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Lessons Learned for Decision Makers and Leads from a Successful SAP Retail Project Part 2 – Client Resources

January 12, 2012 By Tim Yates Leave a Comment

My first post of the SAP Retail Lessons Learned series, I provided some background information on the SAP Retail implementation project that will be used as the primary reference for the lessons learned. I also listed a few over-arching themes for the entire series as well as major Lessons Learned categories that will be featured in upcoming posts.

In continuing my series of lessons learned with SAP Retail I would like to cover the topic of Client Resources and Planning. Again, in general many of these lesson I have learned could be applied to any project and I can easily draw parallels from other SAP industry solution implementations that I have led in the past. I will do my best to highlight where I think there are specific retail differences.

There Are Never Enough Client Resources

This is the case on almost any large-scale project, not just SAP projects. It impacts smaller organizations and it impacts retail businesses more because they tend to run leaner IT organizations. So you might be saying to yourself, “big deal; what project not funded by the government doesn’t have enough resources?” This one point however might be the most important one I make in this series.

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Filed Under: Blog, SAP Retail, Uncategorized Tagged With: Lessons Learned, LOM, lumber liquidators, POS, Retail, SAP, SAP Retail, Tim Yates

Business Benefits of Virtualization

January 10, 2012 By mattlestock Leave a Comment

I speak with a number of people every year who have never heard of virtualization, and quite frankly this is a point that saddens me as a technology enthusiast. How can everyone in the world not know about the glorious wonders that await them if they virtualized their infrastructure?! Haha, ok maybe that’s going a bit too far, but I think you get my point.

To date, I’d have to say that of the business decision makers I meet, only about 30 percent of them know what virtualization is. Now on the flip side, of the people who are actively down in the trenches managing systems on a day to day basis, nearly 75% of them have either used some method of virtualization or heard of it. My question is, why is there such a disparity in knowledge of something that can be so beneficial to an organization between these two groups of people?

Well that’s what this post is about, educating decision makers about the numerous business benefits that virtualization solutions provide.
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Filed Under: Blog, Virtualization Tagged With: disaster recovery, SAP, sap virtualization, sap vmware, virtualization, VMware

Role Call – NRF Annual Convention and Expo

January 9, 2012 By Will Deacon Leave a Comment

DataXstream will be present at Retail’s Big Show later this month (Jan 15-17) to talk all things SAP Retail. Will you be in attendance? Send us a message below to connect with us in New York later this month.

DataXstream: A Proven Expert in SAP Retail

Since a great number of SAP shops exist these days, you might ask yourselves why, as a retailer, you would choose DataXstream to implement SAP for Retail for your business. It is a good question, and we have a great answer.

First and foremost, we at DataXstream are proven experts in SAP, having worked in the SAP world for more than 15 years and having established an excellent reputation. Simply speaking, we understand SAP extremely well. You can absolutely trust us with any SAP project.

Secondly, we have a proven track record when it comes to the specifics of SAP for Retail. With us on your team, you can expect to implement SAP for Retail 50% faster; have all the unique configurations of the system you need to best reach your business goals, and even have your system customized to improve upon SAP’s already excellent functionality.

Thirdly, we are experts in virtualization, as well, which means we give you the unique opportunity to virtualize your SAP environment if you so choose. Many cost-savings and other benefits (including flexibility and increased responsiveness to business growth) can result from a virtualized environment. For more details on the benefits of virtualization, read here.

Connect with us at the Expo

Filed Under: Events, News, SAP Retail Tagged With: POS, Retail, SAP Retail

Lessons Learned for Decision Makers and Leads from a Successful SAP Retail Project

January 5, 2012 By Tim Yates 4 Comments

I have spent the last 2 years working on an SAP Retail implementation. An SAP Retail project is the last place I could have ever imagined myself working. I have always been drawn more to SAP manufacturing, distribution, and A&D projects. Being a manufacturing engineer by trade, I am always a little more comfortable with a manufacturing line or warehouse near by. Even the facility that we ran the SAP project out of had a manufacturing line in it and a warehouse, so it helped to ease my inner engineer. It also broke my 12 year streak of not having a project in the state I live in.

I have been working with SAP for over 15 years. This was my first SAP Retail project and once again SAP has proved to me that it can be successfully leveraged and become a competitive advantage for those companies that implement it. Each time I start a new project in a new industry I think about the vast differences in how the new company will need to leverage SAP and the challenges that unique business will create for the SAP application. Time and time again a reasonable solution path is achieved and SAP becomes a solid foundation from which the business operates. The diversity of my own personal experience working with successful SAP customers demonstrates this point. There are not a lot of similarities in how A Flooring Retailer, Rocket Manufacturer, Pharmaceutical Manufacturer operate, yet they are all very successful at leveraging SAP.

Build an RFC Client with NCo 3.0 for VB.NET – A Step-By-Step Guide

November 8, 2011 By Craig Stasila 4 Comments

Recently, I published an article showing step-by-step instructions for how to consume an SAP RFC with the SAP .Net Connector 3.0 (NCo 3.0). The article included code samples and a working code example for download written in C#. Well, not everybody writes in C#. There are some of you that would prefer to write in VB.NET. So, I have heeded your call, all you VB.NET developers! Here is your very own article detailing how to build an RFC client with NCo 3.0 for VB.NET.

The SAP .Net Connector 3.0 (NCo 3.0) offers many improvements over SAP .NET Connector 2.0. Unfortunately, SAP no longer offers example .NET code. This blog attempts to fill that gap by describing how to build a simple RFC Client using SAP .Net Connector (NCo) 3.0 with VB.NET. Click here to request a .zip file containing a copy of the source code.

It’s SAP Upgrade Time! Do You Know Where Your Customizations Are? Part 3.

November 3, 2011 By msalvo Leave a Comment

In my final post on this topic, I will discuss some of the techniques that I use to “discover” information about customizations in an SAP system, even in the absence of any documentation. The information available to be discovered may include such details as the object name, object type, user name of the person who made the last modification, date and time of the last modification, usage statistics, where-used, and for code-based objects, even the versions and their code differences.

It’s SAP Upgrade Time! Do You Know Where Your Customizations Are? Part 2.

November 1, 2011 By msalvo 1 Comment

In my last post on this topic, I discussed two negative effects of customizations in an upgrade project – risk and cost. I also discussed an obvious reason to eliminate unnecessary customization – the mitigation of risk and cost.

In this post, we will look at some of the customization areas which add risk and the cost to an upgrade project.

Discussing SAP SOLMAN Service Desk Integration Scenarios

October 27, 2011 By Tim Cooper 4 Comments

When you purchase SAP ERP, you get SAP Solution Manager (SOLMAN) as part of the deal – ostensibly for free (although it is really included in the purchase price). SOLMAN provides a wealth of functionality to help manage the technical environment as well as project processes like testing.

Service Desk functionality is delivered as part of SOLMAN for use as a ticketing system. One of the features of it is that it can be used as a ticketing system for both SAP and non-SAP systems as well as in conjunction with other ticketing systems that may be in place already. In this blog post I’ll briefly touch on some of the scenarios I have encountered and show that there are several ways to deploy Service Desk.

Using Service Desk is beneficial because it can automatically capture a wealth of information about what a user was doing when a problem occurred if the ticket is created directly from SAP. Also, Service Desk can communicate directly with the SAP mother ship to log issues and manage OSS notes, which obviously reduces the risk of transcription errors. And Service Desk can be extended to include functional components from non-SAP systems which in turn leads to the possibility of one-stop-shopping for ticket management. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog Tagged With: CA Service Desk, SAP, SAP base solution, SAP Basis, SAP ECC, SAP Integration, SAP Service Desk, Service Desk, Tim Cooper

How To: SAP PI Data Type Enhancements

October 13, 2011 By Craig Stasila Leave a Comment

I have worked with SAP PI since it was called SAP XI (version 3.0). SAP XI was pretty rough around the edges and was not what I would call an enterprise class integration tool. Each successive SAP PI release and enhancement pack has steadily added functionality such that the latest version of SAP PI is finally starting to resemble a fully functional EAI platform.

One such example of additional functionality is the ability to enhance delivered integration content.

Recently, I had to make some modifications to an integration scenario where an SAP ERP system was sending data to an external custom solution. The good news was the SAP ERP and PI objects were built and delivered by SAP!

SAP ERP Delivered Content

The bad news was that the interface, as designed, did not meet the business’ need…

How to add fields to delivered content?

So, the $64,000 question is, how do we add fields to delivered SAP PI content?
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Filed Under: Blog, SAP Interface Blog, SAP PI Blog, SAP Technical Tagged With: BADI, Craig Stasila, Data Type Enhancement, DataXstream, development, Message Mapping, PI, SAP PI, XI/PI