In the late 90’s Hershey foods decided they needed to begin preparing themselves for Y2K. While they were getting all their ducks in a row for what would eventually turn out to be one of the most anticlimactic “doomsday” scenarios in history, they also decided to update all their software, replace existing legacy systems, and implement $112 million dollars’ worth of SAP ERP software (Koch, 2002). It seemed like a solid, “catch-all” solution for what many people considered to be the coming apocalypse. Of course, the world didn’t end on January 1, 2000, nor did much of anything else happen aside from a few doomsday cults feeling the sting of embarrassment and plenty of egg on their faces. Hershey, however, was almost certainly looking back on the past couple years and regretting the rushed schedule they gave themselves for trying to cover more ground than was possible in the time allotted. [Read more...]
Mind the Gap: How Small Lapses in Communication can Derail an SAP Implementation and Cost a Company Millions – Part 1: How SAP Can Make or Break a Company
Webinar – Benefits and Challenges of using SAP Lean Order Management (LOM) as a Point of Sale for Retail
Some SAP Retail customers need an alternative to the SAP POS module or other outside POS interface. Lean Order Management (LOM) is a real alternative that runs order fulfillment processes directly in SAP through a portal interface. A number of enhancements can be made to the base LOM product to make it a fully functional Retail POS. This is particularly beneficial to companies that need real time, up to date information. LOM can be successfully deployed across a large end user base as a Retail POS.
What Will Be Highlighted:
- In this session you will learn how other retailers have integrated and leveraged LOM across hundreds of stores with minimal end user training
- Discussion will include the necessary enhancements needed to simplify the order process (sales, tender, refunds and returns), reducing associate / customer POS interaction and allowing end users to focus on meeting customer needs and enhancing the customer in store experience.
Date: TBD
Time: TBD
Duration: 30 Minutes
Speaker: TBD
SAP EDI EDPAR Table Walkthrough – How to Cross Reference External Customer Number to SAP Customer Number (Part 2)
Let’s say you are receiving EDI ANSI X12 850 Sales Orders from you customers that need to be uploaded into your SAP System using the ORDERS05 IDOC. Most customers will have their own internal customer numbers that they send in their EDI transmissions to represent the Sold-To and Ship-To partners.
How do you convert these external customer numbers into your internal SAP customer numbers?
Some may hard code these conversions into their EDI maps. This approach can be very high maintenance as customers can add new ship-to locations or reorganize their internal numbers which would require changes to your maps.
Others may set up a cross reference table within their EDI translation table to perform the conversion. This works well at times, but then you are at the mercy of your EDI group to update the table with any new additions or changes to existing entries. [Read more...]
Web Dynpro Basics: Context and Binding
This is for those who are new to Web Dynpro programming. Here is an explanation of how to set up a Web Dynpro application using the context and binding the context to User Interface (UI) elements of the application. This is only a basic explanation to help set a foundation for understanding Web Dynpro programming. The 3 basic elements of a Web Dynpro application are windows, views and the context. The window is simply a container for a view. To assign a view to a window expand the views and windows under the section labeled ‘Object Name.’ Double click on a window and then drag and drop the view into the window. [Read more...]
SAP EDI EDPAR Table Walkthrough – How to Cross Reference SAP Customer Number to External Customer Number (Part 1)
When creating IDOCs in SAP to send Invoices to customers via EDI you will likely have to send the customers their internal partner numbers on the EDI ANSI X12 810 Invoice Document. In almost all cases this will not be the same as the SAP partner numbers. So how can we set up a cross reference of SAP and external partner numbers? Well, the answer is simple because SAP has set up a utility to handle this for you. All you need to do is populate the EDPAR table in SAP using the VOE4 transaction. Once this is completed the IDOC_OUTPUT_INVOIC function module will read the EDPAR table when the Invoice document output is processed and populate the LIFNR element of the E1EDKA1 or E1EDPA1 segments of the INVOIC IDOC with the external partner number. Entries in EDPAR can be set up for multiple partners including the Sold-to, Ship-to, and Bill-To numbers so that external customer number cross-references can be passed on the IDOC if needed.
Let’s look at how this process works. Let’s say we have created an invoice document in SAP. In this case, the Sold-to, Ship-to, and Bill-to partners are all SAP customer number 15. If we want to create an INVOIC02 IDOC on which the external customer numbers are populated for all three of these partners we would have to set up three EDPAR entries as displayed on the below screen shot. The Customer field will contain the SAP partner number (Sold-to, Ship-to, Bill-to). The Ext. Function field will contain the Partner Function (SP = Sold-to, SH = Ship-to, BP = Bill-to). The External Partner field will contain the external partner number that the customer is expecting on the EDI file. And the Int. no. field will contain the SAP partner number (Same as the Customer field).
Lessons Learned for Decision Makers and Leads from a Successful SAP Retail Project Part 2 – Client Resources
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.
Business Benefits of Virtualization
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.
[Read more...]
It’s SAP Upgrade Time! Do You Know Where Your Customizations Are? Part 3.
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.
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
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...]
