Hello everyone out there.  I’m actually calling for help.  I have an EHP4 system, that I’d like to upgrade to EHP5.  Like everything, I could probably fumble my way through it, but it’ll take way more of my time that I’m willing to invest.  I’m not looking for a speedy turn around, this could be done over the course of a couple of weeks.  I totally expect this to be the sort of thing that you’ll spend an hour a night, then wait for the system to do a bunch of stuff, then come back the next day to kick off the next steps 🙂  I can provide the files, access to my system, and we talk about your hourly rate.

Let me know if you can help me out.

Thanks for reading,

I just stumbled upon a handy transaction.  I was having issue with one of my gateway services.  I had to do some cleanup (well, quite a bit of cleanup) because all of my date and time fields in my entity were giving me a hard error.  So I cleaned up my entity, went back to the rest client for testing, and I got the same error.  That’s when I found that the gateway contains a cache…  and I’m not quite sure how often it clears itself.  So then I found: /IWFND/CACHE_CLEANUP

you can execute this to clear everything, or just a single project.  As soon as I ran this transaction and re-executed the command in the rest statement, and everything was happy.  It’s simple, but damn handy for me 🙂

thanks for reading,

One of the things I often notice about myself is that I’m incredibly busy, all the time.  The problem is that what I’m often busy doing is the wrong stuff.  For example, I just looked at my to do list.  I have programming tasks, personal task (these are must do:D ), marketing tasks, plus some other things…  While some of these are vital, it’s often good to stop and do a sanity check on what you should be doing.

Now Perry Marshall often talks about increasing your hourly wage.  There are things you can do that earn you $10/hr, $100/hr, $1000/hr or more…  Now the problem I have with this concept is that you often still have to do the $10/hr tasks unless you have a fully staffed business.  For example as a small company, I can’t really afford for someone to write this blog for me, someone to enter in my day to day expenses, or someone to take the trash out for me on Tuesday morning.  I have allocated some funds to pay some programmers to help me, but even that takes up my time because I have to write the specifications, test what they did, report back any errors and repeat.  This does help, because I’m not down in the trenches figuring out why a select statement returns too many values.  So when you can afford to have people help you, I totally agree about delegating out the things you aren’t good at, or that you can easily train someone else to do.  The problem is when you’re small, you don’t always have the funds to pay someone else…  that means your stuck doing it yourself.

This makes it even MORE important to scrutinize your to-do list.  Because there will always be things you have to do (say submit your taxes, or pay your contractors)…  they may not be $1000/hr tasks, but until you’re making enough money, you HAVE to do them.  So the remaining tasks better be getting you toward making that money.  For me, it’s meant that I have to focus on the upcoming SAPPHIRE conference.  It’s not what I’m best at…  but right now, it’s my best upcoming shot at getting prospects, and without prospects, there is no $$$.  Anyway, make sure what keeps you busy is worth your time.  It might be that you need to delay it for a while, and pick it up again in a couple of months.  I had to do that with blogging…

Thanks for reading,

My new favorite marketing guru, Perry Marshall, introduced me to the term head trash.  It’s a simple term to explain a very complicated concept.  Head trash is all of the things we do to sabotage ourselves everyday.  It could be a fear of failure, it could be worrying about what other people think about you or your products, or it could be something far more ominous because you can’t put your finger on it.  I happened to think of this post because lately I think I have plenty of head trash surfacing.  For the rest time I’m battling with insomnia.  Literally, can’t stop thinking when I try to crash for the night.  It took me a while, but I finally realized that I must have issues to deal with 🙂

Personally, I still struggle with the fear of poverty.  It’s a ridiculous fear, but it drives me to keep going and going.  I know I have more under the surface, but I’m still working on figuring them out.  Everyone has something that holds us back.  The question comes down to if we can find a way to overcome it.  Much of it revolves around spirituality and self improvement.  Personally, I found something that I’m toying with.  It’s called Sozo…  and it’s more religious than I normally tend to personally, but a lot of it “feels” right.  So it’s worth a try.

The first step is recognizing that something is holding you back.  So…  what’s holding you back from accomplishing your dreams?

Thanks for reading,

Well, this is a headache I haven’t dealt with in a long time (and I had to go digging to remember how to fix this).  So I thought it might be something useful for any one else looking :).  Now, here is the scenario.  I had a configurable material that has a material variant of the same KMAT on the bom.  (the idea was to have MV’s created without all the options and kept in stock to expedite getting orders out the door).  All of this was fine, until we got to sales order costing.

We kept getting the CK877 error, Sales order costing not possible for recursive configurable materials.  Well, I know for a fact, that it works (it’s been working with a bunch of the material variants created months ago).  So, after some digging, I came to find that for a group of new MV’s created, they all had a low level code of 000.  Now, I don’t claim to understand exactly what these codes are or how they are calculated, but I do know is that adding a 000 onto another 000 will cause issues somewhere down the line when it comes to VC 🙂

Now, in order to “fix” this problem, we located an old dummy BOM.  This happened to be a group BOM (not sure if that makes a difference or not).  I added all of the new MV’s to this BOM saved it (and then deleted it off just for cleanliness), and magically, the low level codes got updated to 001, my sales order costing error disappeared.  FYI.  MARA-DISST will hold your low level code, if you need to do a quick check on a group of materials.

Hope this can save you some major research in the future.  thanks for reading,

Well, since I always tend to bite off more than I chew, I’m clearly not the best of taking my time of rest.  So, that makes the mini-breaks even more important.  I’ve been finding that I need to take 5 mins here or there, and just do some something to help me relax a bit.  I’ve been over stressed for a couple of months now due to personality conflicts, multiple projects, planning for the big conference, designing new software and still trying to find time for my awesome family.

Well, I gotta thank Justin.  For my birthday, he got me a blast from the past.  A rubik’s cube and more importantly,  instructions on how to solve it.  Now it’s interesting, because I remember having this as a kid, and literally having to take it apart in order to “solve” it.  Now, I find that this is really all about pattern recognition and algorithms.  I know, it sounds nerdy, but it’s strangely refreshing.  I can mentally check out and solve a puzzle for a few minutes.  Now I don’t expect to be setting any records, but I’m starting to get to the point that I don’t need to look at the cheat sheet for all of the steps 🙂

The other thing that helps is lumosity.  I’m sure you’ve seen the commercials, but just doing those games gives me a welcome break for a few minutes.

How do you relax?  any good suggestions?  Thanks for reading,

Well, I’m closing in on the third major conference that I’ve exhibited at…  and each one gets better, but they all have a lot of up front headaches and tasks to complete.  Last year, my partner took care of all these tasks, but this year I’m covering it…  For those of you with an idea and you’re thinking about doing a tradeshow, here are some of the tasks that you’ll need to be prepared to tackle.

• Finding people to work the booth.  Now, if you’re a decent sized company this isn’t a big deal, when you’re small like I am, finding people to help that aren’t in the middle of a project go-live can be a challenge.  Plus don’t forget there is travel, corporate shirts, and if the people aren’t familiar with your stuff, some level of training..,.  no shortage of work there.
• General conference requirements.  So many silly little things that take time, like booth selection (critical), insurance requirements, registration, press releases and general administrative stuff that you have to do in order to exhibit.
• Booth design.  Another big one.  For SAPPHIRE, it’s a little nicer because they do the graphics and stuff for you, but you still need to design what you want and they print it for you.
• Swag…  after our first conference, like it or not, it’s a requirement.  if you don’t have a toy to give away, very few people are going to give you the time of day.  Incredible how a $1 trinket brings people in.
• Company shirts for your crew.  Another simple one, but still needed.
• Sales pitch…  what are you really trying to accomplish.  it’s great to collect names, but at the end of the day it’s about sales.  If I just wanted names, I could go to a list broker.  What I need is connections…  true human interactions.  And since you have a limited time to make that connection you need to know your game plan.  For me, it’s tough because I know the products so well, I get excited about “features”.  But I need to remember to focus on benefits…  so many pieces like that.  then of course, making sure your team is on the same page.
• Then don’t forget the logistics of getting everything to the conference.  you buy all that swag in advance…  but you need to get it to Orlando.
• Try to get a list of who’s going.  I’ve discovered this is tough.  with all the privacy laws/contacts, no one wants to give out information.  This unfortunately makes it tough to target certain companies or certain people.  I believe I’ll get a list of companies that will be attending, and the list of speakers…  but it won’t be easy to prepare in advance.  (good thing I’m good at improvising).

Trying to stay on top of all of this can be exhausting.  Especially when I still have my day job requiring way more of my time than I’d like 🙂  Anyway, I’ve gained a new appreciation for the level of effort required to setup for the conference.

BTW.  if you can make it to Orlando, I’d like to see you.  Booth 495B.  Thanks for reading,

I’m pulling another post out of my archives.  Today I wanted to talk about the serial numbers, but today I want to focus on the system status’ you will encounter and what they mean to you.  Like everything in SAP, there are a lot of possible status’ out there, but I’m going to concentrate on the common ones you will see, and the some of the headaches you may encounter because of them.  Here’s the most common equipment status you’ll encounter:

AVLB:  This is the easiest one to deal with, but the least informative.  This status is pretty much the same as saying I exist, but I don’t know where.  If you have the status AVLB, then you use it in scenarios from or to the customer.  Typically this status is assigned if you manually (or in mass) create the equipment record and it hasn’t been assigned to anything yet.

ECUS:  This means that the equipment is at the customer.  If this status has been assigned, then you won’t be able to use it for outbound deliveries, or material movements (at least if you have stock checking turned on).  The only thing you can do with this status is an inbound delivery or Lock it.  You may also see this status combined with EDEL (which means that it is customer owned and on a delivery).

ESTO: This means that the equipment is in stock at your facility.  it could be any plant or location, but it is now in stock, and you can no longer perform an inbound delivery, but you can do material movements on the serial number and you can do an outbound delivery.

EDEL:  This means that it is on a delivery.  If you have an open delivery that has not been PGI’d or PGR’d, then you will see this status with either ECUS or ESTO (which will tell you if it’s an inbound or outbound delivery).  This can be a particularly nasty status.  I’ve seen many instances where deletion of a delivery does not always reset this status.  (Next post I’ll talk about how to fix things that get messed up).

ELOK:  This is the same as marking the equipment for deletion.  Once you set this status you can’t do anything with the serial number.  If you need it, you can unlock it again, but as long as this status exist, the serial might as well NOT exist =)

I hope this helps explain the status’ a little better on the equipment.

One of the really nice features in service orders is the ability to default in a General Task List (routing).  Now the functionality isn’t perfect.  One of my pet peaves on using the general task list is that you have enter in the labor time and duration (not just time) when you start using the task list…  but it’s a small price to pay.

If you are familiar with transaction OISD, you already know that you can assign a general task list by plant/service material.  However, one of the things I often run into with clients is that the task lists aren’t specific to a service material (DIEN), rather they are specific to a material or group of materials. For that reason, SAP is so kind to provide a user exit:

IWO10020

this exit lets you impose your own logic on the general task list selected for the service order.  In our case, we a looked at the material in the task list header.  If the servicable materials = material in the header of the task list, bingo, add it to the service order.

You may have other rules that are more generic, product hierarchy, material group, or whatever you use to make a general group.  This way you have the ability to create the task list one time, and have it automatically pulled into every service order that matches your criteria.  This will help your planning and save your service technicians the time of entering in this data every time.

Hope you found this useful,

Here’s a simple little post about something that recently came to mind as I’m getting ready to cut over to productions, so why not mention it to you as well.  Whenever you create a new service order type, you must remember to set the service order number range.  Like so many areas in SAP, number ranges don’t get transported (if they do, you will likely mess up something else…).  But because of this, it’s often overlooked until you start testing.

Now for full details, check out a previous post of mine:  http://paperstreetenterprises.com/?p=729
Consider this a helpful reminder as you move your configuration 🙂

thanks for reading,