About the SAP Reporter

I started this blog to share tips, insights and sometimes information related to doing SAP implementations. Sometimes it relates to bolt-on’s I have worked on. Sometimes it relates to industry changes that are affecting the way implementations now need to be done. Sometimes I just share productivity tips for staying on task and on track.  These are lessons from the trenches of many many implementations. This is what I have been doing for the last 16 years of my life. Some of these SAP implementation have not been easy ones. They have taxed me and the teams involved both physically and mentally. Often I have learn’t more from the mistakes we have made than from the grand successes we have had. At times, I have wondered: “why the hell am I doing this?”. And through the years, I have had this love hate relationship with the SAP software at times. It is just the roller coaster of life.

In the beginning, we all said that this thing would last for 5 years, max. No here I am 16 years later, and the SAP juggernaut is still rolling on. As one of my colleagues says: “Engineered like no other Software”. And I think it is very true. There are still features and functions in the software that nobody uses – simply because they do not know it is there.

I started off working for a consulting company. I soon realized that I really enjoyed taking a clients vision and requirements and turning this into a workable solution molding SAP. There were times that this was not in alignment with what the consulting company wanted you to do. They had a hidden agenda. And this frustrated me enough that I decided to go out on my own and hang up my shingle. I can honestly say that it was a good decision. I have subsequently ventured back into working for SAP for a couple of years. They were good years and it was a good company to work for. But at the end, I decided to follow my own siren again.

You will notice that I post in spurts. There is even a gap of more than 2 years. It wasn’t that I did not have ideas (they percolate in my head continuously), I was busy with a client and traveling a lot. I wasn’t happy with my hosting plan, nor the lot of the blog. So I just avoided it as I did not want to deal with it. I finally bit the bullet, moved the site to some new hosting and found a template that I am happy with.  Now I am back in the saddle.

I hope you enjoy my ramblings. I enjoy putting them together. Feel free to contact me if you have any comments, questions or consulting opportunities.

My Story

I qualified as an Electronic Engineer from the University of Cape Town in South Africa.

I started working for Siemens Telecommunications doing hardware and software development. A year later, I started doing a part-time MBA. Although I enjoyed the work, I was frustrated by the fact that I never saw the end product nor dealt with the customers.

So I began looking around. Some friends of mine told me about this small consulting company. The employees were young, having fun and working with SAP. I was somewhat confused. You see in South Africa, SAP stands for South African Police !!

After resolving my confusion, I started working for this consulting company in 1994. I was their first Sales & Distribution (SD) Consultant. It was an interesting little company. Twenty eight employees, eleven MBA’s with an average age of 28. Everybody was ambitious and willing to learn. They had an SAP system 1.0 D when I started. But nobody had ever configured SD. I was given a manual (documentation was lousy in those days) and I started trying to figure it out. I had to configure both Financials (FI) and Materials Management (MM) to get SD working. It was a trial of fire. I learnt a lot through trial and error. I spend many late nights and some early mornings trying to get up to speed.

This was the SAP Wild West. 3 months later I was giving (not taking) training at SAP. Crazy.

This was also the beginning of SAP R3. I used to go to the SD Users Group and we would discuss functionality of SAP R2. The Users group met a few times a year and there were only about a dozen of us. Contrast that with the 1000′s of members here in the USA. It was great.

There was a new release of SAP about every 2 weeks. And if you found a bug (a lot of functionality never even worked), you phoned SAP and reported it. They looked in their database to see if it was known and if you were lucky they provided a fix. Those were the days when you could supply them with a proposed fix. Today you have to first convince them it is a bug, and then you are lucky if you get a fix in a month. Often we cannot afford those kinds of delays so we just code around the bug. Sad state of affairs (I will write an article and explain the predicament that has caused this).

Because there were so many new releases, you were constant begging, borrowing and stealing release notes. There was no OSS (Online Support Service) access nor Internet in those days. Great learning environment.

Additionally, getting to know some of the functionality in R2 was useful, because SAP was racing to catch up with the functionality in R3. The functionality of R2 was only matched and surpassed in Version 3.0.

First Project-Cement Industry
My first project was with the main Cement Manufacturer in South Africa, a subsidiary of Anglo America (main gold mining company in South Africa). One of the first things we did was do a tour to all the remote offices and do a brown paper process mapping exercise. I was also given the job of the SD data loads. I was very fortunate to work with 2 outstanding SD consultants from SAP. They taught me a great deal.

One now heads up the SAP consulting office in Cape Town, South Africa, and the other one is an independent consultant in New Jersey, USA.

I did a number of projects in the next 2 years and then got the opportunity to come to the USA.

USA
I initially came to the USA with Cap Gemini and landed in Houston. I stayed about a month in Houston, TX, and then fled to Clearwater Beach in Florida. I had some friends there and living on the beach suited me . I thought that Cap Gemini would teach me consulting skills – boy was I wrong. I was just a revenue source for them.

Chemical Industry
My first project was up in Chicago with a chemical company, Akzo Nobel as the SD Lead Consultant. I arrived in January and was in for a shock. I had never experienced weather so cold. Amongst other things we rolled out a freight rating SAP-Workflow solution here. It was a fun project with very tight time lines.

After a year with Cap Gemini, I decided to venture out on my own.

Sales and Brokering Industry
The first project I did was with a Sales Division of Mitsubishi and being young and eager to prove myself, I made a few mistakes (both social and technical) – cost of learning. I was supporting MM as well as SD. They were running moving average valuation. They sent me to San Fransisco to do a Go-Live support of a division supplying satellite parts. Nobody from the project had been there to gather requirements. So we were defining the SAP processes on the fly. Fortunately, it was a low transaction volume business. They had sales of components worth millions but the price was a fixed price per sale.

Example: 1 Widget (155 components of a single project) was $1,234,007. To enter this in SAP becomes a challenge now (and I was initially too inexperienced to understand the ramifications). In reality the unit price is $7,961.335448387097. Needless to say, we messed it up and the moving average price at month end was way out. To add further confusion, they had defined a report to help us – which was wrong. We ended backing out the transactions and re-doing them. Fortunately, they only had a few transactions every week. What a mess. When my contract ran out, they chose not to renew. Can’t say I blame them. Ah, the cost of learning in the School of Hard Knocks.

Retail Industry
My next project was an Industry Specific Solution for Retail (IS-RE) in the the grocery retail industry. This was the first or second retail project in the US and was a Beta project. Two and half years later, the project was canceled when the retail industry hit some bumps and there was a change in management in the company. I went on vacation for 2 weeks and when I came back, they asked me why I was there. The project had been canceled. And we were so close and everybody on the project team knew it. Great project.

Consumer Products
My next project was a consumer products company in the water industry. I came on as the SD lead. My first responsibility was Pricing. I arrived a month before go-live and discovered that not much had been done in pricing. We had a wild ride but made the date. The go-live date was Jan 2, so I spent my new year in Dallas preparing for the go-live. It was fairly uneventful (as they often are). I ended up managing the development of quite a few custom solutions and interfaces, leading the order management. I also introduced some SAP-Workflow to streamline some authorization processes.

GUIXT
When SAP introduced 4.5, they removed 2 fields on the header of the pricing maintenance screen for the condition validity date. This meant that the users who maintained pricing now had to type the same validity date for every, single, price record. They were not happy campers. So I set out to find a solution.

In my search I came across this package called GUIXT. I had never heard of it, yet it was already packaged with SAP. It allows you to affect SAP screen elements. So I contacted the company, explained my dilemma and asked them if GUIXT could do this. They assured me it could. In reality we discovered that the current functionality could not do it. However, in a week, they supplied me with a version that could. I was amazed at their response. The component of GUIXT that allowed us to accomplish this was called Input Assistant and allowed you to write simple scripts to pass parameters between screens. I mentioned to the company that it was extremely difficult to trace what was happening to the values of the variables. Two weeks later, they supplied me with a debugger that they had written. Now that is service. I have continued to use GUIXT wherever I can in the years since.

Electronics Industry
My next project only lasted about 3 months. It was with a large power electronics company. I was the only consultant there. They did a lot of make-to-order. We were still in the planning stages of the project and were mapping out solutions.

Joining the Mother Company – SAP doing SAP-CRM
In 2001, I joined SAP. I wanted to learn CRM and SAP seemed like the best place to do this. Besides, I was tired of working on my own.

Training New Recruits
SAP decided to hire over 100 new recruits from various industries to ramp up their CRM practice. Many of the new recruits had no SAP experience. To try to get them up to speed, they ran a a 2 week bootcamp. I was asked to run a 1 day SD course to introduce them to SD. Interesting but tiring experience.

Aircraft Development Industry
One of my first projects with SAP was leading a team of consultants doing a prototype for a marketing department in the aircraft industry. It was fun project, but the conclusion of the client was that they did not like the user interface. I then suggested to them that they look at GUIXT. They took up my suggestion and I was soon back to do a prototype user interface using GUIXT. This was in CRM and when I approached the Synactive (makers of GUIXT), they said that it should work. Turns out that I was the first person to try using GUIXT in CRM and it did not work !! CRM is such a different beast from Standard R3. I was not surprised. This time it took them about 6 weeks to get me a working version.

Although I produced a working version with the client which they were very impressed with, I would not recommend doing such a large scale user interface design using GUIXT. Nobody had tried it before.

Postage Meters and Leasing
My next project was in the Postage Meter industry. As the market for CRM was depressed, I was in my old capacity of SD. I was the consulting lead for Billing. It was also a Leasing and Asset Management (SAP-LAM) beta site. So I got involved with leasing and Activity Based Billing (ABB). Whereas LAM was developed in Germany, ABB was developed here. We had a lot to do with the design and testing of the solution and the SAP developers from Germany spent several weeks meeting with us.

After about 15 months, I decided that it was time to start my own company. Although SAP was a great company to work for, I was disenchanted with their constant changing of the bonus scheme. This Postage Meter Project was scrapped about two years later.

Birth of Arrow Solutions
In 2003, Arrow solutions was founded. The idea was to provide unique and out of the box thinking to solve client problems.

Contact Lens Industry & Call Centers
My first project in my new company was in the contact lens industry. They required an high speed, high volume order entry solution for their call centers. The existing consulting partner had led the client to believe they could use standard SAP to do the job. It was 4 months to go-live and nothing had been done. I was called in as the SD Consulting lead as part of a 6 person team: 3 from the client, 2 heavy hitter developers and myself. We proceeded to develop a custom thin-client front-end to order entry. This is a solution I am very proud to have been involved in. The metric we had to live up to was a 20 second order. We ended up rolling this solution out to the UK and Europe at roughly 3 countries a month. It was a wild ride, a lot of international traveling. The project ran into financial issues a year later when they blew through the budget after a few inevitable delays. They closed down the project and started it up about a year later and have subsequently rolled it out to Canada and the US.

My next project was another contact lens company. This was a much larger team. But with much the same task, to produce a order entry solution for the call centers. Additionally, we were responsible for Order to Cash. We used a different approach based on GUIXT here. Once again we were cutting new ground with what we were trying to make GUIXT do. This was beyond what GUIXT was designed to do so it presented us with many challenges. If I had to do it again, I would have done a custom ABAP frontend solution.

Conclusion
It has been a good experience working with SAP. I particularly like developing elegant solution to a clients business problems. It is very rewarding to see the solution making users jobs easier.

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