Well, our new dog may have taught be something about myself this past weekend. I was solo with the new doggy, who by the way has MASSIVE separation anxiety. Well, being the type of person that likes my space, spending time with a dog no more than 5 feet from me at all times started to wear on me. What I did realize is that I might have separation anxiety from my business. It may not require medication :), but when I start to look at myself, I realize that in one form or another, I’m always thinking about my business. In the shower, I’m looking for inspiration to hit me. In the car, I’m listening to audio programs to help me promote, market, sell, or whatever I think I need in my business. When I head to sleep, I find myself stressed about how much money I’ve spent in the business, and wonder how long I can keep it running.
So what in your life gives you separation anxiety? do you have a small business, maybe it’s money, maybe it’s cars, politics, or how your sports team is doing. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. You really need to identify whatever it is in your life that you can’t seem to get away from. In my case, I need to make a conscious effort to remember one thing…

I have a business, but I am not my business.

In my case, I’m working so hard, that I need to make sure I don’t tie my self worth to the business.
I hope you don’t have the same issue I do… but if you do, remember, don’t let it run your life…
Thanks for reading,

What is a technician hired to do? It used to be, they were paid to fix things, install things, or diagnose issues. In today’s world of “Big Data”, half the job of a technician is now about entering data, filling in fields, signing paperwork, recording items, materials, hours, etc… How many hours a day do you think your service technicians spend entering data?
It should be pretty obvious, but if your technicians are entering data, they aren’t fixing things, they aren’t traveling to the next client, and they sure as hell aren’t doing what they do best. So what’s with all the data? can they just skip it? haven’t someone else enter in all the info? The answer is no… Only the technician knows what they did. Any every minute after they did it, makes the data less accurate. Let’s say you have the option of having your employees enter in their hours daily, or weekly. If go opt for the weekly option, you know expect a technician to remember what jobs they worked on and for how long. And they need to remember it for up to 5 days. Do you remember what you had for breakfast yesterday? what about 5 days ago? Do you really think anyone remembers things perfectly accurately after 2, 3, or 5 days? If you really to know how much time is spent on each job, you need to enter it in daily… or better yet, as soon as work is done on that job for the day.
So what can you do about it? You need to be entering in data, and in fact the organization is asking for more details every week. They want accounting indicators, they want what tasks you performed… if they weren’t originally scheduled, you need to add them. They want codes, and tasks, and who knows what else. You already burn 15 minutes a day, maybe more, just entering data. This is each technician. Four technicians means you lost an hour of repair time a day. Most shops I’ve ever visited can’t afford to lose an hour a day (most likely, it’s a lot more than that).
How many hours are willing to lose a day entering data?
Thanks for reading,

While I don’t watch nearly as many movies as I used to, but on the recommendation of a podcast, I watched the movie Harrison Bergeron. Now, you’ll find it interesting that this movie isn’t available on Amazon, Netflix, or even anywhere for sale. It’s unusual that I even talk about movies in my blog, but this movie was rather striking. Now, it was done in 1995, and the special effects were pretty humorous. It’s based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegut.
It’s a rather scary tale, mostly because it paints the picture of the path we are heading down. The premise is that everyone is not created equal, but it’s the government’s job to make everyone equal. That means everyone is average. Smart people are dumbed down, dumb people are brought up. One of the lines (and I’m paraphrasing here), has a teacher talking about history, they talk about the period after the cold war as “The Great Recession”. Why was it different than any other recession? because it never ended. Due to technology, not as many jobs were needed, leading to mass unemployment, and ultimately the third civil war.
Does that sound familiar? think of the hype of putting electronic kiosks into fast food restaurants. Is that technology replacing unskilled labor? isn’t that exactly what is happening in our world? Well, if you happen to have 90 minutes to spare, check out YouTube, it’s the only place to find this movie.
Thanks for reading,

Yesterday I talked about working IN your business vs. ON your business. I started to explain that all of us are guilty of working IN the business. So… how do you work ON your business? Especially, if you’re small and have no choice but to work IN your business. How can you do both?
Well, I struggle with this myself, but everything worth doing well, requires you to do it poorly at first. So let me tell what I have learned. If you have to work in your business, you better be designing a repeatable system to perform that job. Why? because if you don’t make a system, how can you ever hand the job over to someone else so you can go back to doing your CEO duties, instead of making sales calls?
Like so many of us, I find myself a technician, playing business. But the more I play, the better I get. The idea of a repeatable process in everything we do, is far from simple. Just stop to think about everything you do in a day that is for your business. Do you pack boxes? call vendors? hire contracts? engineer a product? or answer customer calls? All the power of a business lies in having a process for each step you do. Why is that so important?
You can’t count on having good people at every position. You often can’t count on having good people at any position. So, make the job trainable, make it repeatable, make it easy. Now, don’t get me wrong, if you can get great talent, strive to keep it. But let’s face it, you won’t have those people at every position. And if you do, it is only a matter of time before you lose them. Good people can rarely be kept forever. The only way to combat that is create a position that almost anyone can do.

you ready to start working ON your business? Then documenting what you do? It won’t be the final draft. It will still evolve and get better over time… but everything starts somewhere.
Thanks for reading,

It’s funny, how much difference one letter can make. In vs. On… but as I’m learning, it makes all the difference. Now if you’re like me, this subtle difference might not be brutally obvious at first. Being a small business person, as I am, I find myself guilty of always being busy. Busy, Busy, Busy… doing it, doing it, doing it… But when I really stop to look at it, what was I doing? Well, I was working IN the business. I was being a developer, I was making calls, sending emails, balancing the checkbook, paying invoices… notice the common denominator of all those tasks??? they are all about 5 levels down the chain (or more) from being the president, CEO, or whatever you call yourself in your business.
Now, don’t get me wrong, when you are a small business owner, you often have no choice, for a while. When you have no revenue coming in, you often have no choice but do all the jobs. But as you start to grow, if you continue doing this jobs because you’re good at it, or it’s easy… well, then you’re just another employee in your business. And who is left to direct things???
Another interesting concept to all of this is the idea of tension. Now, if you have ever worked in sales, marketing or engineering, you’ve felt the tension. Sales starts making promises that operations has to live up to. Engineering doesn’t evolve fast enough for marketing, and so on… That healthy tension keeps business striving upwards. Well, what happens when engineering, marketing and finance are all you??? how can there be any tension? how can you push another group, when you are the other group?

So… what does it mean then to work ON your business???

If you live in my neck of the woods, please come see me on Friday, Oct 2 at the Carolina Speedway, for the Carolina Regional ASUG.
JaveLLin Solutions will be a sponsor, so come say hi to me at the table and let me know you have been reading my ramblings 🙂
Hope to see you there,

Now, I hesitate to post this, just because there is a lot of power in this. But like i learned in Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. And besides, it’s already out there in SCN if you’re looking for it anyway. But I recently ran into an issue where I deleted something I didn’t mean to. it was my dev system, and I knew exactly what I needed to put back. But for some reason it was locked on the screen. I did my diligence to see if I could find a solution, and what I found was surprising… they said edit the table directly and put the info back in there. WHAT?!?

Well, it turns out that in SE16N, if you have debug authorization you can update a table. Rather easily I might add. here’s how:

1) Start ‘se16n’
2) Type ‘/h’ enter debug mode.
Write the variables in debug mode
-> gd-sapedit
-> gd-edit
Change their values ‘X’.
3) Press ‘F8’

it’s that easy. Sure enough, I was able to edit the table, put back the info I needed, and everything started working. This is a great tool for Z tables, but for anything else, I can only recommend the greatest of caution.
Thanks for reading,

Today I started my journey on the road to HANA. Let me tell you, the road to HANA in Hawaii is a lot prettier 🙂 but on the bright side, I’ve been able to do some things that I was told I couldn’t do. Now, please keep in mind, all of my current experiments are being performed on an EHP7 machine running on a HANA DB. I have no idea if any of this will apply to the new S/4 stuff. I’m sure I’ll find out soon enough.

Day 1. I was able to import all of my existing configuration transports into HANA with no issues. I was pretty excited about this, because initially I was told this can’t work. Needless to say, I was skeptical, and since I’m running a virtual machine anyway, what’s the worst that can happen 🙂

With my configuration in place, the next step was to begin creating master data. A lot of my master data is done using GUI Scripting. So, hurdle 2 was to determine if my gui scripts would work in the new system, and would I have to completely rewrite them?
Well, I’m pleased to report, so far, so good. The GUI scripts I’ve tried are working great. I was able to turn on the same configuration and the scripting fired off just like in the other systems.

So far, HANA is an awful lot like my old EHP4/EHP5 system. Which is good news for me 🙂 I’m sure there will be more to come,
Thanks for reading,

Well, in my “custom” environment, I often end up doing things that a normal SAP installation wouldn’t do on a regular basis. One of those things is move transports from system to system (that aren’t connected together). So one of my common tasks is importing a transport. Well, I was testing on my new HANA box, and the first transport I attempted to upload ran into the following error:

Transport control program tp ended with error code 0200

First of all, don’t forget to give full privileges to the SAP directory and the sub directories. Otherwise, you are likely to get a permission denied error. If this doesn’t do the trick, then read on.

Lucky for me, someone else already had this issue, so I was able to run a quick search and find that a background process wasn’t running. So if you run into this same issue, go to SE38 and run the following program:

RDDNEWPP

It will kick off the job you need to import transports.

for reading,

Well, I’m excited to say that I have a HANA system, granted it empty, no configuration, no code, no data. Sadly, this is what I asked for, so I could experiment with it. For my first go-around, I’ve built an EHP7 machine on HANA. It’s been a learning experience to say the least. So far, in my initial digging, the system really doesn’t look any different from my EHP7 machine. The configuration looks the same, even the tables I deal with look the same. So my first experiment will be to see what happens if I try to import my old transports into the system. I’ve been told by a basis consultant that this won’t work. But many of you know me… I have to see this for myself. Eventually, I’ll build another HANA system that will export configuration, data & code to be migrated into the HANA DB, but initially, I want to see what will happen. The nice thing about a Virtual Machine is that if I screw things up, I just revert back to the last snapshot, and I’ll I’ve lost is a little time 🙂
Now, my issues currently aren’t around HANA itself, but around the infrastructure I will have to start paying. First off, Suse (Linux for SAP), I’ll need to purchase a subscription of this in order to get updates. One of the things I learned is that HANA seems to be directly connected to the operating system. While previous versions really didn’t care what version of windows I was on, or what updates had been applied, apparently HANA updates require OS updates. And Suse requires a subscription for those… It looks like it might be $700/year, or maybe $1500/year… the website is vague, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The next hurdle is VMWare. I’ve lived and died by VirtualBox for all my previous systems, and it’s worked great (and it’s free). Now, in order to cut out the additional overhead of the OS on the server, I’ve had to switch to VMWare. This will likely run me another $500 – $800 (I’m hoping that’s not yearly). so keeping a HANA system running for a small business is far from cheap. Granted, I’m still guessing this will be cheaper than doing a web server or something similar. Because, i’d likely need to purchase the same licenses to use it anyway.
More to come as I start getting into the system… but I’m getting closer.
Thanks for reading,