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How DataXstream and SAP Retail can Improve your Business

January 27, 2012 By jvermeire Leave a Comment

Retail Business owners, have you ever wondered how SAP Retail can help your business? Let our partners at SAP show you what we can do for you.

At DataXstream, we create tailored solutions for SAP Retail that give retailers tools which allow them to capitalize on the retail revolution and achieve success in today’s business environment. Our dedicated team of Retail-focused SAP experts, with specialties ranging from technical and functional implementation to custom configuration and strategic project management, enables our customers to realize the full potential of SAP Retail’s highly flexible, configurable, and powerful solution toolset. Whether you are a food, hardline, or softline retailer, Dataxstream can help you achieve operational and supply chain excellence with your SAP Retail system.

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Retail Tagged With: DataXstream. 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.

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

November 3, 2011 By Mike Salvo 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.

Discussing SAP SOLMAN Service Desk Integration Scenarios

October 27, 2011 By Tim Cooper 3 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

SAP Go-Live Lessons Learned

September 27, 2011 By Tim Cooper Leave a Comment

In real estate the key factors in making the sale are location, location and location. In an SAP project I’m coming round to believing that success requires testing, testing and testing.

A Short Selective Retrospective on Key Constituencies

All project events and project success stem from testing and testing well. I’ve written about various types of testing before and how that can lead to some confusion because of issues with definitions. Here I want to discuss some areas where testing really can make or break a project and ideas for how to minimize the chances of things turning out badly. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Testing, SAP Testing Tagged With: DataXstream, SAP, SAP ECC 6.0, SAP Integration, SAP testing, Tim Cooper

Integrate SAP Service Desk with a Third-Party Service Desk

July 7, 2011 By Steve Park Leave a Comment

When companies implement SAP, Solution Manager (Solman) is also included in the installation. Companies need to make a conscious decision of what they plan to use from Solman. One of the features in Solman is the Service Desk ticketing system.

SAP service desk is usually getting introduced in an environment in where an existing Third-party Service Desk is already in use. Because of this, companies need to make a decision on how they will integrate SAP Service Desk with their existing Third-party Service Desk.

In this blog, I will describe Service Desk integration scenarios and DataXstream’s involvement in the Service Desk integration space.

Webinar – Integrate Your Enterprise Ticketing with SAP Solution Manager Service Desk

June 27, 2011 By Dataxstream

Duration: 30 Minutes

Speaker: Steve Park, Senior SAP Interface Consultant, DataXstream

Click to Watch

This thirty-minute webinar will provide you with a synopsis of the strategic advantages of integrating your enterprise ticketing system into your overall ticketing process. This session will highlight and discuss the business benefits, challenges and specific implementation details you need to know in order to successfully integrate SAP Solution Manager with a third party Ticketing System. This webinar will also discuss the key business requirements that must be understood to build a successful integrated ticketing process as well as highlight some of the limitations and challenges of leveraging the SAP enterprise services. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, Events, News, Press Releases, SAP SolMan Blog, SAP SolMan Blog Tagged With: CA Help Desk, CA Service Desk, CA Service Desk Manager, Rt, SAP Solution Manager, Solution Manager in SAP, Solution Manager SAP, ticketing, ticketing open source, ticketing system

Lumber Liquidators’ SAP VMware Virtualization Case Study

April 5, 2011 By Dataxstream

Going Virtual: How Lumber Liquidators Optimized Its IT Investments and Lightened the Demand on Its IT Organization

The April 2011 issue of SAP insiderPROFILES magazine will feature an editorial on the virtualization of Lumber Liquidators’ SAP implementation. The piece takes you inside the thought process of Lumber Liquidators’ IT team as they recount the factors that led them towards virtualization, the selection of DataXstream as their implementation partner, and how they feel today about about the decisions they made a year ago during the virtualization process.

Read the Case Study:

SAP insiderPROFILES – Lumber Liquidators SAP Virtualization

Filed Under: Blog, News, Press Releases, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical, Uncategorized Tagged With: Case Study, Dell, lumber liquidators, SAP, virtualization, VMware

SAP Mid-Month Go-Live: Got the T-shirt

November 10, 2010 By Tim Cooper 2 Comments

Conventional wisdom says you don’t go-live with SAP financials in the middle of the month (strictly speaking I should say the middle of the accounting period, but I’ll say month as a generic term for the posting period). I recently went through a mid-month SAP financials and logistics go-live and so far it has been a success.

Initially the project team had the expected you-can’t-do-that reaction when the idea of a mid-month go-live was suggested. We took three main steps to determine whether or not we were crazy or had a viable go-live option:

We asked SAP. As one of the main participants on the project we got them to do an internal review with some platinum consultants with the objective of telling us why we could not go-live mid-month.
We asked our project team, both client and consulting resources. Again, the goal was to tell us why we couldn’t do it.
We Googled like maniacs to find something to support and justify the conventional wisdom. We failed to find anything substantial that would deter us.

Armed with the conviction that there was no reason we couldn’t go-live mid-month we set about defining the details of how we would pull it off.

SAP Project Management Consulting Clichés – Part 2

November 3, 2010 By Tim Cooper Leave a Comment

Following my previous post I got a couple of responses from folks out on the interweb and decided I’d steal their suggestions and expand on their consulting clichés. After all repetition and overuse are the start point for any cliché and this means I’m doing my part to sustain the cycle – reuse, recycle, renew!

Is Your Project a Hotbed of SAP Consulting Clichés?

I felt compelled to come up with a 2-by-2 matrix to help you decide whether your project is cliché generator or a cliché consumer.