Well, sometimes it’s good to revisit old topics, especially for any new readers to my stuff.  I did some posting on SDN for a quite a while (in fact, those posts inspired my books).  Anyway, this topic is so integral to SAP SM, that I thought I’d cover it again.  This post is actually a good one about the SM repair procedure that I think is helpful, especially if there are any newbies to service out there looking for good info 🙂

http://scn.sap.com/people/michael.piehl/blog/2013/01/04/service-management–configuring-the-repair-procedure

Thanks for reading,

This is a question I personally struggle with, because like so many of my friends remind me, I don’t think like everyone else.  For me, I don’t like to be pestered, but at the same time, if someone pings me once a month or so, it helps keep things fresh in my brain.  But I’m curious, is that enough communication when I want prospects to remember me?

Currently, for any of my potential prospects, I try to ping them with a short email every month or two.  And then I try to send out a mailchimp email every few weeks as well, something that might talk about a feature of my product, or a common problem in service or production.

I’m curious, what’s too much vs. not enough in your world?

Thanks for reading,

Well, this week, I finally finished a spec that I’ve been working on for quite a while.  in fact, if you saw my post yesterday, you saw what I’ve invested a lot of time into.  I’m very excited with this new piece of the JaveLLin puzzle and right now I’m taking a deep breath.  The problem is that how do I take the momentum and keep going.  Right now, I’m struggling to find where to direct my energy, rather than experience a let down and just coast for a couple of weeks.

Well, those of you that know me, know that I don’t do well without a new goal.  I’m the type of person that is either driving toward a goal or tends to spiral a bit into a funk.  At the same time, I’ve been driving so hard, that my wife is begging to see a bit more of me 🙂  So I’m again sitting at the crossroad of where to go next.  Of course, I have a list of development a mile long, and I know what piece I want to build next…  but I also have a huge conference coming up and I need to focus on marketing.  So, priorities are starting to pull me in multiple directions

I’d love to hear from any of you…  what do you do when you complete a big project or goal?  do you celebrate?  do you jump to the next thing on the list?  do you stop and reevaluate?

Thanks for reading,

Now, I’m probably a geek, but this idea got me excited when I first came up with it, and now that it’s reality, I couldn’t wait to show it everyone.  This all ties back to the multiple serial number concept I’ve talked about about before.  the idea is that a customer calls and want to calibrate 4 widgets.  In the standard, out of the box Service management, you have no choice but to create 4 notifications, and either manually create the repair sales order, or make 4 separate orders.  This may fit your business model, but many clients I’ve worked with really wanted a single order with everything tied together.  Well, with Renovation, you can do just that.

So, for this example we will create a brand new notification with multiple objects on it.

We press the button

And now you see the enhanced create repair order screen.  At the top you notice that you have the option to add lines to an existing sales order (it must be configured as a repair order).  Then you can select one or multiple serial numbers to create.

On the bottom is the real magic.  Depending on your business, you can select to add one sales order line per serial number, one per material (so it will group all the similar materials into a single line/service order) or even create one repair sales order for each object.

In the background, it ties the object to the sales order, as well as any documents created at the same times (inbound delivery or service order).  This is really important if you need to keep your history up to date in the equipment record.

I’d love to hear you thoughts on this.  I’m pretty excited, but if you think of something that would be a great addition to this, I’d love to hear it, and most importantly, if you’d like to see more of this, let me know.  I haven’t done the videos for this yet, because if you saw a recent post, I’m trying to make the front end more professional and I”m looking for some help to do it.

As always, Thanks for reading,

I recently struggled for a while with my latest challenge.  I’m back in the Web Dynpro world and I was trying to add a custom drop down list to the service material (for anyone that has used this, wouldn’t it be nice to only see the service materials, not the full pulldown for any material?).  Anyway, the issue I encountered is that if the data element has an explicit search help defined (matnr/matsv both have this).  Well, you can just override this.  I found that you need to explicitly turn the search help off.  Here’s the example code to do it.

in my example, MATSV is an attribute within a node.

data: NODE_INFO type ref to IF_WD_CONTEXT_NODE_INFO,
L_NODE type ref to IF_WD_CONTEXT_NODE.
data: LT_VALUESET type WDR_CONTEXT_ATTR_VALUE_LIST ,
L_VALUE type WDR_CONTEXT_ATTR_VALUE.
L_NODE = WD_CONTEXT->GET_CHILD_NODE( ‘REPAIR’ ).
NODE_INFO = L_NODE->GET_NODE_INFO( ).

***Fill value table: LT_VALUESET
*** the next line is needed if you find that just assigning the value set isn’t working or if you know
*** there is an explicit search help assigned.
NODE_INFO->SET_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_HELP( NAME = ‘MATSV’ VALUE_HELP_MODE = ‘111’ VALUE_HELP = ” ).
*** ‘111’ is for automatic search help.  set the help to blank.
*** then you can set the value set for the attribute.
NODE_INFO->SET_ATTRIBUTE_VALUE_SET( NAME = ‘MATSV’ VALUE_SET = LT_VALUESET ).

It seems I only need to remove the search help when the search help is directly tied to the data type.

thanks for reading,

Well, if you ever need to do remote work into your machine, my friend Chris found a pretty decent solution.  I had been using Gotomypc for a while, and it worked well, at a cost of $100/yr/computer.  I was keeping 3 computers updated, so ti was getting spendy.  I also used Teamviewer from time to time, and it worked great, but depending upon the network settings of the client I was working for, it wasn’t always available, while gotomypc was always working.

Then Chris told me about Chrome remote desktop.  it’s free, and so far works everywhere.  It’s been pretty solid, but there are certainly some things that worked better in gotomypc.  Here are some of the drawbacks:

• Can get very slow, even while typing on the machine, or you might encounter sticky keys.  For example, I attempted to copy and paste something into a word document, and it pasted it about 20 times.  yikes.
• occasionally, the mouse stops working, and the only option is disconnect and reconnect.
• No mobile app to do a quick connect on my phone or ipad.

None of these are show stoppers for me, and if you run multiple computers, this is a great free way to handle this.  If you need a little more stability, Gotomypc is a great option, but it is $100/yr/machine.  Not super expensive, but if you need to control multiple computers, it is worth the money.

Anyway, that’s my thoughts, Thanks for reading,

I’m again realizing my limitation.  I’m very good at making things work functionally the way I want, but when it comes to making it look nice, well I fall short.  So I’m looking for someone to help me out with layout and design of my Renovation application.  I need to take my standard web dynpro layout and make it look professional.

If you know ABAP web dynpro and have some extra bandwidth, please email me and we can work out the details.  This could be a great opportunity to learn from each other, and for you to make some extra money.  Win-Win 🙂

mpiehl@javellinsolutions.com

Thanks for reading,

Thanks to Dennis for this.  A while ago, I posted about a way to delete connections to a class (CL24n type stuff) even after it had been used in transaction.  The method I listed certainly worked, but with the caveat of it should NOT be done in production.  The biggest reason behind that statement is that it could (or most likely would) leave one or many sales orders inconsistent, forcing you to visit each one to refresh the configuration.  A royal PITA.  Well, my friend Dennis found another approach, that I’ll certainly recommend going forward.

Using exit “EXIT_SAPLCUCP_005” combined with a new Z table to handle to put the material that want to delete regardless from a given class . The deletion needs to be carried out using engineering change management and the change date is in the future.  In the user exit we could check the class type , aennr , matnr in the Z table that we want to override the deletion . If allowed by that Ztable , return deletion allowed flag to let the object deleted regardless of the SAP telling us that the configurable objects exists and cannot be deleted.

By including the change number/future date portion of this, it should eliminate any sales order inconsistencies, since it will not go into the past.  Please note, I haven’t tried this specific approach, but it certainly warrants a closer look if you find yourself with materials or classes accidentally attached to the wrong class (and let’s be honest, it happens more than any of us would like to admit).

So thanks Dennis and thanks everyone for reading,

Well, in my free time I was thinking of adding to my service management library, but I wanted to throw the idea out to anyone reading my stuff to see if it’s something you’d find worthwhile.  My thought is to create a new book, in the same fashion as my first book, but instead of focusing on configuration, I’d focus on the user.  The new book would focus on using the transactions, like Service Orders, Confirmations, Notifications, etc…  I’d talk about the different fields, what you should know about each, and why I do or don’t typically encourage businesses to use them.

I’d stay with my same approach of lots of screen shots, and a quick reference at the beginning to help you focus on the standard process, but throwing in plenty of advanced stuff about each transaction (well, at least as much as I can fit into 10MB.  ha ha ha).

Please let me know if you think this is something worth my time…  or if I’m better off focusing on something else.  I always appreciate your feedback.

Thanks,

Mike

Well, in my extensive time I’ve been spending working on my Renovation updates (multiple serial number, enhanced return order creation, enhanced repair order creation) I’ve spent quite a bit of time scratching my head.  Not because I couldn’t find functions to do what I needed, but rather because independently the code worked great.  But as soon as I started doing more complicated testing, one or more functions suddenly began throwing errors.  Let me tell you, what a headache.

So let me explain some of the things I’ve discovered.  The first takeaway (and I’m sure you programming types already know this) is that functions and BAPI have this global area of variables.  Which is great, you can re-use things and make life easier.  Where the challenge lies is that you don’t always see that the same function group (global area) may be called many levels deep in different “unrelated” functions.  Especially when you begin to loop through and call multiple functions more than once, the confusion hits.  I was having entire functions throw errors because a previous BAPI set a flag that somehow was looked at in an unrelated function (that one took a couple of hours to dig out).  In some instances, call the BAPI_TRANSACTION_COMMIT function can clear some things…  but it doesn’t work for everything.

The worst part is that there isn’t an easy solution to this.  I’ve resorted to finding different functions to call, or moving certain function calls to different parts of the method.

Anyway, if you find yourself getting weird errors, you may have to look for common variables within the functions you are using.  In my case, it took some creativity to make it work.  I’m finally almost there 🙂

Thanks for reading,