it yet, but I plan to).  If i understand it correctly, for $30/month I get the same channels (technically more, but the extras I don’t care about), and I get a cloud DVR good for 28 days.  If I understand correctly, its good for any of the channels, including AMC, and the other cable networks which you don’t get with SlingTV.  Now, of course there is a catch.  Vue doesn’t work with Roku.  It only works Fire TV.  So that means I would have to buy a different piece of hardware, which I think will happen soon!!!

If anyone has experience with the Vue I’d love to hear about it,

Thanks for reading,

I recently sat in some sessions to start to learn about the new C4C, also known as Cloud for Customer.  Obviously, my interest was the piece of C4C called Cloud for Service.  From everything I can see, this is the newest approach from SAP to handle service.

Previous years, you hear about CRM Service or HANA, this year it’s all about C4C.  So, of course I needed to get a little info on it.  At first glance, it looks very cool, and I’m flattered to say that many of the features I have built in JaveLLin applications is showing up in C4C.  From what I can see, C4C is very good at taking over the notification portion of service, as well as the Field Service portion.  The biggest piece I see that is missing from C4C (and I doubt will become part of it any time soon) is the in-house repair portion.  Again, this comes down to handling all the deliveries.

One of the pieces that I”m excited about, and plan to exploit is the oData integration.  If you’re not technical, it just means that my stuff just needs a Netweaver Gateway service, and it can be called directly from C4C.  This means that if you use C4C, you can still use JaveLLin applications.  You might not need all the functionality, but since C4C does not cover everything we do, you can get the best of both worlds.  Or just use all of our pieces, and get a cheaper version of Cloud for Service 🙂

Thanks for reading,

I wanted to send a great big Happy Birthday to my beautiful wife.  Today is her birthday, and even though she rarely reads my blog, maybe today will be the day.

Happy Birthday Julie!!!