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What Makes a Great ISV Enablement Partner?

May 16, 2013 by Leave a Comment

DataXstream is a company that specializes in SAP and most readers of this blog are SAP professionals.  So, I have some shocking news for you–news SAP doesn’t want you to know.  Are you sitting down?  Good.

SAP isn’t the only software vendor out there!!

Shocking, I know.  But there are other software platforms than NetWeaver; software languages other than ABAP and Java; and there was a time in the not-too-distant past where the center of the SAP universe, HANA, didn’t even exist!

While you are coming to terms that SAP is not the be-all and end-all, I would like to point out that no modern software system exists in a vacuum.  Because of this fact, attention has to be paid to how software systems interact with each other.  There is a seemingly endless supply of enterprise software solutions that supplement existing functionality, introduce new functionality, improve the user-experience, and, in general, bring value to the enterprise.  SAP’s predominance in the enterprise software market means that it these new enterprise software solutions need to interact with SAP–either getting data from SAP or sending data to SAP (or both).

But, SAP is not an easy software system with which to integrate.  The depth of SAP product offerings and modules make learning how to properly merge SAP functionality with an external software system difficult.  SAP NetWeaver is not known as a particular open or easy-to-access platform.  And while I personally laud SAP for their decision to enforce proper multi-tier data access restrictions (i.e. no direct read/write database access), this decision makes the SAP learning curve especially steep.

Many software companies desiring to integrate their software solution with SAP choose a independent software vendor enablement partner.  So, what makes a great ISV enablement partner?

  • Functional Expertise: In order to make the most of an integrated software solution, you must understand the needs of the business user.  Once these needs are understood, you need to transfer these requirements into software functional units of work.  Finally, an end-to-end workstream is defined across all participant software systems that will deliver the required functionality to your customers.
  • Technical Expertise: The best end-to-end workstream definition is only as good as the framework upon which the integration executes.  A great ISV enablement partner understands all of the technical aspects of SAP NetWeaver integration and development.  They will use this expertise to design and implement a solid, robust, scalable technical integration solution.
  • Go-To-Market Experience: Once the solution has been designed and built, it will need to be made available to the market.  A great go-to-market strategy involves market analysis, promotion, and working with the SAP ecosystem including SAP partnerships and certification.
  • Technical Sales and Marketing Support: Even the best software solutions don’t sell themselves.  Your ISV enablement partner should be there throughout the customer sales process to answer any questions and remove any barriers to sale.
  • Flexible Partnering Agreements: A great ISV enablement partner will work with you to craft a partnership agreement that benefits all parties while giving your customer’s the world-class solutions and support that they need.

DataXstream has been a leader in SAP ISV partner enablement since 2005 and has assisted dozens of software companies successfully enter the SAP market. Contact us today, to find out how we can unlock the SAP world for you!

Filed Under: Blog, SAP ABAP Blog, SAP EDI Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Interface Blog, SAP Java Blog, SAP PI Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , ,

What Makes a Great SAP Custom Development Partner?

May 15, 2013 by Leave a Comment

SAP Development Reality versus Reputation

Have you ever met someone whose reputation precedes them?  You’ve heard great things about his/her ability to get things done, the technical expertise and all kinds of accolades.  Then you meet.  And disappointment sets in.  The disconnection between reality and reputation smacks you in the face.

This (alleged) rock star cannot articulate what he does in a language you understand; he can’t give you a good sense of where he has done similar work before.  Where’s the magic?  I’m often amazed at how often technical gurus seem to have a skill deficiency when dealing with regular folks.  But why do I care, they’re a bunch of technical folks with specialized skills who do what the specification says – right?  Not so much.

SAP Development Core Competency

For me this situation touches on a core competence found in a great SAP development partner: the ability to communicate, question, understand and explain in non-technical language is critical.  As an SAP end user, business representative or business analyst (or, true confessions, sometimes as a project manager) you don’t care about how efficient the code is, which select statements are best, the funky table joins, the use of internal tables, memory parameters, and so on.  This is like explaining relativity to your dog – he’s hoping something good is going to happen when you stop talking.

Great developers have great coding skills; they understand technology and relish the tough assignments.  Don’t get me wrong: I love these folks and what they can do.  But the ones I want to work with know I don’t care that much about their esoteric universe and their alphabet soup.  Instead they know we need to use a common language to work together: the language of business and business goals.

My Checklist for a Great Custom Development Partner

The things I value most in a great SAP custom development partner are communication and collaboration, this means:

  • developers who understand business goals, business process and business data
  • comfort using business language
  • understanding of SAP business processes
  • SAP technical and integration expertise

DataXstream developers know quality output comes not just as a result of a well written functional or technical specification: it comes from common language and collaboration.

Now, let’s talk.

 

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical Tagged With: ,

What Makes a Great SAP Integration Partner?

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment

An SAP integration specialist’s responsibilities are to design and implement a robust, extensible solution that uses the appropriate standards and technologies to guarantee ACID programming guidelines (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) while leveraging the available programming interfaces to the best of their capabilities.  This may sound like a daunting task.  That’s because it is.  Integration is a very complex, specialized areas of expertise in the SAP ecosystem.

A great SAP Integration Partner will offer individuals that design and build integration solutions that adhere to the following concepts:

  • Robust – A good integration solution can recover from data and/or transmission errors. A truly robust solution should automatically attempt reprocessing where appropriate and, barring automatic processing, alerts the support personnel to the exception with context-specific data to assist in the exception resolution.
  • Extensible – Change is constant in the world of business.  A good integration solution is able to rapidly adapt to changes in process, requirements, and/or functionality.  More often than not, the individual that initially implemented the integration solution is not available to make the changes.  A combination of good design, process and procedure adherence, and documentation lowers the total cost of ownership for the integration solution.
  • Standards – Good integration partners understand standards, how they should be applied as well as their strengths and weaknesses.  Integration solutions that conform to standards are usually more robust and extensible, and therefore easier and cheaper to support, than their custom counterparts.
  • Atomicity – Robust integration solutions require atomic actions.  That means if one part of the transaction fails, the whole transaction fails.
  • Consistency – A consistent integration solution leverages the application programming interface to ensure that all business rules and processing logic are applied to the data prior to posting it to the database.  It is also important that data created via the integration solution passes the same validation and business rules as data created via the user interface.
  • Isolation – Great SAP integration partners understand how transaction isolation can greatly impact overall system performance.  Providing isolation means concurrent execution of data transactions results in a system state that would be obtained if transactions were executed serially–or in other words the interface can be executed in parallel, and therefore, take advantage of SAP NetWeaver parallel processing.
  • Durabilty – A durable integration solution is not affected by errors outside of the transaction–whether these errors be related to environment (power, network, database, etc.), data (business rules, missing data, incomplete data, etc.) or other factors.
  • Programming Interfaces (APIs) – A great SAP integration partner understands available programming interfaces and standards, their relative strengths and weaknesses, and how they interact with other components of the application.  Not all APIs are created equal and a great SAP integration partner will choose the API best suited for the integration solution.

DataXstream solution architects and integration specialists are trained in every one of these aspects and have the experience necessary to ensure every integration solution is a great one.

Filed Under: Blog, SAP ABAP Blog, SAP Basis Blog, SAP EDI Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Interface Blog, SAP PI Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

What Makes a Great SAP Project Manager?

May 1, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A project manager’s job is to deliver a defined scope on time and on budget.  This expectation comes from the overall project leadership, the business community and the IT organization.  To do this an SAP project manager needs to know:

  • The project goals and success criteria
  • The tasks to be performed

  • The dependencies between the tasks

  • The resources and skills needed

  • The key milestones and critical deliverables

Coordination, execution, review and sign-off throughout the project lifecycle requires marshaling different resource types at different times including business team members, functional consultants, ABAP developers, PI/XI developers, the Basis team, technical infrastructure, network operations, production support, training teams, etc.  A great project manager needs to be comfortable and confident interacting with different audiences, communicating in their language and using terms and jargon they understand.  A great project manager has a rolling horizon always looking a week, a month, a quarter or more into the future anticipating needs and planning ahead.  A great project manager lives with the belief that fire prevention is far more desirable than firefighting.

A great project manager monitors critical tasks and recognizes when to be flexible and when to dig in. There is constant negotiation, evaluation of information to separate the important from the inconsequential, and refinements to keep the project on track.  A great project manager knows to cultivate team member engagement, motivation and drive and maintain a common vision of the end goal.

DataXstream project managers understand all of this.  They live it every day.

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, Uncategorized Tagged With: ,

Upgrading your SAP System – Pitfalls and Processes for Success

March 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Why Upgrade?

What compels a firm running multiple versions and multiple products of SAP to upgrade its ERP and other usage types? The (not always) obvious reason is the need for new functionality, which can better support company business needs and help them thrive in an ever growing competitive landscape. Basically, they want their business to run better than other businesses in their market. So a brief note on the release strategy for SAP applications, which follow a “5-1-2” maintenance concept: “5″ years of mainstream maintenance; “1″ year of extended maintenance at an additional two percent of the maintenance fee; and finally, “2″ years extended maintenance at an additional four percent fee. Not cheap, but it may be cheaper than a big upgrade project. After that, if you still don’t want to let go of the SAP release, there is always customer-specific maintenance, which is expensive.

I am sure that most of the decision makers are not aware of this information, and that is why I’m  writing this post.  SAP customers need to know of the additional investment they would have to make to keep their SAP system, running status quo.  I would encourage you, and your bean counters, to do the math on considering your SAP installations. After that, I am sure you would be compelled to focus on the upgrade (if not now, when?).

New Functionality

The main reason for upgrading has almost always been the additional functionality.  There are other reasons as well, like instance consolidation, virtualization, and requirements based on hardware, software and O/S.  Every SAP release brings new features, challenges and opportunities.  The need to upgrade is mostly driven by business needs, which in turn require new functionality in your SAP environments.  This empowers your company by transforming your processes and moving your company to higher levels of efficiency, richer reporting with new and improved analytic tools like BIA and HANA, and ability to make timely and informed business decisions.  The choice must be made whether to implement and develop the new functionality or perform an upgrade. This is not always an easy evaluation and the amount of customizing you do will certainly drive this decision.  This is the so-called “solution gap” and you have to ask, is the solution gap large enough to justify the SAP release upgrade?  And since SAP upgrades are time consuming and usually complex, is it worth investing time, money and resources to address this solution gap with an upgrade?

Yesterday’s Technology

SAP systems need to be constantly customized and enhanced in order to support evolving business needs. The time will come when the installed instances will no longer be able to suit your needs.  Staying on the same release is unsustainable from an infrastructure point of view as you will be required to stay on older hardware, software, and O/S.  If you have systems with many external touch points, it becomes more difficult over time to keep these working, especially if you are running much older SAP software. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP SolMan Blog, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical, SAP Testing, SAP Testing, sap upgrade, SAP Upgrade Blog Tagged With: , , , , ,

How DataXstream and SAP Retail can Improve your Business

January 27, 2012 by 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:

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

January 5, 2012 by 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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP Project Management, SAP Retail, SAP Strategy, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

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

November 3, 2011 by 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.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Blog, SAP ABAP Blog, SAP Functional, SAP Project Management, SAP Strategy, SAP Technical, SAP Testing Tagged With: , , , , ,

Discussing SAP SOLMAN Service Desk Integration Scenarios

October 27, 2011 by 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: , , , , , , , ,

SAP Go-Live Lessons Learned

September 27, 2011 by 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: , , , , ,
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