I can’t count the number of times I’ve asked myself this very question. I had the initial idea of my software around 9 years ago. Granted, it’s taken quite a while to bring it into reality, but it’s been a long road. If any of you are entrepreneurs out there, I’m guessing you’ve experienced the exact same thing. You work the long hours, the spend precious money, all trying to make this dream a reality. But inevitably, we all hit the wall sometimes. And when I hit the wall, I often find myself wondering if my idea was just flawed… or am I just on the brink of wild success. So the question is, how do you know?
I wish I had an answer to that. My consulting business has certainly reaped the benefits of my software business. For example, much of what I’ve done with this blog, my website and my e-books was done to help gain attention for my applications. But I’ve been lucky in the fact that my consulting arm of the business has done incredibly well over the past few years. The only problem with this is that I want to be an entrepreneur, not a contractor. If you are unfamiliar with the difference, one of my favorite podcasters, Jack Spirko, summed it pretty well. If you are paid hourly, if the business stops when you stop, if you only get paid when you work… you are a contractor. A real business is something that pays you even when you aren’t working, and ideally will grow way beyond you, giving you the chance to work yourself out of the business. That’s where I want to be.
Everything takes time, and I keep reading that so many of the big breakthroughs came after pushing just a little further. These stories are inspirational, motivational, and helpful. But, what if your idea just isn’t meant to be? I don’t say that in a fatalistic way, but in a realistic way. What if the market you are trying to sell to doesn’t exist? what if the business model was wrong from the beginning? How much time and money do you continue to “invest”? When is it best to walk away and find a better business to pursue?
So many questions… and I guess only time will tell. If any of you out there know the answers, I’d love to hear it.
Thanks for reading,

If you’re anything like me, you find yourself always behind in what you should accomplish. Do you go into the office every day, see a stack of purchase reqs that need to be ordered? emails that need a response? work orders that need to be scheduled? all the while, people keep stopping in your office to ask for help, or some other needs that require your immediate attention?
How do you ever get out of the shadow of the mountain? Now it’s easy to say “just ignore the little stuff”, but when you are responsible for the little stuff, you can ignore it. You might be able to delegate some of it, but then you have to find the person and the time to train them to do it. So where are you supposed to get that time from?
Well, your only real option sometimes is to make the time. But how do you make the time when you are already working 60 hours, the family never sees you, and you are still falling behind?
Now, more people is rarely an option in our age of “less is more”. You need to leverage all your people as best as you can. That means you may need to let some things slide for a couple hours, spend the time training someone else to do the small things. Delegation is your only hope. No one person can do it all. Take advantage of the skills of the people around you. It will cost you some time at the front end, but give you a lot back in the long run.
Thanks for reading,

I recently had one of my programming friends teach me something. He showed me how to use the interface to help me design my free trial software. Now, it’s funny because the whole idea of inheritance is familiar to me. I’ve done programming in Java and other OO langauages, so needless to say, I felt pretty “simple” when the concept was explained to me.
Now, with my products, in order to be able to provide a free trial, without giving away everything, I broke up the code into 2 pieces, common code, and Full version. Well, in my first pass, I just created 2 classes with the same methods, one for free, one for full. I tested it out, and it worked great. Now the drawback of this approach is remembering all of the places in the code that I needed to update from FREE to FULL when I would package up the software.
The interface solves that problem. Thanks to some creativity from my friend Edward, he showed me how to contain all the code in an interface, then using a table entry, I can define if it pulls the FULL version, or just the free version. It’s very slick.
If you aren’t familair, it’s really just creating another class. The difference is that in the interface, it’s only the method definitions. No code. Then you create the class (for me, it was the common or free class). I attach the interface, then add the code into the methods that should work for FREE, and either leave the other empty, or add some message code. Then you do the same thing for the Full version. This time you redefine the methods that are available only in the full version. Using inheritance and interfaces, I was able to cut the manual work down to a table entry. Everything else takes care of itself.
Now, I have one more tool at my disposal.
Thanks for reading,

If you live with me here in the states, you know that today is a national holiday.  It’s supposed to be about honoring the workers in our nation.  Well, today means a lot more to me because it happens to be my little boy’s 5th birthday.  It’s lucky for me this year, that I get the spend the whole day with him.  So, I’m very thankful for Labor Day.

What about you?  what you going to do with this day of rest?  enjoy it with friends?  relax?  have a BBQ, or for my friends in MN, enjoy the last day of the state fair. Well, whatever you do, enjoy. Tomorrow will be back to the old grind for most of us.
Happy Labor Day,

I recently ran into another test.  I’ve seen this error before, but never paid much attention to it.  The scenario is that you have a service order, you enter in planned time and you get the following error:

Number of capacities in activity exceeds capacities in work center

or

No operating time entered for the work center.

Even though you can see that planned time was entered in the order for the operation.  Well, what I found is that if the capacity within the operation is not maintained, the service order see that as Zero capacity, so nothing can be entered against it.  Lucky for us, the solution is simple.  Maintain the capacity in the work center and everything is fine.

TXN: CR02 and go to teh capacities tab:

press the capacity header

Populate this screen.  The info doesn’t need to perfect, but it does need to be there.

Thanks for reading,

Today, I encountered a new issue, that previously, I have never seen before.  In testing, the transaction VRRE just did nothing.  If you’re familiar with service, you will recognize VRRE as a method of creating an inbound delivery.  Personally, I’ve got used to just using VL01N, but hey, nothing wrong with using VRRE, except when it doesn’t work.

Well, after some debugging, and searching in OSS, I finally discovered that there is a field in table TVLK (the delivery type table) called UEVOR.  To the best of my knowledge, there is no way to manually populate this field, and if you create a delivery type that isn’t copied, this field comes in as blank.  Well, it turns out that this has been an issue within SAP, unless you have some heavy support packs installed.

2061514 – VL01: No delivery in case of manually specified delivery type

if you happen to encounter this, be sure to implement the above OSS note.  it takes care of things very easily.

Thanks for reading,

Well, I was reminded again of the dangers of going down the rabbit hole. If you’re not familiar with this phrase, it means going off on a tangent.  He’s a perfect example, because it happened to me today.  I was building a test plan for my Renovation application.  It took me a while, but I’m realizing I can never escape the day to day if I don’t document everything.  But I digress.  As I was testing, I came across something in one of my dropdown boxes that I didn’t like.  It’s not critical, and certainly not a show stopper. but nevertheless, I found myself googling, experimenting, and suddenly I had lost 2 hours on this minor detail.  Something that no one but me might ever see.

Now, luckily, I caught myself before I went ever further down the hole.  I finally realized that this isn’t the most important things I could be working on.  So I documented the issue, added it to my future to-do list, and moved on.

The point of this post is to remind you that it is very easy to get caught up in small details, just because they are interesting or entertaining.  Keep your eye on the prize and always stay focused on the most important things.

Thanks for reading,

Today, kept getting calls with no messages from some number in NY.  I finally decided to answer it, and it was my friends at iCompNY.com.  I talked to the guy for around 10 minutes before I finally told him I had to go…   Here’s roughly how the call went.

We had the initial hello and explanation of who he was.  I guess this was the customer service manager, that “practically owns the business”.  Ok, good for you.  Then he says that they weren’t able to process my refund sooner because they couldn’t crack the password on the machine.  Just to be clear, the only password on the machine was my Windows password.  I’m not sure who he has working there in his tech department, but so far in my opinion, they don’t know how to test and they don’t even know how to format a HDD.  And on top of it, this guy, that I don’t know, expects me to just hand over a password.  Keep in mind, this machine crashed on me, and I couldn’t even get it running again, so luckily, I didn’t keep anything important on the HDD (I learned from the first time).  He keeps going on that it’s going to cost him more money to “crack this”.

Then the guy goes into a sales pitch, of how I should’ve got an HP, because they are better for what I need (granted, he didn’t ask what I needed).  I politely explain I’ve already got a new machine running and working great.  And how he wishes you would’ve talked to me sooner.  He apologizes, but then continues to make excuses how this isn’t a good machine, must have been damaged in shipping, blah blah blah.  Always a half assed attempt at an apology.

Then, and I believe this was the real reason for the call, the rest might have been BS, but he starts badgering me to change my Amazon feedback, because it could cost him thousands of dollars in sales from one bad review.  After listening to him go on and on for a couple minutes, I finally end the call saying I need to go to another meeting.  He again asks me for a password to a machine…  even though it’s a windows password.

Anyway, I left that call feeling completely accurate in my bad review of iCompNY, and would highly encourage anyone reading this to never do business with them.

Thanks for reading and I hope you learned a little something about customer service as I just did 🙂

Well, typically (in my opinion), Microsoft releases good versions of Windows every other release, so naturally, I was excited that Windows 10 was coming out, because I wasn’t a fan of Windows 8.  Then, to make things better, they are giving it away to people.  Jackpot… right???

Well, the interface is certainly better than Windows 8.  MS finally remembered that not everyone using Windows is using a tablet or touch screen.  There are still people using laptops and desktops.  Crazy?!?  Do they brought it back to more of the traditional interface, you get a Windows button/start again to launch apps and look for things.  That I like.  They added Cortana to Windows 10 as well.  Being a geek, I like the fact that they incorporated the AI from one of the most popular games for the X-Box (HALO), who was named Cortana…  I doubt that is a coincidence.

Now, there is always a downside.  I feel like I’m in a Beta test version of it right now.  I have a bunch of machines, servers, laptops, etc all used to keep my little JaveLLin empire up and running.  So that means, I need machines that are reliable, and operating systems that work with the software I care about.  Unfortunately, there have been a couple of key applications that Windows doesn’t play well with.

1. Webex – being a consultant, means lots of conference calls.  I usually have to jerry-rig jumping between browsers to get connected to a Webex call.  Not cool.
2. Virtualbox – had to download a new “pre-release” version just to keep things running.  And of course, I’ve been having glitchy things happen.  I’m working hard to keep all my systems up and running.  A lot harder than I was before.
3. Outlook 2013 – this one confuses the hell out of me.  Shortly after I upgraded to Win 10, I had to delete all of my email profiles and create them again.  I think it was because I also connected to an internet calender, but come on, this is a MS OS that can’t work with an MS application.

And of course, everything is different.  it’s hard to find the control panel (at least the one I’m familiar with).  At least Cortana is reasonably good at finding what I’m looking for.  But in general, it’s still very buggy.  I’m hoping that over the course of the next month, I’ll be able to spend more time learning my Internet of Things stuff, and less time administering Windows 10.

thanks for reading,

I did some consulting a while back for a company implementing service.   Like many service shops, it was lean…  VERY lean.  I’m talking 4 people that could run the computers, and a dozen or so people fixing everything back in the shop.  Well, I got to know the service supervisor really well.  As we went through the process of what he does in a day, it became so painfully obvious that in order for him to keep up with his workload, it meant that every day he spent less time managing the shop.

I’m sure you realize what a downward spiral this becomes, but since I’m good at pointing out the obvious, I’ll explain anyway :).  The supervisor, we’ll call him Chris, would get in by 6AM every morning, work thought his backlog of questions, vendors, suppliers, and his own employee’s questions.  Exactly what he is supposed to be doing. Then he’d have to scramble to figure out what the current status of everything was in the shop.  What was there, what was in process, and what shipped yesterday.  All of this was a manual, walk around the shop process, and talk to all of his techs.  Now this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but still time consuming to pull all the data together for the status meeting.

Chris would then attend his daily status meeting to figure out what the newest top priority was in the shop, then go back out and make sure all the techs were on the same page.  When that finally done, he’s pretty much spend the rest of his day transacting everything into the system that his techs had done the previous day.  He’d be putting in purchase reqs for parts they needed (and probably already received), checking on missing components, entering in time, closing jobs, entering new jobs, switching jobs between warranty and billable, and then making sure that shipping was actually getting things out the door.

And that didn’t include the constant piling on every time a new part was needed, someone was ready ship and needed paperwork, the machine shop lost an order and they wouldn’t have the parts they expected for 2 more weeks, and on and on and on…

Now imagine this is your life, every day.  Nothing gets any better, you don’t have time to make things more efficient or even figure out where the problems are.  Just constant reaction…  maybe you don’t have to imagine.  Maybe that is your life every day.  I deal in SAP, so it’s what I know, but I have to imagine that any ERP system out there is the same thing…  maybe even worse.

It’s no wonder that service tends to work outside the standard processes.  It’s the only way to get anything done, at least that’s how they see it in the shop.  Seems like there has to be a better way…

Thanks for reading,