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SAPtips.com SAPtips © 2008 Klee Associates, Inc.

From the Managing Editor I remember an obnoxious com-mercial I once heard on late night television. The loud and abrasive restaurateur stated “if we don’t have it, you don’t need it”. At that time I thought his claim was ridicu-lous, if not impossible…but this issue of SAPtips is so big, and so diverse, I think we could almost use that same annoying statement.

Our February/March 2008 issue has everything you need…well, almost. With eleven solid articles and four timely white papers add-

Cheryl A. Cave, Managing Editor

From the Editor continued on page 2

Unlocking the Value of your SAP® Investment Undocumented Features…Timesaving Solutions…Best Practices

Journal | Training | Consulting | Document Library | Tip of the Month | Software Solutions | SAPtips Community

3 u View from the Trenches

5 u SAPtips Training and Consulting

7 u User News from ASUG

90 u Software Solutions

91 u SAPtips Associate Editors

DEPARTMENTS

HR13 u �Tracking Changes Made in PD

Infotypes – A Guide for SAP HR Consultants and Users, by Rehan Zaidi, Siemens Pakistan. Need to customize your Personnel Development functionality? You’ll want this auditor-pleasing guide to tracking changes.

18 u �Infotype Creation in HCM: A Detailed Guide, by Kamran Ellahi, SAP Consultant. Get the value from your investment in Human Capital Management by following these easy steps to customize applicant Infotypes.

LOGISTICS25 u MM��

Forecast Accuracy vs. Safety Stock Levels: What You Need to Know, by Adam Tysman – SAP® Value and Effectiveness Specialist.

Safety Stock levels not even close to accurate? You may

be over-adjusting. Find out what to do and what not to do in Adam Tysman’s debut article.

35 u� MM��Using Condition Types in SAP: Knowing What Condition Your Condi-tion Is In, by Jocelyn Hayes, SAPtips Director of Consulting and Training. Jocelyn Hayes demonstrates how to create a new condition type, add it to a calculation schema, and test it.

FINANCIALS48 u� ��Dunning: Not Just a Village in

Scotland, by Anurag Barua, SAP Consultant.

Buckle your kilts and prepare for a tour of Dunning. No, not Scotland, FI/CO.

SOA

53 u Building the SOA City – Part V, Logosworld Blue Elefant SOA Awards 2007, by Axel Angeli and Lynton Grice. The envelope please… Find out who won the Oscars of SOA development.

BASIS

67 u�� You’ve Got Mail: A Guide for Setting Up Your SAP® Mail Configuration, by Eric Walter, SAP Consultant. Armed with Eric Walter’s article and the pertinent OSS note, you too can set up mail with SAP’s WebAS 7.10 in ECC 6.0!

COVER STORY 8 u APO�

Changing the Planning Calendar in Demand Planning: Getting It Right,�by Ranjan Sinha, SAP Consultant. It’s not your favorite activity, but once in a while you may have to change the Planning Calendar in the APO/DP sub-module. Don’t despair. Ranjan Sinha provides the change logic, technical steps, and cutover steps for a successful conversion.

Journal

Publisher: Andy Klee Director of Publications: Laura Donovan Managing Editor: Cheryl A. Cave Editors: Emil Marx Colleen Low Larkin Graphic Designer: Mark Hunter

Klee Associates, Inc.Table of Contents continued on page 2

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ing up to 137 pages of hard-to-find SAP advice, we think we have a five-star lineup this time.

For all you SCM, APO folks, our cover story should whet your appe-tite for Demand Planning insights. SCM veteran Ranjan Sinha presents a thorough discussion of the ele-ments of planning, and steps for changing the Demand Planning calendar, beginning on page 8. But if you’re hungry for something more logistical, you may want to start with our MM pieces. New contribu-tor Adam Tysman serves up some sage advice on making Safety Stock leveling work in your organiza-tion (page 25), while SAPtips’ own Jocelyn Hayes delivers the scoop du jour on MM Condition Types (page 35).

Perhaps you’re in the mood for something a little more…oh I don’t know, FI/CO…you’ll want to enjoy a large helping of Anurag Barua’s arti-cle on Dunning (page 48). With his solid experience and keen insights, blended with a light sense of humor, Anurag shows us that Dunning is more than just a village in Scotland. If your tastes lie more to the techni-cal side, you’ll want to sample Eric Walter’s mail setup guide for WebAS 7.10 in ECC 6.0 (page 67) or Rehan Zaidi’s white paper on the new ABAP Debugger.

Round off your SAPtips experience with a visit to our dessert cart, with Axel Angeli and Lynton’s Grice’s sweet eSOA award announcement (page 53) or our piece de resistance, Jon Reed’s rich review of Mashup Corporations, a groundbreaking new book on eSOA implementation: present and future (page 82).

If you don’t see what you’d like, just ask our chef…page 4 shows a list of topics we’d like to pub-lish…you can add your request by emailing [email protected] or [email protected]. Or perhaps you can cook up an article of your own on one of these topics; we’ll pay you handsomely and promote your career to boot.

From the Editor continued from page 1

SAPtips ONLINEBe sure to visit the SAPtips Document Library to download these new white papers.

On�MMThe Principle of Dual Control: Two-step Change Process for Vendor Master Record By Kiran Bhat, Fujitsu Consulting Inc.Double your fun. Double your control. SAP’s Principle of Dual Control offers you peace of mind when it comes to changes made to your Vendor Master records by building in a secondary “sanity check” by a second, authoritative party. Kiran Bhat delves into how this two-step process works, including the steps to configure and test the Dual Control process. Before long, you’ll be in (dual) control of your critical master data!

On�BI/BWSAP BI 7.0: A Forward Facing StrategyBy Arthur Patrick Pesa, ProKarma, Inc.Think future! Think forward! Think Central Repository! As SAP acquires more and more tools to enhance reporting in BI 7.0 (and other systems), it’s key to think in terms of information, people, and their needs—not just the systems involved. Pat Pesa hones in on how to start planning for an infor-mation-filled future and how to maximize SAP’s newest acquisitions in the reporting industry. Let’s just say this—best of breed in the SAP landscape never looked better than it does now.

Journal

73 u�� Configurable Menus in SAP: An Easy Way to Access Module Transac-tions, by Maria Nikolova, SAP Senior Expert, National Electricity Company, Bulgaria. Finally, some common-sense instructions for utilizing the configurable Area and Role menus, as well as setting up the Favorites folder in SAP.

CIO Corner82 u SOA from the Outside In:

Applying the Lessons from Mashup Corporations, by Jon Reed, JonERP.com. Follow the eSOA adventures of Vorpal Corp. through the eyes of Jon Reed as he reviews the valuable lessons in the groundbreaking new book, Mashup Corporations.

86 u Maximizing Planning and Technology Use for Business Health, by CJ Rhoads. ERP project planning: when to hold ‘em, when to fold ‘em.

White Papers continued on page 3 From the Editor continued on page 3

mailto:[email protected]


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On�MMMaterials Management – Master the Best PracticesPart II: MM Master Data Best PracticesJocelyn Hayes, SAPtips Director of Training and ConsultingJocelyn’s back, and she’s got more Material Management best practices to share! This time, she’ll delve into what’s important to know when working with Material Masters and Vendor Masters. These tips include not only what is the “best” thing to do, but what pitfalls you’ll want to avoid when dealing with master data.

Remember, if you like the article, you’ll LOVE what you’ll learn from Jocelyn during the SAPtips University’s Material Management workshop this spring in Dallas!

On�ABAPThe Exterminator: A Tour of the New ABAP DebuggerBy Rehan Zaidi, Siemens PakistanWhile “new and improved” often translates to the same old thing, just repackaged (new Coke anyone?)—there are exceptions. As Rehan Zaidi points out, one of those is the ABAP Debugger found in ECC 6.0. Rehan discusses the advantages of this new functionality over its prede-cessor, as well as how to use it to compare two variables and how to personalize your Debugger tools.

White Papers continued from previous page

Jocelyn Hayes’ View from the Trenches February 2008 – From the Director

2008 should be another interesting year for SAP®. Business ByDesign is making its way onto the market as the first fully hosted ERP solution by SAP, and the acquisition of Busi-ness Objects is being finalized, thus signaling SAP’s venture into two spaces relatively new to them. As a result, they have picked up many new “potential” SAP ERP custom-ers with the acquisition. I attended a Webcast hosted by Henning Kager-mann, CEO of SAP, John Schwarz, CEO of Business Objects, and two Business Objects executives, Doug Merritt and Marge Breya. In my opinion, the acquisition represents a very strategic move for SAP because Business Objects customers are now SAP customers, and could be future ERP customers. While Business Objects will continue to be run as a separate entity, there will certainly be many synergies and cooperative development activities around the two Best of Breed solutions.

Here at SAPtips, we are fully under-way with our new SAPtips Univer-sity workshops. This spring, we are offering our newly developed Mate-rials Management, ABAP, and Pric-ing workshops, in addition to our Sales and Distribution, Basis and Security, and Business Warehouse courses. Check out our Website at www.SAPtips.com for the full schedule. Time is of the essence; you’ll miss the spring classes if you don’t act now! If you cannot make our public workshops and you have a team of 4 or more that would benefit from any of these courses, contact me and we can discuss bringing any of our workshops to your site – customized for your company’s specific business processes if you need.

Our Mastery Level consultants are currently developing courses in Financial Accounting, Controlling, Human Resources, and Advanced Purchasing, which we will be offer-ing at SAPtips University beginning fall 2008.

In May, I will be attending the co-hosted ASUG-SAP Annual Confer-ence. Last year, I was appointed to the ASUG Board of Directors as the Director of Membership and Volunteers. Please drop me a line if you are planning on attending the conference, as I would like this opportunity to meet as many of our subscribers as possible!

Meanwhile, enjoy the February/March issue of SAPtips.

JocelynHayes [email protected]

Jocelyn Hayes

If you want to increase your SAP skills, you’ll want to take advantage of the spring SAPtips University training (page 6), but hurry, classes are starting soon. Or perhaps you need an onsite class on any one of over 35 different SAP topics.

Be sure to visit our SAP Partners’ Product Solution list (page 90) that makes SAP project life easier to swallow.

Bon Apetit! CherylA.Cave, Managing Editor, SAPtips

[email protected]

≈

From the Editor continued from page 2

Journal


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Tell us what you want…

Yes! This is your opportunity to tell us what tips, tricks, and undocumented features you’d like to see in your SAPtips Journal.

Drop us an email and tell us what Category, Sub-Category, or specific topic you’d like to see. We’ll post these on our SAPtips Web site for potential authors to view. www.SAPtips.com/WhitePapersNeeded.asp

… we’ll even let you write it for us

Couldn’t ask for more than that, could you? SAPtips pays $750 for each article or white paper published.

Clients: Don’t let the consultants grab all the glory. Send us your tip ideas and we’ll show you how to get started. Get your cash and your 15 minutes of fame!

Consultants: Get your name out there in front of thousands of SAPtips readers – you never know, you just might get some more work out of the deal.

Let Cheryl Cave know you are interested: [email protected]

Journal

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Relax. We’ve got you covered: • Onsite Training www.SAPtips.com/OnsiteTraining.asp

• SAPtips University www.SAPtips.com/WorkshopSchedule.asp – (Check out our Spring 2008 schedule on page 5!)

• Mastery-Level Consulting Services www.SAPtips.com/Consulting.asp

Contact Jocelyn Hayes Director, SAP® Consulting and Training, at [email protected] or 1.877.832.2594 ext 122.

Discover how far you can go with your SAP system!

≈

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Mastery LevelKnowledge

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There are still some seats available, but time is running out. RegiSTeR ToDAy!

Here’s what attendees from our Fall 2007 University had to say about their workshop experience:

“Very good skills; excellent teacher for complex

scenarios.”

“Workshop offered a comprehensive coverage of

the topic.”

“Very enjoyable.”

“Instructor had great knowl-edge of SAP!”

“Instructor presented materials in a clear and con-

cise manner.”

“It was great that the instruc-tor had working experience

and full command of the topic.”

“The instructor answered questions well — even those

related to our home systems.”

“I would recommend this class to others.”

What could SAPtips do for your next project?

on-site training is available on over 35 SAP topics.

[email protected] ext 122

SAPtips TrainingandConsulting

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SAPtips University Workshop Schedule Spring 2008– Dallas, Texas

Workshops Dates

ABAP April14-18,2008

BasisandSecurity March17–21,2008

MaterialsManagement March31–April4,2008

Pricing April7–11,2008

SalesandDistribution March3-72008

Ask about our TrainingPak! 15 student/days of training for $7,495. That’s a savings of $1130, or 13% off of our regular prices. That pays for 3 students to attend a 5 day class, or 1

student to attend 3 classes, or … well, you get the idea! We offer public classes every six months and

Training Paks never expire.

All SAPtips workshops are presented in a group-live environment. Click on the course links above or go to www.SAPtips.com/WorkshopSchedule.asp to view detailed course

descriptions, including objectives, prerequisites, who should attend, CPE credit, and continuing education credit information. Workshops offered are subject to change.

To register or view our pricing, registration, and cancellation policy, go to www.SAPtips.com/WorkshopRegistrationPub.asp

Klee Associates, Inc. is registered with the National Association of State Boards of Accountancy (NASBA) as a sponsor of continuing professional education on the National Registry of CPE Sponsors. State boards of accountancy have final author-ity on the acceptance of individual courses for CPE credit. Complaints regarding registered sponsors may be addressed to the National Registry of CPE Sponsors, 150 Fourth Avenue North, Suite 700, Nashville, TN, 37219-2417. Web site: www.nasba.org.

We’re holding your Seat

Follow us to classes at SAPtips University.

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SAPtips UserNewsfrom

SAPtips is not formally affiliated with ASUG, but we share important ASUG news and events with our friends and partners.≈

it’s almost spring and ASUg is budding with opportunities to participate in User group activities and learning opportunities.

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Editor’s Note: Planning managers don’t have buckets of time, but they do have Time Buckets in SAP. Time buck-ets are how data is viewed in the Planning Calendar; when plans change, the view will need to be changed as well. Ranjan Sinha explains why this happens and how to make the changes, including configuration of Time Buckets to correspond with your time.

Synopsis In SAP, the Planning Calendar defines how the plan-ning data is viewed in Demand Planning within APO. If the Planning Calendar changes, you’ll then need to take steps to organize the data into the new Planning Calendar. Recently I was involved in a project that dealt with this type of change; this article will touch on the rationale for this change, the technical steps in mak-ing the change, and the cutover steps involved in the production landscape.

IntroductionWhen the user logs into a Planning Book within APO, he or she views data in time buckets. The time bucket could be Daily, Weekly, Monthly, or Quarterly. These time buckets are configurable; a weekly time bucket could correspond to the “SAP standard” of Monday through Sunday, or it could be a “configurable” time bucket (for example, Friday through Thursday).

Similarly, a monthly bucket could correspond to a standard calendar month like the 1st through the 31st (e.g., January) or could be organized as “configurable month”, typically organized as 4 (or 5) full weeks.

Issue of Dis-aggregationThe justification to get away from using a standard calendar month is that the month beginning and month end don’t coincide with the start and the end of the week; this makes it difficult to toggle between a weekly and monthly view. Data entered in a weekly view would “dis-aggregate” between two calendar months, which makes the planning more difficult. If a week is assigned to a single “configurable” month, then no data dis-aggregation takes place.

Here’s an example: If we take a look at the Planning Book in “Weekly Buckets” (SAP standard weekly bucket corresponding to Monday through Sunday), the numbers entered are 0, 200, 200, 300, and 400 for the Key Figure Forecast for the weeks 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 (see Figure 1).

Now if we look at a “Standard Calendar Month”, Figure 2 shows what the data would look like. To understand the numbers, we have to take a look at the date ranges that the week corresponds to in Figure 3.

Changing the Planning Calendar in Demand Planning: getting it Right

By Ranjan Sinha, SAP® Consultant

CoverStory

Figure 2: Monthly View of Data

Figure 1: Weekly View of Data

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Week 5 spans the months of January and February. Week 9 spans the months of February and March.

The month of February shows a value of 986. This corresponds to the roll up of values from the weeks 5 though 9 (1,100 total). Since week 9 spans two differ-ent months, the value of 400 splits, based on the num-ber of days that fall into the respective month – with five days in February, 5/7 of the value rolls up into the month corresponding to 286; this brings, the total to 986.

To get away from this “dis-aggregation”, companies usually shift to a definition of a month that has a whole

number of weeks, where data does not span different months.

Figure 4 shows us what the data looks like when the month gets re-defined – now we have defined the “Cus-tom” month of February to correspond to start from beginning of week 6 and ending of week 9 (Note the start corresponds to 4th of February and ends 2nd of March) – so the data rolls up as 200+200+300+400 to a value of 1100.

Product Allocation Planning and Choice of Planning CalendarIn Demand Planning, we can theoretically define a “flexible” week (with a different starting day than Mon-day), and a “flexible” month (like the one defined in the Figure 4). The flexible month would have to coincide with the start and end of the week definition.

In scenarios where Product Allocation plans are cre-ated in Demand Planning and where Global Available to Promise is used with a check against the Product Allocations, the “periodicity” of Product Allocations using a single planning area can only allow for a single custom period definition. For business scenarios where both weekly and monthly allocation plans are created, the choice is a critical one. If a standard week is used,

Figure 4: Data in a Custom Monthly Format

Week Date From Date To

W 05/2008 01/28/2008 02/03/2008

W 06/2008 02/04/2008 02/10/2008

W 07/2008 02/11/2008 02/17/2008

W 08/2008 02/18/2008 02/24/2008

W 09/2008 02/25/2008 03/02/2008

Figure 3: Date Range of Weeks

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then a flexible month is allowed. Where a configurable week is chosen, then only a standard calendar month is allowed. In such a scenario, a standard week and a cus-tom month seem to be a better approach since it solves the dis-aggregation issue.

Conversion ScenarioThis article is based on a company that was already “live” with a Saturday through Friday week, but used a standard calendar month in a Product Allocations scenario, and decided to move to a standard calen-dar week definition (Monday through Sunday) with a custom month. This allowed the company to solve the “dis-aggregation issue”, as well as allowing a consistent execution of GATP against Product Allocations.

Conversion StrategyIf a company is already live with a Planning Calendar, a critical step in the transition in the period definition is deciding on the conversion strategy for converting the existing data from one calendar to another.

In a scenario like the one just described (where both the week and month definitions changed), the first step is to determine how the values from the old week and month get carried over to the new week and month definition. For example, let us say week 5 in the old format corresponds to a period of 26th January (Satur-day) through first of February (Friday), but in the new format corresponds to 28th January (Monday) through the 3rd of February (Sunday). Let’s discuss the options for converting the data.

Option 1A simple conversion strategy would be to take week 5’s data from the old definition into the new format. This would be followed with a process wherein the planning is done primarily in weeks, and the monthly figure is a roll up number. When the calendar does change, the data would change in the monthly view, although for a particular week number, the value will be the same. Based on this option, the weekly values in Figure 1

remain the same; however, the monthly values would change from 986 to 1100 (compare values in Figure 2 and Figure 4).

Option 2Another strategy would be to make sure that the cal-endar month value for February matches with the new “Custom” month format of February, which corre-sponds to our example in Figure 4 from the 4th of Feb-ruary to 2nd of March. Here the weekly values would have to be adjusted to make sure that the monthly values retain the same value. This option would have to be chosen if the planning is done in monthly buckets and the weekly data only reflects how it dis-aggregates from the monthly number. This option is a little more complex to achieve.

In our case we followed Option 1, since the change in the week basically corresponded to the weekend (Satur-day and Sunday) and did not affect the weekly view of data.

Where the planning area corresponds to the one used for Product Allocation Planning, some special consider-ations and logic would have to be built for “consump-tion quantity” (a data point that shows how much of the Product Allocation quantity has been used by sales orders) in the past periods.

Conversion StepsOnce the conversion strategy is chosen, the main con-version steps involved in applying them in a production environment are:

1) Perform a backup of the planning area to make sure there is a reference point of the data as it exists prior to conversion. The backups may have to be performed in the associated BW system from where reporting is done. This will also be the data one could restore and “re-convert” if things were to go wrong in the data conversion.

2) Convert data from the planning area into a “Conver-sion Cube”, which will now have data in the new calendar format. This will require suitable update rules and routines so that the data does get converted correctly.

3) Validate that the converted data (in step 2) is correct according to the conversion logic. The weekly values should not change since we followed Option 1 on the Conversion Strategy. This can be done by comparing week n in the “Conversion Cube” to the week n data

Where a configurable

week is chosen, then only

a standard calendar month

is allowed.

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in the planning area. This validation typically should also involve some of the business users so that there are no surprises and there is a “buy in” from the user community. Once step 3 is done, only then can we go ahead with step 4, which would remove the data in the planning area.

4) “De-initialize” the planning area so that there is no data in it. (A planning area in Demand Planning stores data in time series in live-cache of APO.) De-initialization refers to removing the time series data in the planning area.

5) Move the transports from the development sys-tem to change the calendar, as well as transport the planning area that refers to the new calendar. This involves some configuration steps (these are highlighted in the section Configuration Steps that follows).

6) Load the data from the conversion cube (from step 3) back into the planning area.

7) Validate to make sure that the data in the planning area matches (the data in the conversion cube from step 3), and as per the conversion logic.

For Product Allocation scenarios where Allocations are checked; the Back Order Processing should be run to cancel all Order Confirmations on Sales Orders, and all “consumed” quantities should be “zeroed” out in the future time peri-ods. This is especially true for “Monthly Models” where the Product Allocations could have shifted because of our con-version strategy. This gives a clean slate for Back Order Processing to run again and align confirmations accord-ing to the new monthly values.

Usually “mock” conversions involving some key users are done in test systems beforehand, so that all goes well in the production environment.

Configuration StepsThe configuration steps involved in making the calendar change in the Planning Book are:

1) Define a “Fiscal Year Variant”. Use transac-tion code SPRO and follow menu path mySAP® SCM‡Implementation Guide‡Advanced Planning and Optimization‡Supply Chain Planning‡Demand Planning‡Maintain Fiscal Year Variants.

A new fiscal year variant is defined, such as “FM”. For every year, the “fiscal periods” corresponding to the custom month are defined. In the example, the first custom month corresponds to period 1 and ends on the 3rd of calendar month 2 (February). Figure 5 shows the definition of a fiscal year variant.

2) The Fiscal Year Variant is then used in the Storage Bucket Profile.

Use menu path Demand Planning‡Environment‡Current Settings‡Periodicities for Planning Area to define the stor-age bucket profile. The system stores data in the planning area based on the storage bucket profile.

Figure 5: Definition of the Fiscal Year Variant

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Figure 6 shows how a storage bucket profile (like CUSTOM_PERIOD) is defined; this uses the Fiscal Year Variant “FM” from configuration step 1.

3) This Storage Bucket Profile is then used in the definition of the planning area (menu path Demand Planning‡Environment‡Administration of Demand Planning and Supply Network Planning). Select the relevant planning area (in my example named CUSTOM_PERIOD), as shown in Figure 7.

4) Define the Time Bucket Profile using the Fiscal

Year Variant by following the menu path Demand Planning‡Environment‡Current Settings‡ Maintain Time Buckets Profile for Demand Plng and Supply Network Plng, as shown in Figure 8.

This Time Bucket Profile is used in the Planning Book in which data is displayed. It is quite obvi-ous that when the planning calendar changes, the associated Planning Books would also have to be migrated (at the time of “Cutover”) to the new calendar.

ConclusionThe choice of the time buckets in which planning is done is a critical one: you’ll want to take into consideration the application areas like forecast-ing, product allocation planning, etc., and where it will be used. Sometimes, the choice may need to be re-visited at a particular point and a company would have to change the planning calendar. This article covers the steps involved in the change you’ll need to make, along with the configuration steps involved in defining the planning calendar that works for you.

Ranjan Sinha works as a project lead in the infor-mation systems department of a major electronics manufacturer and has 11 years of SAP experience. He previously served as a consultant in various supply chain implementations using APO and i2. His implementation experience has been in areas of APO like Demand Planning, Supply Network Planning, Global Available to Promise; and areas in R/3 like Production Planning, Material Manage-ment, and Logistics Information systems. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

4On APO

Figure 6: Definition of the Storage Bucket Profile

Figure 7: Use of Storage Bucket Profile in the Planning Area Definition

Figure 8: Defining the Time Bucket Profile


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Editor’s Note: Next to anything financial, if there’s one area where you (and your auditors!) would want to know who’s been making changes, that area would be Personnel Administration Data. Surprisingly, as Rehan Zaidi points out, not everyone is aware that there are tools that already exist in SAP’s HR module that will track changes made to the Personnel Development area. Rehan explains this functionality and guides us through the setup of a PD Change Log.

A lot of documented and undocumented information is available about tracking changes made in Personnel Administration data. Not many functional consultants are aware, however, of the tools embedded within the HR module that can be used to track changes made in the data pertinent to the Personnel Development(PD) area (such as Organizational Management, and Train-ing and Event Management). The log of changes made in PD data may be required by companies for audit purposes. Due to the ease with which the tracking of PD data changes can be employed, it is beneficial for HR consultants and users to understand this functionality.

This article outlines the procedure for tracking chang-es made in PD Infotypes. I will start by presenting some background information, then go over the steps required to activate the PD Change Log. I will also discuss, in detail, the standard report that we used in generating the PD Change Log. These are some of the questions that this article will address: • What advantages do the PD change data tools offer

consultants?

• What steps are required to activate the PD Change Log?

• How is the PD Change Log generated?

This paper is primarily intended for SAP HR consul-tants. I will assume that the readers are familiar with basic HR and PD concepts, and also have knowledge of their Infotypes. For more information, refer to the SAP documentation on http://help.sap.com. The functionality described here can be utilized in releases 4.7 to ECC 6.0. All the screen shots have been taken from ECC 6.0.

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The concepts may be applied to Training and Manage-ment sub-modules also. However, I will use the OM (org management) concept as an example throughout the article.

Tracking Changes Made in PD Infotypes: A Brief BackgroundAn audit log that can track changes to Personnel Devel-opment (PD) Infotypes was introduced by SAP in R/3 Release 4.7. Initially, only changes made in Infotypes 1000, 1001, and 1002 could be tracked. However, this functionality was later (ECC 5.0 and ECC 6.0) extend-ed to other Infotypes also.

Changes made to PD Infotypes are not recorded by the default SAP system. Certain settings need to be applied before this is possible. Necessary entries must be created in the table T77CDOC_CUST. Entries in this table are created to indicate which PD Infotype changes should be recorded in the log by the system.

Note: This audit log performs a similar function to the Personnel Administration Infotype log, which has been used for some time. For more information on tracking PA data, refer to my article Tracking Changes in Master Data Without Any Programming in the SAPtips docu-ment library.

The information pertinent to the changed PD data is stored as “change documents” in the database tables CDHDR and CDPOS. These are the change document header and detail tables, respectively. A typical entry for changes made in the data of Infotype 1000 (in table CDHDR) is shown in Figure 1.

Tracking Changes Made in PD infotypes A guide for SAP® HR Consultants and Users

By Rehan Zaidi, Siemens Pakistan

There are many tools in the

HR module that can be used

to track changes made in

the data pertinent to the

Personnel Development area.

http://help.sap.com

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The object class name is of the form HR_ITnnnn, where nnnn denotes the Infotype number (in our case, 1000).

There are numerous advan-tages that the PD change data tools offer for consul-tants:

• The changes made in both Organizational Manage-ment, and Training and Event Management may be tracked.

• Changes made to all objects may be tracked.

• The basic settings for standard Infotypes may be performed via easy configuration settings and require no coding.

• The functionality may also be applied to cus-tomer-Infotypes by doing some additional program-ming.

The PD Infotype change is displayed using the program RHCDOC_DISPLAY. (We will see the subsequent sec-tions later in this article.) This program reads the data residing in the CDPOS and CDHDR tables, and displays in the form of ALV list.

Steps Required in Activating the PD Change Log As previously mentioned, activating PD Infotype track-ing requires some configuration in table T77CDOC_CUST. The IMG path for accessing the maintenance

screen of this table via the Organization Management node is shown in Figure 2.

Alternately, you may use transaction SM31. To do this, go to transaction SM31 and enter the table name in the field provided, as shown in Figure 3.

Click the Maintain button (Figure 3). On the screen that appears, click the New Entries button. The New Entries screen appears, as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 1: Entry in CDHDR for Changes Made in the Data of Infotype 1000

Figure 2: IMG Path for Accessing the Change Document Activation Node

Figure 3: Transaction SM31

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The various fields of the table T77CDOC_CUST are described as:

Plan Version – The value 01 should be entered in this field; this denotes the planning database active version. A change log will not likely be required for versions other than the active version.

Object Type – The objects to be monitored are specified in the Object Type column. The one or two-digit code denoting the relevant object type must be entered in this column. For example, S for position, O (for Orga-nizational unit), and so on. It is also possible to place an asterisk (*) in the Object Type field. This would mean that the change log must be filled if any object is changed for a given Infotype. For example, if you want to track the changes made to all objects in Infotype 1000, the Object Type field must be filled with an aster-isk * (see Figure 4).

Infotype – The Infotypes that are to be tracked are specified using the Infotype column. The four-digit Info-type number is entered in this field. For example, the Basic Definitions Infotype (Infotype 1000), the Rela-tionships between objects Infotype (1001), and so on.

Subtype – This column is used to restrict the updating of the change log on the basis of a subtype. In this case, the change documents are only generated when a record pertaining to the specified subtype is changed. The four-character subtype must be entered in this column. For example, if you want to limit the audit log only to the subtype B002 for the Relationships Infotype 1001, the relevant entry will look like the one shown in Figure 5. For Infotypes for which subtypes are not applicable, the Subtype field must be filled with an asterisk (*). For example, there are no subtypes in Infotype 1000.

Active checkbox – This is a checkbox for switching the Infotype tracking on or off. It is not necessary to delete the entry in order to deactivate the tracking of Info-types. You may simply switch off the Active indicator.

Tip: Infotype logging may be turned on and off by the Active check box, making it easy to deactivate a logging entry without deleting it.

Once you have created the necessary entries on the maintenance screen, save your entries.

Figure 4: New Entries Screen for Table T77CDOC_CUST

Figure 5: Limiting the Audit Log Only to the Subtype B002 for Relationships Infotype 1001

Infotype logging may be turned

on and off by the

Active check box, making it easy

to deactivate a logging

entry without deleting it.

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Generating the PD Change Log SAP has provided the program RHCDOC_DIS-PLAY for viewing the changes made in PD data. The selection screen of this report is shown in Figure 6.

The Object section of the screen lets you limit the selection of data changes according to the Object Type and its ID. Enter the Plan version, the Object Type, and if necessary, the ID of the object in question.

Next, you need to fill the Infotype-relevant infor-mation in the fields of the Infotype block. The input fields of this block change dynamically depending on the data entered on the selection screen. For example, when a language-depen-dent Infotype number (for example, 1000) is entered in the Infotype field, a language key field is automatically added on the selection screen. You may then specify the lan-guage key (for example EN for English) for limit-ing the selection of data of the object in question (Figure 7).

Similarly, if 1001 (Rela-tionships Infotype) is specified, the fields for the Object Type and the ID of the related object, appear on the screen (see Figure 8).

Figure 6: Selection Screen of Program RHCDOC_DISPLAY

Figure 7: Language Key Field Added to Program Selection Screen

Figure 8: Object Type and Related Object ID Fields for Relationships Infotype

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You may then also specify either the type and/or ID of the related object. The program will then display only the changes made in Infotype 1001 for records having the specified related object type and/or ID. In the Planning Status field, you specify the status of the Infotypes/Subtypes for which change documents are to be displayed.

The Change Data section of the screen can be used to select the Infotype change documents by specifying the ID of the User who changed the data, the Start and End dates, and the time during which the data was changed. By default, the current date is proposed by the system as the start and end date. However, you may enter any period that you like.

Finally, within the Output field block, you’ll specify how the selected data is to be displayed. There are two options; Technical view and Summarized view. If you select the Technical view, the change document data is displayed in the manner in which it is stored in the database. If the summarized view is selected, in case several documents are stored for a given set of data, only a single summarized document is shown.

If you would like to see a detailed report of each Info-type field that has been changed, along with the Old and the New values, select the Display Field Contents checkbox (in the Output section of the screen). In case the indicator is not selected, only one line is displayed in the report for each change made.

A typical Output report is shown in Figure 9.

The first column includes an icon column for the object type (OT) (in our case, Organizational unit). It is fol-lowed by the Object ID. This eight-digit number is usually assigned by SAP at the time a user creates the PD object (organizational units, jobs, etc.) by using Organizational Management (OM) transactions such as PPOME, PP01, etc. Next, the Object Name and changed Infotype are shown. Then, the Start and End dates of the changed record are displayed.

The name of the user who changed the given Infotype record is displayed under the Name column, whereas when the change occurred is indicated in the Date and Time columns.

The example shown pertains to when the Display Field Contents checkbox was selected on the selection screen. So the Label, as well as Old value and New value (of each modified field of the Infotype record) are shown on a separate row.

Note: No standard transaction for running the PD audit program RHCDOC_DISPLAY is provided by SAP. The program can be run directly in transaction SE38 or SA30. However, access to transactions SE38 and SA38 is not allowed by many companies. The report can be made available to users via a custom transaction code.

ConclusionFrom SAP Release 4.7, the HR module provides tools that can be used to track changes made in the data pertinent to the Personnel Development area. Some companies may require this feature for audit purposes. HR consultants and users should be aware of the ease with which the tracking of PD data changes may be employed. This article demonstrated the process for tracking changes made in PD Infotypes, as well as the program used for generating the change log. I hope this article will be a valuable piece for your HR team.

Rehan Zaidi, Senior SAP Consultant, Siemens Paki-stan. Rehan has been involved in both ABAP develop-ment and functional configuration for SAP HR imple-mentations at multinational and local companies, and also has experience with SAP Workflow. He has contributed articles to the SAP Professional Journal, the HR Expert newsletter, and to the TechRepublic Website. He is currently working on his first book, specifically designed for SAP HR Users and Managers, as well as a guide for ABAP/Workflow Consultants titled “201 Interview Questions on Workflow”. Rehan is the founder of the Web site www.siteofSAP.com. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

Figure 9: Typical Output of Report RHCDOC_DISPLAY

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Create the InfotypeFollowing are steps to create the Infotype.

1. Go to Transaction PM01 (Create Infotype)

We are creating an Infotype to record applicant travel information, which is part of Recruitment (PB). For a PA/PB Infotype, use transaction PM01 to create the Infotype for which the structure would be called PSnnnn (where nnnn is the Infotype number) with all the fields relevant for the Infotype. If you wish to create a Personal Development Infotype, use transaction PPCI, the structure of which is called HRInnnn (where nnnn is the Infotype number) with all the fields relevant for the Infotype.

2. Enter Infotype number (e.g., 9802)

Note: All customer or user-defined Infotypes should start with a 9nnn number range. Figure 1 shows the field where you designate the number for the Infotype.

Editor’s Note: Lots of employees equals lots of data to manage. Infotypes can help you manage that data your way. Kamran Ellahi demonstrates how to create your own Infotype for an Applicant in SAP HCM ECC 6.0.

IntroductionThe more data you have, the more valuable your SAP investment becomes; more information leads to better management, planning, and decision-making. Now, SAP HCM on ECC 6.0 pretty much covers all the attributes of Human Resource Management. But in case you need to gather more information in HCM, SAP gives us the provision of creating our own Information Structures called Infotypes. In this article, I will walk you through the basics steps of creating your own Infotype for an Applicant, to record additional information about Applicant arrival data. This article is intended to leverage SAP HR consultants and developers knowledge in customizing SAP HR Information Structure to incorporate the company’s requirements as per their business requirement, when they are not fulfilled by SAP Standard HR Informa-tion Structures. The article, including screen shots, is based on SAP ECC 6.0, but can be applied to earlier SAP releases (e.g., SAP 4.6b and 4.6c).

InfotypesAn Infotype is a unit of information in SAP Human Resource Management. Recording employee data for administrative, time record-ing, and payroll purposes is of primary importance for master data administration in HR. In SAP, the informa-tion units used to enter mas-ter data are called Infotypes. Infotypes are used to group related data fields together. They provide information with a structure, facilitate data entry, and enable you to store data for specific periods.

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infotype Creation in HCM: A Detailed guide By Kamran Ellahi, SAP® Consultant

Figure1: Create Infotype

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3. Select the Applicant info-type radio button

4. Click on the Generate Objects button.

5. The system prompts you with a Dictionary object message, as shown in Fig-ure 2. The message high-lights that the structure for the new Infotype does not exist in the system.

6. Click the Create button (shown in Figure 2).

You have now successfully defined the Infotype; let’s go on to maintain the structure of the Infotype.

7. In the Dictionary Maintain Structure screen, enter these criteria as shown in Figure 3:

a. Short Description = “Applicant Arrival Data” b. Add components of structure; see Figure 3. i. Component = Flight_Time ,Type = ZD_FTime ii. Component = Flight_Date ,Type = ZD_FDate iii. Component =Terminal ,Type = ZD_Terminal iv. Component =Flight_Number ,Type = ZD_

FlightNo

c. Click the Check icon, as shown in Figure 3.

d. The system will prompt you to Save Object (see Fig-ure 4); click Yes to save the newly created object.

e. Click the Activate icon shown in Figure 4.

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Figure 2: Create Dictionary Object Message

Figure 3: Infotype Maintain Structure

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Infotype Characteristics1. Go to transaction PM01

2. Click on the Infotype character-istics button; see Figure 5.

3. Click on the New Entries but-ton, as shown in Figure 6.

4. Enter Infotype No. = 9802

5. Enter Short Description = Applicant Arrival Date.

6. For this Infotype, we would copy all the values of the Info-type characteristic from the SAP Standard Infotype 0001.

a. Open PM01 in a new session.

b. Enter Infotype number = 0001.

c. Click Infotype characteristic; copy the values into their respective fields in your Infotype, see Figure 6.

Note: To change the Infotype characteristics, Go to SM30‡Table V_T582A , select the Infotype (e.g., 9802), and click Detail, as shown in Figure 7.

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Figure 4: Check Structure and Save Object

Figure 5: Infotype Characteristics

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Figure 6: Infotype Characteristic, Values Picked from Infotype 0001

Figure 7: SM30 Infotype Characteristic Maintenance Screen

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Technical Maintenance1. Go to transaction PM01

2. Click Technical Attributes, as shown in Figure 8.

3. Select the Infotype 9802 dia-logue module; see Figure 9.

4. Click Details as shown in Figure 9.

5. The screen shows you all the technical details of the Infotype (e.g., the module pool, transpar-ent table, and structure), as shown in Figure 10.

Note: A module pool is the main ABAP program that is used for the maintenance interface of the Infotype; the name of the program would be like MPnnnn00.

Infotype ScreensEach Infotype has at least three screens.

An Initial ScreenThe Initial screen is used as a technical interface with the transactions; it is processed in the background and is not displayed. The screen can be accessed using the module pool and screen num-ber 1000. It performs the general initialization of an Infotype and transfers control to the single screen.

A Single Screen The Single screen is the interface between the Infotype and the user. It allows you to create, display, or maintain Infotype data. It can be accessed using the module pool program and screen number 2000. You can create your own single screen of the standard Infotype available in the system. Customer single screens are assigned in the name range of 2900 to 2999.

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Figure 8: Infotype Technical Attributes

Figure 9: Change Infotype Dialog Module

Figure 10: Technical Details of the Infotype

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A List ViewThe List View screen of the Info-type enables you to display all the records of a maintained Infotype for a specific personnel number. It can be accessed using the module pool program and screen 3000. You can create your own list screen of the standard Infotype avail-able in the system. Customer list screens are assigned in the name range of 3900 to 3999.

The screens of an Infotype can be accessed using:

1. Go to transaction PM01

2. Enter Infotype Number= 9802

3. In the group Subobjects, select option Screen

4. Enter Screen (e.g., 2000)

5. Click Edit (see Figure 11) 6. The system will direct you to the

screen painter

7. Select Layout and click Display, as shown in Figure 12

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Figure 12: Display Infotype Screen Layout (Screen Painter)

Figure 11: Infotype Single Screen (2000) Maintenance

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8. Click Execute button (see Figure 13) or press the F8 key

9. The system will generate the Infotype screen output as shown in Figure 14

ConclusionThis article is a comprehensive guide to developing your custom Infotype in SAP ECC 6.0. Along with the procedure for developing your own custom Infotype, I have highlighted some of the key technical points that both SAP consultants and developers need to know if they are required to create a new Infotype.

Kamran Ellahi is a Technical SAP Consultant who has performed various roles in SAP implementations within Pakistan and the Middle East. These roles included ABAP development, User Role Rationalization, SAP Workflow, and SAP Solution Manager. Most of Kamran’s work includes designing and writing country and customer specific customizations and enhancements for the SAP MM, PM, PS HR, and BASIS modules. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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Figure 13: Change Layout of Infotype Screen

Figure 14: Infotype Screen Layout Test Run Output


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Editor’s Note: So you think your inventory and inher-ent safety stock levels are appearing high in MRP? What you think is high and what the reality is could be two very different things. As Adam Tysman explains, SAP formulas are designed to keep the inventory forecasts as accurate as possible. Yet, many people try to “adjust” what they think are mistakes in the forecast and, well, make things worse. To help everyone understand the mathematics involved behind the scenes in SAP, he’s bringing these formulas to the forefront. Read along as he explains the impacting factors that determine inventory forecast and test your understanding with an exercise he’s included.

IntroductionMany SAP customers rely on their instincts or metrics to tell them that their inventory levels are too high. I’ve often heard clients complain, “Our MRP type is flagged to compute Safety Stock levels as a result of running the

forecast. We monitor and adjust our forecast, we keep an eye on consumption – basically we are on the ball; but for some reason, our inventory levels (especially Safety Stock) are always too high!”

Let’s take a step back here and see where this discon-nect lies. This article explains the mathematics behind the relationship between Safety Stock and your fore-cast, as well as other master data elements. In moving through this discussion, I will explain why Safety Stock levels are often high and how some efforts to remedy the problem actually compound it. Also, I’ll make some suggestions regarding configuration and process changes that will help reduce these inventory levels without impacting service levels.

In the end, you should be able to better understand how erroneous lead times, smoothing factors, service levels, and forecast correction (by amendment of historical consumption and/or forecast values) all interact to

influence your inventory levels. This article is based on a material example from R/3, 4.6C screen; the information applies to any R/3 or ECC system. The material is set with an MRP type config-ured to calculate Safety Stock. The Settings on the Forecast screen for this material are shown in Figure 1.

In Figure 2, we see that demand is constant at 10 units every period. Nothing changes and the forecast is 100% accu-rate. You will notice that the system has deter-mined a suitable Safety Stock level of nothing; this is due to the 100% accuracy of the forecast.

Forecast Accuracy vs. Safety Stock Levels: What you Need to Know

By Adam Tysman – SAP® Value and Effectiveness Specialist

Figure 1: Sample Material Forecast Settings

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After all, if you are 100% correct all the time, nothing can go wrong and no security is required!

This is the first time this forecast has been run for this material, and is based on manually entered consump-tion data.

Apart from the Safety Stock field containing no valuein the display shown in Figure 2 (remember this has been calculated at ZERO due to the perfection of this forecast):

• What are the other values/fields that you see? • How are they calculated? • Why are some of the others also blank?

Let’s start by looking at Basic Value, Error Total, and MAD. Once these intrinsic elements are understood, we will be able to explore how these contribute to overall stock levels via Safety Stock levels.

Basic Value The Basic Value acts as a record of the last forecast, to factor into the next.

That is, it is the reference forecast value that the system will use in various calculations related to fore-casting. It is affected by the Alpha value maintained in the Forecasting

parameters of the Material Master Forecasting tab. For further information on the Alpha factor and what it means to the forecast and safety stock, please refer to the “ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, DELTA” section of this article.

Basic value is calculated using the formula shown in Figure 3.

Previous Basic value from previous period + (Alpha value * actual requirement for current period) + Previ-ous Basic value from previous period)

So in the example shown in Figure 2, the amount of “10” for the Basic Value was calculated as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 2: Forecast Results for First Forecast Run

Previous Basic value from previous period + (Alpha value * actual requirement for current period) + Previous Basic value from previous period)

Figure 3: General Formula for Basic Value Calculation

0 (first run so no previous value) + 10 (average values for forecast period =10) + 0 (first run so no previous value)

=0+10+0

=10

Figure 4: Application of General Formula for Basic Value Calculation – Based on Initial Forecast.

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In our scenario, two days pass in which the actual consumption for this mate-rial is zero (see Figure 5). Based on these new values, the system now forecasts 8 units for each of the forecast periods, comprising a 12-day forecast. The forecast values are shown in Figure 6.

This forecast value of 8 per day is the result of the fore-cast calculation. (Remember the actual consumption in the last two days was noth-ing.) The formula for cal-culation of the Basic Value in this case is described in Figure 7.

Figure 5: Two Days Pass with No Consumption

Figure 6: Forecast After 2 Days Without Consumption

(Alpha*consumption in last historical period before forecast ran) + (1-alpha)* previous basic value).

Figure 7: Formula for Basic Value Calculation Based on Second Forecast

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Where no values are entered by the user for any of the smoothing factors, the system has various default values that it applies when performing calculations (for a material where no Alpha value has been user main-tained). The system uses a default of 0.2.

This is because if the system were to proceed with a value of 0 for Alpha, the new average would be exactly equal to the old one. This would result in no change to the previous Basic Value and pertinent data having been ignored.

So in this case, the actual calculation is as shown in Figure 8. Note what would have happened if the sys-tem had not substituted a default of 0.2 for the Alpha smoothing factor.

Notice that the Basic Value is still the same as the aver-age value, because the Alpha value is still 0 (as far as the calculation is concerned). To derive this, the system goes through the logic shown in Figure 9.

Leaving the Basic Value to exactly equal the forecast value like this (that is, having no Alpha value set to influence the Basic Value) means that all historical con-sumption periods in the time series considered (60 days in this example) are treated equally. That is, no weight-ing is given to more recent periods over older ones.

The most common values for Alpha lie between 0.1 and 0.5. An alpha value of 0.5 weights past consump-tion values, as shown in Figure 10. This represents each historical value being set to have half of the importance on the calculation of the previous value.

Thus the higher the Alpha value, the more sensitive to recent changes in consumption the forecast becomes.

Error TotalAnother figure that has changed since we ran the second forecast for this material is the Error total. This is simply the sum of all forecast errors in a historical time series –(minus) Previous Basic Value, as demonstrated using our example in Figure 11.

What this represents in this case is the sum of the error the forecast made for the previous period. It forecast 10, but actually nothing was consumed, giving an error of –10 (negative10).

(0.2*0) + (1-0.2)*10

= 0+0.8*10

=8

Figure 8: Application of Basic Value Calculation (Against Values in Figure 6, Using Formula in Figure 7)

10 (previous value) + 8 (average values for forecast period =8 and no Alpha value is maintained on the forecasting screen) - 10(previous value)

= 10+8-10

=8

Figure 9: Why the Basic Value Equals the Average Value (as Applied to Values from Figure 6).

1st historical value: 50%

2nd historical value: 25%

3rd historical value: 12.5%

4th historical value: 6.25%

Figure 10: Alpha Value of 0.5 and Its Effect on Weighting of Historical Consumption

The higher the Alpha value, the

more sensitive to

recent changes in consumption

the forecast becomes.

0-10 =-10

Figure 11: Error Total Calculation (Based on the Values in Figure 6)

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The Error Total is an important element of the final Safety Stock calculation. It is used in the calculation of the temporary Mean Average Deviation. This, in itself, is a factor in the calculation of the actual Mean Average Deviation. This, in turn, is the central element of the Safety Stock Calculation itself.

MADMAD stands for Mean Absolute Deviation. It is used as a measurement of error in the forecast. The MAD value provides a statement on the quality of the forecast.

MAD is calculated as shown in Figure 12.

As mentioned earlier, where no values are entered by the user for any of the smoothing factors, the system has various default values that it applies.

So, although we have Delta set at 0, the system uses a default of 0.3 (as none has been set by the user in the Material Master).

Temp MAD is the difference between the actual con-sumption in the last period and the forecast value.

In our example, there is no actual consumption in the previous period, but the forecast predicted a consump-tion of 10. Figure 2 showed the forecast value in our example, and Figure 5 showed the actual consumption.

Clearly, this gives a difference of 10.

So the MAD calculation in this example would be “3”, as demonstrated in Figure 13.

Safety StockFinally we come to the Safety Stock itself. Perhaps the most important of all the calculations, we must under-stand how lead times, service levels, and MAD interact to affect stock levels.

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An important factor in Safety Stock calculation that we haven’t mentioned yet is the influence of the Service Level.

The Service level is a value maintained in the MRP view of the Material master. It represents how sure you want to be that any demand for this material can be met whenever it occurs. It accomplishes this by acting as the determinant of how much of any demand (what percentage) is to be covered by your existing warehouse at the time the demand is recognized. The higher you set this value, the higher the system will calculate your Safety Stock requirements to ensure that there is always stock on hand to meet demand.

For example, setting your service level to 90% means that for 9 out of every 10 occasions where this mate-rial is demanded (as a BOM component or in any other way) the system should ensure that there is enough stock in the warehouse.

The Mechanism employed to convert this Service Level value into a factor in the Safety Stock calculation is the translation of the Service Level into a number/factor known as “K”

The K values themselves are based on the number of standard deviations from the Mean your service level

values are set at. The trans-lation table used is shown in Figure 14.

Delta*Temp MAD +(1- Delta * previous MAD)

Figure 12: General Formula for MAD Calculation

(0.3*10) + (1-0.3*0)

= 3 + 0

=3

Figure 13: Application of General Formula for MAD Calculation to Values Seen in Figure 6

The higher you set this value,

the higher the system will

calculate your Safety Stock

requirements to ensure that

there is always stock on hand

to meet demand.

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The formula to calculate Safety Stock for a mate-rial managed in months is shown in Figure 15.

To calculate this, the system uses the values (5 working days per week, 21.4 work-days per month on average) in the formula in Figure 16.

Note: When converting the lead-time into work-days, you must round up before dividing by 21.4 and performing the square root calculation. So, for example, if a material’s lead-time is 10 days, you would apply the formula in Figure 17.

In this example though, we are using a material man-aged in days, so there is no need for the “number of workdays” part of the equation. Therefore the formula we will use is shown in Figure 18.

Square root of lead time*MAD*K

In this equation, we see that if a material had a lead-time maintained in the Material Master that was longer than the actual time it takes to procure and receive the goods, the system would respond with an artificially high safety stock.

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Service Level K

55 0.16 60 0.31 65 0.49 70 0.65 75 0.84 80 1.05 85 1.3 90 1.6 91 1.68 92 1.76 93 1.8594 1.9595 2.0696 2.2397 2.3798 2.5699 2.9199.5 3.299.9 4 Figure 14: System Interpretation of Safety Stock Values Entered into Material

Master

Square Root of (Lead time*number of workdays)* MAD* K

Figure 15: General Formula for Safety Stock Calculation (Monthly Managed Material)

Square Root of (Lead time*5/7) / 21.4)* MAD* K

Figure 16: General Formula for Safety Stock Calculation with System Values

(10 * 5/7) = 7.14 Round up to 8 and then divide by 21.4 and take the square root = .6114

Figure 17: Lead Time to Workdays Calculation

=(Square root of 5)*3*4

=2.23*3*4

=26.76

= Safety Stock of 27

Figure 18: General Formula for Safety Stock Calculation (Daily Managed Material)

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In this equation, we also see that the service level maintained for a material has a powerful multiplier effect on Safety Stock levels, and should be carefully considered.

Most importantly, we see that maintenance of the forecast output by manipulation of past con-sumption (or of forecast values, or non-checking of the forecast values over long periods of time) could cause the MAD to increase by a large factor, again resulting in excess Safety Stock.

Remember, the MAD is a multiplier in Safety Stock calculation. A perfect forecast has a MAD value of 0. This was shown in Figures 1 and 2.

OK—now that we’ve explained the basics, let’s put this to practice. Try the exercise in Figure 19 and see how you fare.

EXERCISEAnswers to this exercise can be found at the end of this article.

EXAMPLE: The material SAPTIPS in plant TIPS has a 23-day lead time and a service level of 99.3.

The various relevant parameters are:• Previous Basic Value; 95• Previous MAD: 15• Previous Safety Stock: 16• Previous Error total: -50• Current and previous Alpha = 0.1• Current and previous Delta =0.04

Consumption was 50 in the period prior to now and was 100 per period for the preceding 10 periods. The forecast takes 11 periods into consideration.

ALPHA, BETA, GAMMA, DELTAThis section emphasizes the effects the Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta smoothing factors can have on the forecast output. Special reference should be made in order to understand how these factors can be used in place of correcting historical consumption values to influence the forecast outcome.

A higher Alpha puts more weight on recent values and thus makes the forecast more reactive to recent changes in history. Why this is is explained within the section of this article concerning the Basic Value calculation.

At many client sites, I notice that some materials are set to have the Basic Value virtually unaffected by past

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Figure 19: Test What You’ve Learned (Answers are at the end of the article)

If consumption for the period 02/2008 were only 50 EA

1. Using the above equations and historical values, can you compute this month’s values for these factors?

2. If you were to alter the previous consumption or forecast values for a material, what would happen to the stock levels after the forecast was next run and why?

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consumption, while others have the average con-sumption for the last forecast very heavily multi-plied, so that the average of the new forecast will more or less equal that of the last – an Alpha factor of 1 would mean that the new average would be actually equal to the value of the consumption of the first historical value under consideration. This is frequently unintentional.

This article has so far assumed a Constant Model for simplicity of explanation. However, it is impor-tant to note that the Basic Value is also the basis of the multiplication in Seasonal model calculations, and the value to which trend values are added if forecasting with a trend model.

Thus, we see that an incorrect Alpha factor can skew both these (Constant and Seasonal) forecast models by starting an artificially (and therefore incorrect) low or high Basic Value as the basis for the rest of the calculation. This will result in a high MAD value, which leads to high Safety Stocks via the mechanisms detailed earlier in this article.

Incorrect seasonal and trend values can be further compounded (or indeed corrected) on the basis of the values maintained for the Beta (trend smoothing) and Gamma (seasonal smoothing) factors on the fore-casting screen of the Material Master record concerned.

As seen in Figure 12: “General Formula for MAD Cal-culation”, the Delta factor is the smoothing factor for the mean absolute deviation (MAD). Adjustment of this factor is a means of controlling the MAD value and thus controlling Safety Stock levels. Lead-Time CorrectionNow that we have seen the potent impact lead times can have on Safety Stock levels, we see how important it is ensure they represent the correct value; that is, the actual average lead-time (taking all your regular ven-dors into account) for this material in this plant.

If communicating with all of your vendors is a task too complex to attempt, you may want to apply the method of determining the correct values, using transaction MC$G.

Run the Purchasing Information Systems Material Analysis report for a given material. Choose the icon

Select the Key Figure Mean Delivery time as per Figure 20.

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You will now see the mean delivery time. The total delivery time is the total time between purchase order and goods receipt, in days, on each line, divided by the number of deliveries against the PO line item.

Click and select Plant, by checking the radio button next to the word “Plant” as shown in Figure 21. You will now see the mean delivery time for your material in each plant.

These values should be used to check and correct the Material Master record view for each plant.

Tracking LimitDuring the forecast calculation, the system calculates a tracking signal.

This is calculated as shown in Figure 22.

Figure 20: LIS Key Figure Selection

Figure 21: Switch LIS Drilldown Level

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The tracking limit is a value set in the material master record. The system automatically sets the tracking limit (the default value is 4.00). When the tracking signal is greater than the tracking limit, a message is issued stating that the forecast model should be checked.

After a model change or a forecast model initialization, the error total is automatically reset to zero, and the MAD value to its initial value.

It is not possible to view the tracking signal itself, only to see whether your tracking limit has been exceeded. It is, of course, simple to calculate if you have the error total and MAD values available.

ConclusionYour SAP system was always using the factors and equations described in this article and those calculated in previous forecast periods to let you know when the forecast was getting off course and producing results unlikely to reflect your actual total consumption.

To help you mange and meet your stated Service Levels, those same factors and calculations were determining your Safety Stock levels. The more distant from actual consumption the forecast values were (as measured by your SAP system), the more Safety Stock was required.

After Forecast runs, the system displays vari-ous values concerning that run. Without a true comprehension of the meaning and purpose in subsequent calculations of those values, it is impossible to interpret the communication the system is attempting to engage in. This means important messages around inventory levels and forecast accuracy are being lost, simply as a direct result of not understanding the mecha-nisms and calculations giving rise to the values on the screen.

The most obvious corrective actions (such as altering the forecast values themselves or adjust-ing historical consumption) actually make the situation worse the next time the forecast is run. The forecast believes itself to be even more off target than previously and compensates with ever-higher Safety Stock values.

Now that that relationship is clearly understood, especially in conjunction with the power of the

Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Delta smoothing factors, you have the means to bring inventory levels down, without endangering customer service targets.

Answers for Exercise:

Error total/MAD

Figure 22: General Formula for Tracking Signal Calculation

23-day lead-time and a service level of 99.3.• Basic Value; 95• MAD: 15• Safety Stock: 16• Error total: -50• Alpha = 0.1• Delta =0.04Using the values and formula in the article/exercise:For Basic value (Alpha*consumption in last historical period before forecast ran) + (1-alpha)* previous basic value).(0.1*0) + (1-.1)*95 0 + (.9*95) =86.5For Error Total:Sum of all forecast errors in a historical time series- Previous Basic Value((10*100+2*50)-87*10) -95(1100-870)-95For MADDelta*Temp MAD +(1- Delta * previous MAD)(0.04*37)+(1-0.04*15)(1.48) + (0.96*15)2.43*15 = 36.45For Safety Stock;Square Root of (Lead time*5/7) / 21.4)* MAD* K(23 * 5/7) = 16.42 Round down to 16 and then divide by 21.4 and take the square root = 0.8646=0.8646*15*3= Safety Stock of 38

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Adam Tysman is a former long-term SAP America Senior MM Consultant. He has many years of experi-ence improving, implementing, and supporting SAP sys-tems across multiple countries in a variety of industries. This has included working for SAP in Germany and in the UK. Adam and his colleagues specialize in helping clients reap the benefits of untapped functionality lying latent within their existing SAP investments. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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of materials offered by the vendor), a material condition group, material group, material type, incoterms, and invoicing party.

Vendor Subrange is maintained in the Info Record in Figure 1. Time-Independent ConditionsOpposite of time-dependent conditions, no validity period or scales exist for time-independent conditions. Purchase Order conditions are time-independent. Time-dependent conditions will generate subtotals – net price and effective price.

Note: If you wish to share conditions across Purchasing Organizations, create a Reference Purchasing Organiza-tion and maintain them at that level.

Using Condition Types in SAP®: Knowing What Condition your Condition is in

By Jocelyn Hayes, SAPtips Director of Consulting and Training

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Editor’s Note: Want to love SAP Purchasing uncondi-tionally? Jocelyn Hayes demonstrates how to create a new condition type, add it to a calculation schema, and test. Once you’ve mastered this not-so-easy technique in purchasing—you can apply this to SD Pricing as well! This is yet another taste from Jocelyn’s upcoming Mate-rial Masters workshop—found only at SAPtips Univer-sity in Dallas!

Condition Types: IntroductionConditions refer to Pricing “rules” in SAP Purchas-ing. You can maintain conditions related to discounts, surcharges, taxes, freight, and just about anything you want to add to the pricing procedure for Purchas-ing. Conditions can be used in Purchase Orders, Info Records, Quotations, and Outline Agreements. In addi-tion to these conditions, you can also maintain Vendor conditions on the Vendor Master record that apply to all Purchasing documents created for that Vendor.

In this article, I will discuss two types of conditions that exist in SAP: time-depen-dent and time-independent conditions. This tip was developed using ECC 6.0, but is relevant to earlier releases as well.

Time-Dependent ConditionsInfo Records, Contracts, Quotations, and Schedul-ing Agreements all contain time-dependent conditions, unless otherwise specified in Customizing. Time-depen-dent conditions allow you to assign validity periods and scales to the pricing. They can also be entered generi-cally against a vendor, a vendor sub-range (a grouping Figure 1: Vendor Subrange Field

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This article will provide step-by-step instructions on how to create and add a new condition type to an exist-ing calculation schema that is used for standard Pur-chase Orders. The new condition type will be to have a vendor discount included automatically at the header of a Purchase Order.

Step 1: Determine Condition Table to Use in Access SequenceIn the first step of creating a new condition type, you must determine what fields you want to use in storing your condition records. In this example, we will provide the option to store the Vendor Discount condition record at the Vendor level only or at the Vendor and Purchas-ing Organization level. This means that we will need two Condition Tables.

The following provides steps to finding the correspond-ing Condition Table that we will assign to our access sequence in the next step:

1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path: Materials Management ‡ Purchasing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Process ‡ Maintain Condition Table

2. Click on “Display condition table” (Figure 2) and click on

SAP utilizes a pricing procedure called “Condition Technique” to arrive at a net cost for your purchases. The same concept is utilized in SAP Sales Pricing. It has four main components that must be understood:

• Condition Type – represents various factors that lead to the net price and can include discounts, surcharges, freight, base price, and taxes.

• Condition Table – includes the fields that will be used in your access sequence.

• Access Sequence – when you create a condition record, you select an access sequence. The access sequence determines the level at which you would like to maintain your condition. For example, if you are maintaining a condition record for a Vendor Discount, you may wish to maintain it at the Vendor level, or the combination of Vendor and Purchasing Organization. To differen-tiate between the levels at which you maintain this data, you assign multiple Condition Tables to your access sequence, and you define the order in which the system accesses the records. The example pro-vided in this section will explain this further.

• Calculation Schema (this is the term in Pur-chasing, it is the same as Pricing Procedure in SD)– the calculation schema includes all the condition types you will use to determine your net price.

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Figure 2: Display Condition Table

SAP utilizes a pricing procedure

called “Condition

Technique” to arrive at a net cost

for your purchases.

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3. From the drop-down menu shown in Figure 3, find a condi-tion table that describes what you are looking for – you may have to go through a few until you find a match. If you do not find an exact match, you can create your own condition table. I found one called “Vendor”, which seems like a good choice here.

Double-click on the desired table to select it. Click .

4. View the selected Condition Table and verify the fields (you wish to maintain in your condi-tion record) are in the Selected Fields column. It is also possible to copy Condition Tables from existing ones and to simply add fields from the Field Catalog on the right side. (See Figure 4.)

Take note of the Condition Table you have selected – here we selected table 44.

Figure 4: Condition Table Fields

Figure 3: Select a Condition Table

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5. Next, we will copy Condi-tion Table 44 into a new custom Condition Table that will only include the field “Vendor”. To do that, navigate back to the Choose Activity screen shown in Figure 5, and double-click on “Create condition table”.

6. Create a new Condition

Table –In this example, I selected 502. Note: You must number it within the customer name space (which is 501 – 999) and copy from Condition Table 44, as shown in Figure 6.

7. Click on “Purchasing Organization” and click

to delete it from the Selected Fields (see Figure 7).

8. Click the Generate icon. You will be prompt-ed for an application package, since this is a cross-client table. You can either add it to an appli-cation package and then to a transport request, or as a local object.

Step 2: Define Access Sequence In this step, we will define our access sequence. The access sequence defines how SAP searches for conditions. You may have a condition record that you maintain at various hierarchical levels.

Figure 5: Select “Create condition table”

Figure 6: Create Condition Table

Figure 6: Create Condition Table

Figure 7: Delete “Purch. Organization” from Selected Fields

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In our example, we will have the option to maintain the condition record at the Vendor level or the Vendor and Purchasing Organization level. The access sequence will basically tell SAP to see if there is a condition record at the Vendor/POrg level first, since that is more specific, and if one does not exist at that level, it will look at the Vendor level. This allows you to maintain a condition record at the Vendor level for the whole company. If a specific Purchasing Organization has a different agree-

ment with the Vendor, they can also maintain it at the POrg level, which will take precedence in determining the discount on the Purchasing Document.

1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path: Materials Management ‡ Purchasing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Process ‡ Define Access Sequence

2. Of course, an access sequence may already exist that works for our scenario, so we will look for one first. Access Sequence 0006 uses table 44 (which we deter-mined was a good fit for our scenario in the previous step), so we will copy that one and add Table 502 to it.

Select Access Sequence 0006 and click copy as shown in Figure 8. 3. Change the Access Sequence number and Description

(see Figure 9).

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Figure 8: Select and Copy the Access Sequence

Figure 9: Change Access Sequence Number and Description

In our example, we will have the

option to maintain the

condition record at the Vendor

level, or the Vendor and

Purchasing Organization level.

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4. Click Enter and select “copy all” (Figure 10).

5. Select the Access Sequence and double-click on , as shown in Figure 11.

6. Select the unwanted Access Numbers (AcNo) and click Delete as shown in Figure 12.

7. You will receive the following pop-up message shown in Figure 13, click .

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Figure10: Select Copy All

Figure 11: Change View to See the Access Sequences

Figure 12: Select and Delete the Unwanted Numbers

Figure 13: Accept Deleted Entries

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8. You will receive a couple error messages because the two tables you have selected to delete from the Access Sequence use some of the same fields that are used in Table 44 – simply click the twice to exit the errors.

The error message says “An entry already exists with the same key”.

9. The result looks like the screen in Figure 14. 10. Click Save and go back into the transaction. Navi-

gate back to the Access Sequence you created.

11. Save your Access Sequence.

Step 3: Create Condition TypeIn this step, you will create a new condition type for a Vendor Discount. For our example, we will copy the existing condition type.

1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path: Materials Management ‡ Purchasing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Process ‡ Define Condition Type

2. Click the button.

3. Enter RL01 and click , as shown in Figure 15. 4. Select Condition Type RL01 and click the copy icon

to copy (Figure 16).

5. Change the name of the condition type and the access sequence (Figure 17).

6. Click the Save icon to Save the Condition Type.

Figure 14: Result of Copied Access Sequence

Figure 15: Position Cursor on Condition Type RL01

Figure 16: Copy Condition Type

The error message says “An entry

already exists with

the same key”.

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Step 4: Assign Condition Type to Calculation SchemaIn this step, we will assign the Con-dition Type to a Calculation Sche-ma (which is used for our Purchase Orders). The Calculation Schema determines the order in which con-ditions are applied: whether they are updated for statistical reporting purposes, and whether or not they are required.

1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path: Materials Management ‡ Purchasing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Process ‡ Define Calculation Schema

2. The standard Calculation Schema delivered with SAP is RM0000 – we will copy it to a new Calcula-tion Schema, which we will assign to our Purchasing Organization in a later step. Select RM1000 and click the Copy icon to copy (Figure 18).

Figure 17: Change Condition Type

Figure 18: Copy Procedure RM1000

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3. Change the Procedure name (Figure 19).

4. Click to copy all the entries to ZM1000.

5. Continue to click Enter until you reach the Change View “Sche-mas”: Overview screen (Figure 20).

6. Double-click on the icon.

7. Review the information shown in Figure 21.

This represents the steps taken to determine the Net Price of the Order and the order in which SAP will apply the conditions. It depends on your corporate rules as to how you wish to apply Vendor Discounts (whether they are applied before or after other conditions like Contract discounts). In our example, we will add it into Step 10 and leave the counter blank since that should only be used for manual condition entries.

8. Click and enter as shown in Figure 22.

9. Click the Save icon .

Step 5: Define Schema GroupIn this step, we will define a Schema Group and assign it to our Purchasing Organization. A schema group allows you to group together your Purchasing Organiza-tions and/or Vendors that have the same Calculation Schema. Then, in the next step, you will assign a Calcu-lation Schema to a combination of POrg and/or Vendor. You can also have a default Calculation Schema by not assigning it to any Schema Groups.

Figure19: Change Procedure Name

Figure 20: Displays Copied Procedure

Figure 21: Procedure Control Data

Figure 22: Add Condition Type to Procedure

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1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path: Materials Management ‡ Purchasing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Pro-cess ‡ Define Schema Group

2. Double-click on Schema Groups for Purchasing Organizations (Figure 23).

3. Click the but-ton.

4. Enter as shown in Figure 24.


6. Click the Back icon twice, until you arrive at the screen in Figure 25.

7. Double-click on Assign-

ment of Schema Group to Purchasing Organization.

8. Find your Purchasing Organization, and enter as shown in Figure 26.


Step 6: Assign Cal-culation Schema to Standard Purchase OrdersIn this step, we will assign the Calculation Schema to our Purchasing Org Schema Group that we created in the Step 5.

1. Navigate to the IMG, and follow the path:Materials Management ‡ Purchas-ing ‡ Conditions ‡ Define Price Determination Process ‡ Define Schema Determination

Figure 23: Choose Activity – Schema Groups for Purchasing Organization

Figure 24: Create New Schema Group

Figure 25: Choose Activity Assignment of Schema Group to Purchasing Organization

Figure 26: Assign Schema Group to Purchasing Organization

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2. Double-click on Deter-mine Calculation Schema for Standard Purchase Orders (Figure 27).

3. Click the but-

ton and enter the infor-mation shown in Figure 28.

4. You can also make this your default Calculation Schema, as shown in Figure 29.

5. Click the Save icon to

save the assignment. You have now configured the following:

• Condition Table

• Access Sequence utilizing the Condition Table

• Condition Type utilizing the Access Sequence

• Calculation Schema incor-porating the Condition Type

• Assigned the Calculation Schema to your Purchasing Organization

The final step to put the new Condition Type to use is to create a new Condition Record and then enter a Purchase Order for the Ven-dor for which the Condition Type was created.

Step 7: Create Condition Record1. Follow the menu path:

Materials Management ‡ Purchasing‡‡ Master Data ‡ Conditions ‡ Other ‡ Create OR use Transaction: MEK1

2. Enter your new Condition Type (Figure 30) and click .

3. Key combination is a term used to describe the fields or keys in an Access Sequence. We used two key combinations when we created our Access Sequence – Vendor and POrg/Vendor. For this example (see Figure 31), select POrg/Vendor and click .

Figure 27: Choose Activity: Determine Calculation Schema for Standard Purchase Orders

Figure 28: Assign Schema Group to Procedure

Figure 29: Make Procedure Default for All Purchasing Organizations

Figure 30: Create Condition Record

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4. Enter the Purchasing Organization, Vendor, and discount percent as shown in Figure 32. You can also modify the validity period on this Condition Record.

5. Click the Save icon to save to Condition Record.

Step 8: Create Purchase Order to Test Configuration and Condition RecordTo test your new condition record, enter a Purchase Order for your vendor within your Purchasing Organi-

zation. The results are shown in the Header Conditions in Figure 33.

And shown here in the item conditions (see Figure 34).

And you can see in the item conditions that you can override the discount.

Figure 34: Item Conditions Tab on Purchase Order

Figure 33: Header Conditions Tab on Purchase Order

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Figure 31: Select Key Combination

Figure 32: Create Condition Record

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Conclusion:In this article, we created a new condition type, added it to a calculation schema, and tested that it worked as planned. The condition type technique is quite unique to the World of SAP, and can be quite confus-ing. But once you unlock the “dead bolt” (the dead bolt being the terminology and sequence of events), you can be quite dangerous… not only in configuring Purchas-ing conditions, but configuring SD Pricing and output, which all utilize this technique.

Jocelyn Hayes, Director of Consulting and Training for SAPtips, has over 11 years of SAP experience. She has enjoyed a successful consulting career for a Big 4 firm as well as independently. Jocelyn’s focus primarily has involved the Logistics modules of SAP, and has also developed ESA Roadmaps using NetWeaver™ tools, including Visual Composer, XI, Enterprise Portal, and BI. She also led a CRM Business Process Reengineering project. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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Editor’s Note: Before you ding (someone’s credit), you must dun. Dunning is the practice of reminding custom-ers (and vendors) of past due payments. In SAP, it’s a capability that often is not fully understood. Anurag Barua illustrates how to utilize this functionality to get the message out to those in the late column, including an overview of the terms and configuration.

IntroductionA friend of mine recently mentioned to me that Dun-ning is the name of a small village in Scotland. My guess is that it is a nondescript little hamlet with a handful of people – a mere speck on a very detailed map of Scotland. Never had I heard about it until my trivia-obsessed friend came up with this nugget. Like me, very few folks outside of Scotland are likely to have ever heard of this village. Coincidentally, folks outside the Accounts Receivable arena (including credit management and collections processes) seem equally unaware of the like-named process. However, the simi-larities between the village and the AR process end right there. There is nothing non-descript about dunning, and especially in the world of SAP, it is an important component of several modules such as Accounts Receiv-able in FI, Sales and Distribution, and a sprinkling of sub-modules. In this article, after a general overview of the concepts and configuration activities, I will provide insights on some aspects of dunning that are not well understood, and are often confusing. I will also delve into the important dunning tables that you can peek into for browsing dunning data.

What Is Dunning?In simple terms, it is the process of sending remind-ers to delinquent customers to pay you (the supplier/retailer/service provider) the amount that you are owed. As the days go by and you continue to not receive payment from a customer, these dunning notices morph

from reminders to demands to mild threats. I would like to clarify what I mean by “mild threats”. Different countries have different laws that govern the severity of collection efforts. Some countries, and their state jurisdictions (including almost all states in the US), pro-hibit the use of harassment tactics to recover overdue amounts.

Dunning in SAP: An OverviewStandard SAP has supported dunning from the earli-est R/3 releases through the latest, ECC 6.0. In fact, you can also dun vendors. This situation arises when a vendor has an open accounts payable item on its books in the form of a credit memo. For the remainder of the article, I will refer to vendors and customers as “busi-ness partners” (BPs), since this is the term that SAP uses for any entity with which you do business.

SAP provides you with an automated way of dunning business partners. In order to use this automated pro-cedure, you have to customize the system. Let’s outline the steps that you’ll need to perform to ensure that dun-ning is executed correctly:

1. Completion of configuration activities in the IMG. Navigate to Dunning configuration activities (after running transaction SPRO) in the IMG, as shown in Figure 1.

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Dunning: Not Just a Village in Scotland By Anurag Barua, SAP Consultant

Figure 1: Dunning Configuration Activities in the IMG

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4On Financials

The navigation path is shown with the yellow colored bars and the con-figuration activities are those within the area bounded by the red box. The activities are:

a. Define dunning areas, keys, and blocking reasons in “Basic Set-tings for Dunning” (see Figure 2).

b. Define dunning proce-dures, groupings, and interest rates in “Dun-ning Procedure” (see Figure 3).

c. Create settings for print-ing dunning notices, including defining and assigning dunning forms, specifying details of sender, and making settings for attached payment media (see Figure 4).

2. Assignment of dunning

procedure and dunning areas (if required) to your business partner. This occurs in the Vendor or Customer Master maintenance. Remember, if you do not carry out this activity, the dunning program will exclude the business partner (that does not have a dunning procedure assigned) from being dunned, despite it having past due items.

3. Running of the Dunning Program. You can do this by either running transaction F150, or by carry-ing out the following navigation from the SAP main menu: Financial Accounting ‡ Accounts Receivable ‡ Periodic Processing‡Dunning. The initial screen of this program is shown in Figure 5.

The dunning program is a very comprehensive program that serves all your dunning processing needs. Based on the selection criteria that you enter, it will create a proposal for you to review and amend, if necessary. When you schedule an actual dunning job, the program prints the dunning notices per the configuration activi-ties that you have already carried out. As you may infer, this program has a lot of similarities with the automatic payment program, both in terms of the look and feel of the selection screens, and the operational details (such as the use of logs for proposals and results, the func-tionality, and the printing aspects).

Figure 2: Basic Settings: Define Dunning Areas

Figure 3: Defining Dunning Procedures

Figure 4: Create Settings for Printing Dunning Notices

The dunning program is a very

comprehensive program

that serves all your dunning

processing needs.

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Dunning Issues, Tips, and Solutions1. Dunning functionality is shared by

FI-AR and SD. There is a com-mon misconception that dunning configuration needs to be done separately for each of these mod-ules. This is not correct. Dunning configuration is common to both these areas and a customer in FI-AR is a customer in SD; and more importantly, the same one.

2. I have come across confusion in the understanding of the implications of the “grace period” and “Min. days in arrears”. A manifestation of this confusion is when the dunning proposal (log) does not pick up certain open items, possibly because either of these numbers (or perhaps both) push out the adjusted due date. These two variables are important elements of a dunning procedure. The grace period is the number of days an open item is allowed (for a BP that has been assigned this dunning procedure) before the BP is dunned. “Min. days in arrears” is the number of days that needs to elapse for at least one item of the BP account before the BP will be dunned. Let’s look at the matrix in Figure 6.

Let’s say BP (or customer) “Reluctant Payer” has two open items. The dunning procedure assigned to Reluctant Payer’s master record stipulates that it gets 2 grace days, and the minimum days in arrears is 4. Open Item #1 is due on 2/10 and #2 is due on 2/11.

Now, if the dunning program is run on 2/12 or 2/13, Reluctant Payer will not be dunned even though Item #1 is otherwise due on 2/12 (2/10 + 2 grace days). Similarly on 2/13, both Item #1 and #2 are due, but Reluctant Payer will not be dunned because the 4-day limit for “min. days in arrears” has not expired.

However, if the dunning program is run for 2/14 and later, Reluctant Payer will be dunned because on

Figure 5: Initial Screen of Dunning Program

Figure 6: Dunning Matrix

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2/14, at least one item (#1) is past due and starting 2/15, both the items are past due. So, the “min. days in arrears” setting has the effect of overriding the grace days. In the absence of the latter, in this example, if the dunning program were run for 2/12, Reluctant Payer would be dunned for Item #1.

If the dunning program were run for 2/11 in a scenario where there is no “min days in arrears” (i.e., it is 0) Reluctant Payer would not be dunned, because both Item #1 and 2 are within their grace periods.

3. If various organizational units within your enterprise (i.e., company code) dun separately, you may need multiple dunning areas. For example, different sales organizations in your enterprise may use their own dunning procedures and policies. In this case, you will need multiple dunning areas. However, if you have just one organizational unit within your company code that duns, one dun-ning area will suffice.

4. There are times when dunning configuration is cor-rectly completed, – well almost, – and when the dun-ning program is run, the dunning notices that you expect to print are not printed. In such circumstanc-es, make sure you have carried out the configuration step “Assign Dunning Forms” under the “Printout” node shown in Figure 4. If you do not do this, noth-ing will get printed.

5. A lot of companies like to e-mail and/or fax dunning notices to their business partners. In this day and age of electronic communications, this is a reason-able requirement. Unfortunately, even though SAP does have this ability, it is not available to you out

of the box. You will need to carry out some technical configuration that involves using an SAP technique called Business Transaction Event (BTE). Check out the following SAP Notes to get a broad understand-ing of this area: 328124, 156985, 376099, 554408, and 521585.

6. It is not unusual for some customers to want to dun BPs before amounts are past due. The motivations for such a requirement range from notifying BPs in advance of a payment that is coming due (and there-by reducing some of the pain that may result in a protracted dunning exercise), to wanting to eke more functionality out of SAP. Yes, that is right – there is no standard way of dunning BPs before receivables are due, you will have to “squeeze” this functionality out of SAP. The changes that you will need to make are explained in SAP Note 333506.

Important Technical Components of DunningHere is a list of some of the important dunning tables. As is customary in SAP, for a quick and unformatted listing of data, you can always run transaction SE16, provided you have the authorization to do so, and browse the data per your desired selection criteria:

• MAHNS – Accounts blocked by dunning selection

• MAHNV – Details of dunning program run param-eters

• MHND – Main transaction data table for all dunning data

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Figure 7: Decision Matrix

It is not unusual for some

customers to want to dun

BPs before amounts are past due.

Date Dunning Is Reluctant ReasonProgram Run Payer Dunned?

2/11 No Both items within 2-day grace period.

2/12 No Item #1 is due today (2/10 plus 2 grace days), within 4-day limit for “min. days in arrears”. Item #2 within grace period.

2/13 No Items #2 is due today (2/11 plus 2 grace days), Item #1 still within 4-day limit for “min. days in arrears”.

2/14 Yes Dunned for Item #1—expiration on 4-day limit for “min. days in arrears”.

2/15 Yes Dunned for both items—expiration on 4-day limit for “min. days in arrears”.

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• MHNK – Dunning data table from an account entry standpoint

Additionally, there are several configuration tables that you access indirectly when you go through your configu-ration activities. Almost all of them begin with “T047”. Figure 8 shows the dunning configuration table names. ConclusionDunning is an important component of your order-to-cash business process. A solid understanding of dunning and the ability to configure your SAP system efficiently to meet your dunning needs, plays an important role in managing open receivables and reducing the poten-tial of write-offs. In this article, we looked at various aspects of dunning from an SAP perspective. Hope-fully, you will be able to leverage the information in this article in your organization.

Anurag Barua is an independent consultant. He has 16 years of experience in conceiving, designing, managing, and implementing complex software solutions, includ-ing nearly 10 years of SAP experience. He has been associated with several SAP implementations in various capacities. Anurag’s core SAP competencies include FI/CO, Logistics, SAP BW, and SAP NetWeaver® BI, SAP NetWeaver tools and technologies, Sarbanes-Oxley com-pliance, reporting, and project management. Anurag is a frequent speaker at SAP conferences and contrib-utes to several publications. He has a B.S. in computer science and an MBA in finance. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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Figure 8: Configuration Tables for Dunning


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Content Management Systems (CMS). For enterprise-wide application development, ABAP is still second to nothing. Furthermore, the CMS market is the domain of the Open Source Foundation.

CMI 9 Champion ApproachOur ratings are the result of an extensive review of potential candidates. Because SOA is far away from being a standardized science, we avoided defining a simple criteria catalog and rating each individual com-ponent. Instead, we defined a Capability Maturity Index – named CMI9 – that appoints one product or product offering as the champion. This forms the yardstick against which other products can be evaluated and compared.

The Champion Approach differs heavily from a classical shootout. During the comparison, we came across some interesting surprises. While we believed that a certain product might be the non-plus-ultra (absolute best) of its kind, we would then see features in other products that turn out to be extremely helpful as well. If we come across such a feature, we added it to our list of state-of-the-art capabilities. After reviewing all those products, this list of capabilities is defined as state-of-the-art. Then we iteratively compared each of the products against this index. A product that combines all capabili-ties will receive the normative rating (i.e., 7 out of 15 points) Fifteen points can be reached, when a product implements what was seen as theoretically possible and desirable, when the reference score was defined.The thought behind this approach is that we do not define a hypothetical reference scale; we use features already found in existing products and look for those features in other products.

Editor’s Note: And now, the envelope please… Axel Angeli and Lynton Grice have been building us up to this moment since last summer, when they began their series on Building the SOA City. This time, the winners of Logosworld’s Blue Elefant SOA Awards are revealed. But before you read who’s in the top spots for the vari-ous components of SOA—keep in mind that there are many other solutions out there that may not even be on Logosworld’s radar. Therefore, they ask you to not only consider their endorsements, but look at the deeper rea-soning behind each and ask—“does it apply to us?” The true beauty of the SOA City is the ability to be diverse and look for solutions that meet your company’s needs. Now, without further ado. . .let the winners be revealed!

“To dilute the will to win is to destroy the purpose of the game. There is no substitute for victory.”

-Douglas MacArthur

If you are like us, then you enjoy reading about evalua-tions and contests. This is apparently an archaic instinct in most of us that we want to see the clear winners and losers. It’s fun for those who win and means tears for those who are “second winners”. The fact is that people tend to forget the ones who have not been selected as top of the tops. It happens the same way with the Academy Awards, aka the Oscars; people remember the winner, but do not remember the honorable nominees. Or for you sports buffs, you most likely remember the Olympic gold winner but the silver medal is soon out of mind, even if the winner won by 1/100th of a second! Just a little change in the environment, scales tipped in a totally different direction.

In the case of the Blue Elefant SOA Awards, the win-ners in the categories mentioned captured their wins by a very narrow margin in most instances. Depend-ing on the constellation, of collaborating departments in an enterprise, a completely different result could be possible. The basis of our evaluation is the CMI9 rating scheme, which is a balanced score scheme that allows a reproducible comparison of weaknesses and strengths of a product or solution against an individual reference. The topical rating is therefore a function of the param-eters that describe the business case and constraints.

In determining the winners, two categories provided clear, unanimous winners: Development Framework and

Building the SoA City – Part VLogosworld Blue elefant SoA Awards 2007

By Axel Angeli and Lynton Grice

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The Champion Approach differs

heavily from a classical

shootout.

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Does the Award Help You? – A DisclaimerEvery evaluation and rating is biased by mul-tiple factors. A recommendation that is valid for one company, or for a certain use within a company, might be a disaster if applied else-where. For instance, SAP® XI is the best choice for most companies who run predominantly on the SAP NetWeaver™ stack. But XI is certainly far too complex and expensive in terms of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for smaller depart-ments, or SMBs (Small and Midsize Businesses) with thousands of Windows applications to integrate. This allows enough room for niche players.

Logosworld’s evaluations are normally tailored for a special business case. The constraints and focal targets of the business are assessed for this business case, and then the CMI9 reference for the defined champions is created.

For the public award, it was necessary to define a hypothetical enterprise. We have chosen a globally situated enterprise with 10,000 employees with a heterogeneous IT landscape, running a full kiosk of applications from legacy to mobile communication. We also assumed that part of the operating IT had been outsourced to some application service provider. We also assumed that company politics see IT as a money drain in their infra-structure; this view excludes companies like eBAY or AMAZON who generate money from their IT, in terms of real net profit.

The Envelope, Please – The ChampionsTo get a fairly universal reference suiting to a wide range of companies out there, we have chosen the only three full-service vendors as the champions. Full service vendors are companies that can deliver a full suite of IT services and software from the execution platform to the business applications. The only ones that can deliver are IBM, SAP, and Microsoft. Oracle and SUN have tried stepping up in this league, but they are not yet able to

run a completely autonomous IT – not even with the help of subcontracting partners. If one is really pedan-tic, there is not truly anyone out there who can really deliver everything. SAP and Microsoft do not deliver hardware, while IBM and Microsoft pass in terms of applications.

Figure 1 shows the full suite suppliers evaluated for the Blue Elefant awards.

What about the Ones That Are Not Mentioned?There are probably hundreds of vendor solutions in any one category that we have not mentioned. If a product is not in our assessment, it could be because we have not seen it work, maybe because we have never heard about it, or that we found it weaker than the ones we selected as winners.

The CategoriesWe are able to classify SOA services and solutions in several distinct categories (Figure 2). There is, however, not an award for every category. We neglected those groups that would also fall under the subject of classical IT, such as databases.

Figure 1: Full Suite Suppliers

There are probably hundreds

of vendor solutions in any

one category that we have

not mentioned.

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The illustration in Figure 3 shows the categories that we reviewed with respect to our model company.

If we watch the requirements from the service perspective, we get some-thing close to what’s depicted in the flow chart in Figure 4.

The Verdict

For the awards in this review, we have put on our SAP glasses and assumed that we are a company that is predominantly dependent on SAP software. This leads us into a number of restrictions. There is, first-of-all, the “one-vendor paradigm” that rules the procurement strategy of most major companies.

There is a good reason for such a strategy. One vendor normally lowers the costs for in-house services and training. Normally. In some cases, like portals and Con-tent Management Systems (CMS), the price difference between the costs of SAP EP or Microsoft SharePoint (compared with open-source solutions) is so extreme, that it would normally pay to opt for the alternative. But the calculation is difficult to make. Costs for train-ing the in-house staff still can have an influence, and costs vary heavily depending on how the communica-tion flow in the enterprise is organized.

Commercial Products Are Far from “State of the Art”The bad news first: The commercially available soft-ware for SOA is still quite a long way away from what we think is possible; and we do not dwell in wishful thinking, but yearn for solutions that might ease the use and reliability of an SOA significantly. This is especially obvious in the portal sector. If we blended the 20 best open source Content Management Systems, we would see a fairly well equipped state-of-the-art CMS. There is a growing gap between the SOA avant-garde and the enterprise-ready solutions. SOA is agile, something the

Figure 2: Component Layers of a Full Featured SOA Service Stack

Figure 3: Categories of Basic SOA Services (Categories in blue are those we awarded)

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bigger vendors have yet to understand. As a customer, you often have to decide between two evils: You can choose between either a poorly equipped solution from a big vendor that comes with the guarantee that they can fulfill their contracted and promised obligations in the long run, or a trendy, cutting edge solution that puts you at risk of being left alone with the installa-tion and product support.

RecommendationsThe good news is that a real SOA is ready for best of breed and is ideally introduced with competing and redundant solutions. A one-vendor policy contradicts the inner spirit of an SOA.

In an SAP-focused environment, we recom-mend a balanced mix between SAP’s own solu-tions and one of the best of breed solutions. It is not only OK, but even desirable, that for some areas there will be several solutions that run in parallel.

In the middleware section, for instance, we suggest that you shield your SAP systems with at least two independently running XI instances (of course, if there is only one SAP instance, then one XI is OK), and use them mainly for data mapping and transformations both into and out of SAP. Then add an ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) solu-tion like Fiorano, IBM Process Server, Seeburger BIS, or Apache ServiceMix, to orchestrate the data flow between the systems.

For the portal sector, however, we strongly recommend that you use a Windows Server-based solution. This could either be an Open Source portal or Microsoft SharePoint. An SAP EP (Enterprise Portal) is good enough for “SAP only” solutions, but we are not satis-fied with it when we measure it up against Enterprise WebWeb 2.0 requirements. The recommendation in favor of Windows is a very practical one as some of the strongest add-on solutions in the market are designed for Windows only. This is especially the case when hard-ware drivers are part of the solution. Since nearly all Linux-based solutions run on top of Java or PHP, they can always run on Windows, but not every Windows solution runs on Linux.

If you plan to develop major ERP software on your own, the well-known advantages of the SAP ABAP

ecosystem speak for themselves. The SAP Transport Management System for source control and deployment, the version management, and the unique debugging and testing features are still far ahead of the crowd. Smaller applications may be built in PHP as well, especially if you use one of the existing PHP-based CMS solutions as the skeleton to start with. Further, we continue to stress that you should refrain from developing major applica-tions on top of a Java stack.

The WinnersFigure 4 shows those products we feel represent the “best of breed” in their respective areas.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Portals (Front-ends)A comment out of desperation: We were actually very tempted to deny an award to any of the market offer-ings in this category so far. When it comes to efficient frontend development that comprises corporate identity, usability, and desktop integration, no product comes close to our expectation. In brief: Front-end develop-ment is expensive, and there is no help in sight.

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Figure 4: Best of Breed SOA Award Winners

1Free translation according to Cato the Elder: Et ceterum censeo Karthaginem esse delendam.

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Portal and Front-endsFor “SAP-only” users, the SAP Enterprise Portal is certainly an appropriate choice if the primary goal is to present SAP content in a unified format. However, if the SAP data is to be blended and mashed up with other data sources, our product of choice for a portal is still Microsoft SharePoint. The choice of tools and the possibilities built in there are simply far more advanced than any competitive product if one looks at the full package. There are certainly portals that have some advantages in dedicated areas. If you are an SAP-only user, then it does not make much sense to hook onto SharePoint because the SAP Enterprise Portal has all your functionality ready to use. But if you look for a mashup solution where you try to blend information from several data sources, then SharePoint has the best offer. If your organiza-tion uses Microsoft Office on the front-end, then you will like the Office integration. Until other portals recognize that this is the essential component to work on, they will always be behind SharePoint in terms of usability.

When we talk about portals and CMS, we face a very special situation. We are in an arena whose inventive-ness is heavily driven by the Open Source communities. Projects like Drupal, Joomla, Typo3, or YetAnother-CommunitySystem (YACS), have become legend in this arena and offer features that are seldom found in com-mercial offerings. The blogging engines like Wordpress or the wiki engines, like Wikipedia’s Mediawiki, or even the text based Dokuwiki and the commercial enterprise Wiki “Atlassian Confluence”, also fall into this category, and are by far more superior to a community or blog-ging tool.

SAP EP in the Role of the ChampionSAP Enterprise Portal is a Java-focused portal imple-mentation, so it is mainly of interest to companies that already have major investments in Java. Compared with

other commercial or non-commercial offerings, there are not many features in it. The value exists primarily for companies who produce the wide majority of the portal content from an SAP NetWeaver back-end. On a positive note, SAP has provided a huge array of easily plugged-in “business packages” available for down-load from their WebWebsite. Furthermore, SAP has not forced all portal development to be done in Java; rather, developers can also develop in .NET or ABAP (BSP or ABAP WebWebdynro) – this provides for some good flexibility.

The Winner Is …

For the time being, the most reasonable choice for the majority of companies out there will be Microsoft Office Sharepoint (MOS), provided that there is already a sub-stantial amount of Microsoft Windows know-how within the organization. In such a case, MOS is most likely included in your licenses and extensions are normal Windows .NET development tasks. Making develop-ments in .NET is not easy, but other than a Java-based portal, you can make use of .NET languages or plug in other extension platforms like PHP-ZEND, Python Django, and the like. You can even add Java component plug-ins easily into Sharepoint, although this is not a sensible option from the maintenance viewpoint.

If you only need a great looking front page with stun-ning templates and visual effects, then Joomla! is the trendsetter. Not that Joomla! is a masterpiece in the history of software development. The code looks poor and most other open source projects have a higher speed in terms of bringing new ideas into reality. But Joomla! has succeeded in capturing the emotional part by making possible the creation of eye catching Web sites with dynamic contents in half of a day. And there is a whole industry of Web designers out there ready to develop tons of great looking style sheets to make your front page look great. If visual effects or corporate identity are your main reason to choose a portal frame-work, then Joomla! will be the one to look at. Other portal vendors are advised to allow the reuse of Joomla! templates.

4On SOA

If you only need a great looking

front page with stunning

templates and visual effects,

then Joomla! is the trendsetter.

Commercial OpenSource Junior Award

• Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 • Joomla

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Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: CMSChampion Is the World Wide Web (WWW)SAP is currently not really playing in this league. They have major investment reserved for developing the new SAP Knowledge Management tool, and what we have seen in the labs so far appears to be a great step for-ward that will also include an enterprise search engine. However, those products are not on the market yet, so we could not put them into the competition. The true reference for CMS is the World Wide Web, the world’s largest library. Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon mark the cornerstone for any CMS (Content Management System).

The Winner Is…As every CMS comes with a portal framework, many prod-ucts do not even make a differ-ence. If choosing a CMS is your goal, then you would take the portal that comes packed with your new document repository tool.

For a CMS and collaboration tool, we found Atlassian Confluence the most promising work, while we see SharePoint slightly ahead when we look at it through the needs of larger organizations. Atlassian Confluence makes it extremely easy to add, share, and find content within the enterprise. If you like the best-of-breed, you would take Atlassian Confluence as your CMS, running on a pure clean Windows Server.

The French community tool YACS (Yet Another Com-munity System, http://www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com) is a small, but very efficient community project. It has fewer supporters than Drupal, but the architecture of YACS is so clean and smart, that it is an ideal under-ground for developing your own extensions without tampering with the kernel of the framework. We run YACS as a default add-on for any PHP development so that we have a quick and easy way to visually present data. Drupal and Typo3 are of course still the eager beavers of the Open Source community with the most feature-rich solutions and the most agile community.

The true winner of this category is certainly the Open Source Founda-tion as a whole. There are hundreds

of great CMS implementations out there, most of them developed on top of PHP, some on Python, Ruby, or Java. Many of them can compete with the commer-cial CMS and often are far better and set the trend. The WebWeb site http://www.opensourcecms.com sports an exhaustive summary of what exists out there.

Figure 5 shows our winners in the Portals arena.

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Figure 5: Best Portal and CMS Solutions


• Microsoft Sharepoint 2007 • Open Source Foundation • YACS• Atlassian Confluence (Drupal, Joomla, Plone,Typo3)

http://www.yetanothercommunitysystem.com

http://www.opensourcecms.com

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Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: WikiThe Winner Is…

Atlassian Confluence is by far the most elaborate enter-prise wiki today. It is easy to use, clearly structured, and designed for the needs of collaborating enterprise teams. The Open Source Dokuwiki is also a very good and easy to use, PHP-based, wiki engine. It has fewer features and support than Atlassian, but if you need to blend it with your own extensions, then Dokuwiki is a good choice. Some may be tempted to use the popular Mediawiki, which is the engine used by Wikipedia. It is comparable to Dokuwiki, but we did not like it as much as Dokuwiki, as it stores all data in plain text files rather than in a database (as Dokuwiki does). Figure 6 shows our winners in the wiki market space.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Search EnginesThe Winner Is…

Search engines are a killer application in an enterprise. Whatever project you start, always do it with a search engine in place. The problem in projects is not a lack of documentation but rather an inability to get the information you want quickly! The easiest way to get a search engine in place is to buy a Google appliance that allows you to plug and play. SharePoint has a built-in search engine as well, but it can only spider its own information by default. Wrensoft ZOOM is a small and handy Windows-based, universal search engine tool available for less than 1,000 USD. SAP has announced its own enterprise search engine to be available for 2008, but we have not seen it yet. Figure 7 shows our

search engine competitors, and how sparse this arena is currently.

4On SOA

Figure 6: Best Wiki Solutions


• Atlassian Confluence • Dokuwiki • YACS


• Google Appliance • Wrensoft ZOOM

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Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Enterprise BloggingThe Champion: WordpressBlogging has become a popular sport on the Internet. Anybody can post new comments, texts, and more, and immediately see the results displayed. Modern IT departments have understood that the same communi-cation will be required for your IT departments as well. Every team member should be able to post information in dedicated news groups without the need of an IT or Web design expert.

Since blogging comes from the WWW, it is no surprise that the tools there are the most elaborate ones. The community-standard veteran for bloggers is Wordpress; it’s not rich in features but used by a large numbers of bloggers.

Drupal is the better product. It can do everything that Wordpress can, but has more features for content man-agement, like the ability to hierarchically arrange your documents in chapters and sections. Again, the French YACS is the light-weighted variation of Drupal, and is also a serious contender with Drupal.

Microsoft has added the same support for blogging into their Sharepoint 2007 offering. Blogging alone is no argument to install Sharepoint, but if you use Share-point for another reason, there is no need to use any other blogging tool.

4On SOA

Figure 7: Minimal Competition in the Search Engine Arena


• Microsoft 2007 Sharepoint • Drupal * Yacs

• Worldpress

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Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Development FrameworksThe Champion: SAP NetWeaver ABAP

Development frameworks (or Virtual Machines) are the mission criti-cal execution environment for your enterprise implementation. There is hardly any virtual machine that has the power, agility, and reliabil-ity that SAP ABAP has. The recent implementations of Python or PHP follow the same direction as ABAP. They combine a reliable execution environment with a handy programming language that is easy to learn. PHP and Python are as good as ABAP, but they still lack many additional features like Enqueue, background processing, and transactional processing; they are closing in quickly. Ruby on Rails plays in the same league as Python and PHP, with the additional burden of a messy andcryptic programming syntax. While ABAP enjoys the role of the sleeping beauty, PHP and Python add new useful features every day. Microsoft.NET is the all-purpose framework for an enterprise. It has strong integration from hardware to reporting while still being tolerant enough to host and collaborate with PHP, Python, Ruby, and even Java. A Python stack should always be installed next to .NET; it does not harm, nor does it cost any extra money, and service costs are at a minimum (and it is simple to learn!). Figure 8 shows our champions’ logos.

The Shooting Stars: ScriptingOne last note on the language topic…we at Logosworld are so passionate and excited about where things are moving in terms of scripting. There are absolutely bril-liant runtime frameworks and development environ-ments out there to support our agile development, most of them for very little money. Ruby on Rails started the hype, PHP (on ZEND) made the race. Python has been around just as long as Java and only now proves to have found its true destiny.

All these languages have extremely strong and agile service frameworks in common. These frameworks take care of the most common administrative work like com-municating with a Web site, or sending and receiving email, as well as logging work steps, process workflow events, and much more. Ruby’s framework is called RAILS; Python has several competing projects with ZOPE, GEARS and DJANGO. PHP’s base SOA frame-work is ZEND, but then there are myriads of Open Source additions to choose from, leading to an embar-rassment of riches.

There are great IDEs for them as well, like Wingware.com’s Wing IDE, for Python or ZEND Studio for PHP, plus a larger number of competitive IDEs have come into view recently - including some Eclipse plug-ins. This has really changed the game for us in terms of speed of development. Scripting allows us to rapidly develop and debug pretty much anything with absolute ease. As mentioned above, languages like Python are

4On SOA


• SAP NetWeaver (ABAP) • ZEND PHP

• Python Django

Figure 8: SOA Frameworks for Scripting: Rails for Ruby; ZOPE, GEARS, django for Python

While ABAP enjoys the role of

the sleeping beauty, PHP and

Python add new useful features

every day.

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hot on the heels of ABAP. Figure 9 shows some of the reasons we feel NetWeaver leads in frameworks for SAP, as well as our runners-up. Figure 10 lists the development framework tools we have added to our short list of “up and coming”.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Enterprise Service BusSAP XI Against the Rest of the WorldSAP has tried to roll up the market with their Exchange Infrastructure (XI). Unfortunately, SAP’s pace is not very fast. The biggest handi-cap for SAP is still that some criti-cal components of the runtime are developed in Java, and have to rely on the stability of the Java run-time. Aside from the discussion of whether Java is a good or bad virtual machine, it is a nightmare for SAP NetWeaver support. Few NetWeaver operating centers have sufficient Java-smart staff to troubleshoot Java related issues quickly. Analysts like us, however, love the Java compo-nents in XI very much – it guaran-tees a lot of well-paid emergency work!

The Winner Is…There is a highly competitive market for ESB. Any household name in IT wants to have its share of the ESB market. The gap between state-of-the-art and practical implementa-tions is wide, and most vendors abuse the term ESB as they typically only implement parts of it with satisfac-tion. In order to get a better overview of the strengths, we have split the category of ESB into three sub-catego-ries upon which we awarded:

• Integration Brokers Integration brokers or workflow engines coordinate

and monitor transactional sequels of actions.

• Message Queue Engines A message queue engine is a special purpose database

engine. Message queues are optimized for speed and absolute reliability in terms of not losing any data, except for those built on classical relational databases.

• Mapping and Conversion Engines (ETL: Extract-Transform-Load)

This component takes care of transforming data structures.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Integration BrokersIntegration brokers are very similar to workflow engines. We see integration brokers at work on the lower level, when monitoring and coordinating the data flow; while workflows model the business view of a process.

Figure 9: Best SOA Runtime and Development Framework

Figure10: Short List of Development Frameworks to Watch

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SAP XI Against the Rest of the WorldIn the SAP NetWeaver stack, the integration engine is part of the XI. The solution is good for SAP-to-SAP communication and for extending the SAP Workflow.

The Winner

We currently consider IBM Process Server ahead of the crowd when we rate the full pack-age. However, if we only look at the technology, we are very excited about Fiorano, ActiveBPEL, and the open source Apache Service Mix. All these solutions may also work as business workflow engines.

For companies that depend on SAP XI, it is still a good choice to part-ner XI with a Seeburger BIS. Note: Having a very strong focus on EDI, the Seeburger BIS product allows a company to tackle any complex integration issues or mappings SAP XI is a “strategic product” in most SAP-focused companies, and most certainly has its pros. As any com-pany knows, one of the most impor-tant things about a piece of software is how quickly and easily you can get the system up and running. If one compares the amount of work (and pain), for example, of installing Seeburger BIS with SAP XI, Seeburger BIS wins hands down! See-burger still falls behind some other ESB offers, but it’s proximity to SAP and wide compatibility with the SAP process infrastructure makes it a serious candidate as a power side-car for the established SAP XI installation. Figure 11 shows the ESB integration broker products we reviewed and awarded.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Mapping and Conversion EnginesMapping engines are designed to transform data struc-tures. Conversion engines cater to the protocol conver-sion. The critical component of a mapping or conver-

sion engine is the ease of use of the design tools, and the abilities to trace errors during runtime.

The comments on integration engines are valid in this section in an analogue way. SAP NetWeaver shines with great marketing, although it has severe difficulties when it comes to integrating non-SAP solutions quickly and reliably.


• IBM Process Server • Apache Service Mix (Best Complete Package)

• Fiorano

Figure11: ESB Integration Brokers

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The Winner Is…

We currently consider IBM Process Server ahead of the crowd when we rate the full package. If we only look at the technology, we are very excited about Fiorano, ActiveBPEL, and the Open Source Apache Service Mix. For companies that depend on SAP XI, it is still a good choice to partner XI with a Seeburger BIS. All those solutions may also work as business workflow engine. Figure 12 shows the ESB Mapping and Conversion engines we reviewed and awarded.

Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: Message QueuesA message queue engine is the most critical component of an ESB, although many integration consul-tants still believe they could live with-out it. The MQ is the backbone for guaranteed delivery and the place to stage data for asynchronous distributed processing. Reliability and robustness are the alpha and omega of any MQ engine.

The Winner Is…

The unbeaten champion as a dedicated message queu-ing solution is still IBM WebWebsphere MQ. Microsoft MSMQ is part of any Windows server installation, and a fair alternative to IBM MQ. The Apache MQ falls behind IBM or Microsoft, but is a nice and cheap alternative. SAP, unfortunately, has still not come up with a proper MQ solution, even though the SAP ABAP

stack is certainly the ideal candidate for this. Figure 13 shows the ESB Message Queue engines we reviewed and awarded.


• IBM Process Server • Apache Service Mix (Best Complete Package)

• Fiorano

Figure12: ESB Data Mapping and Conversion Tools


• IBM MQ • Apache Active/MQ

• Microsoft MQ

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Blue Elefant SOA Award 2007: MonitoringMonitoring applications and workflows are an impor-tant and often critical aid in a complex, networked, enterprise IT. The natural candidate for a monitoring solution is first your hardware vendor, then your appli-cation service provider. If you look for your own solu-tion, there are many offerings out there; a good number are from specialized vendors. SAP offers the Solution Manager for this purpose. IBM is still the champion with Tivoli.

The Winner Is…If you can afford the price for IBM Tivoli, it is probably what you want. It is a solution for those who want to monitor everything and have some pocket money to code the right add-ons to transport the information to the right endpoints. SAP’s Solution Manager is still in its early days and it needs to be observed in the future as to if it can hold the promises. The monitoring solution that has really exploded onto the scene and has really excited us is Zenoss . It is an open source solution, developed in Python, which allows you to easily monitor your entire IT infrastructure from network servers to applications to services. It has a brilliant AJAX front-end and alerting system that

allows for perfect real-time monitor-ing to the Zenoss dashboard, email, or to your mobile phone. The ease with which you can get the software installed and analyzing the environ-ment is truly amazing. Within the Zenoss space, this product is going places! Figure 14 shows the Moni-toring Framework tools we reviewed and awarded. SummaryThese awards will help you develop a basis for your own evaluations. Ideally, evaluations should be executed by a neutral, specialized, third-party. Never do an evaluation in-house, since you will be tempted to confirm your prejudicial affinities and may not look at other important

facts that may sway your decisions. There are vendor-independent specialists, like benchmarking firms, that do the job for you. They are quite independent and neutral since they do not have to sell any of the rated products.

Final NoteThese awards do not mean that the winning products are the ultimate solutions for you; it simply means take a closer look. In reality, there are many good products out there in the market—these are just the ones that got our attention.

Figure13: ESB Message Queue Engines

Figure 14: Monitoring Solutions

2Check out Zenoss at http://www.zenoss.com

4On SOA

http://www.zenoss.com

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“How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.”

- Lou Holtz

Axel Angeli, logosworld.com. Axel is a senior SAP and EAI advisor and principal of logosworld.com, a Ger-man-based enterprise specializing in coaching SAP and EAI project teams and advising IT management on implementation issues. Axel has been in the IT business since 1984, and throughout his career, he has always worked with cutting edge technologies. Axel’s SAP experience stems from the good old R/2 days, and he is an expert on SAP’s NetWeaver technology and any kind of ABAP development. A speaker of several languages, Axel specializes in coaching and leading large multi-national teams on complex projects with heterogeneous platforms and international rollouts. Known for his intensive and successful trouble-shooting experience, Axel has been nicknamed by his colleagues as the “Red Adair” of SAP projects. He is the author of the best-selling tutorial “The SAP R/3 Guide to EDI, IDocs, ALE and Interfaces”. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title.

Lynton Grice, logosworld.com is an SAP integration specialist contracting in Johannesburg, South Africa. He has a passion for programming and has a particular interest in the “business process and SOA space”, incorporating things like workflow, BPEL, SAP XI, etc. Lynton is a champion of the Blue Elefant League of SOA Excellence. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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SIDadm. It is recommended that you activate SMTP on all application servers that will run SAP in your environment. Once this is verified and tested, you can activate the SAP profile parameters by using transaction code RZ10, and adding and activating the parameters in Figure 1 to each instance in your environment.

Figure 2 shows an example of your profile parameter entry screen with RZ10.

The next step in configuring SAP mail is to set up a user that will have authorization profile “S_A.SCON” and make the user type “service” (this will avoid password expiration). I use a user ID named mailadm; however, you can name your mail user anything you like. This will all be completed using transaction code SU01, as shown in Figure 3. Notice the user type under the “logon data” tab.

Editor’s Note: With newer versions of SAP came newer challenges for mail integration and configuration, most specifically setting it up in SAP Web Application Server 7.10. SAP OSS note 455140 gives you some of the details you need to know. Meanwhile, Eric Walter fills in the rest—including step-by-step setup in ECC 6.0! Read Eric’s tip, then get ready to hit SEND!

SAP has the ability to send mail to recipients using the native mailing software configured on the server on which the SAP application is running. In previous versions of SAP, this required integration with gate-way API’s set up in the SAP kernel. However, in newer versions of SAP Enterprise Central Core (ECC 5.0 and ECC 6.0), the mail integration involves a different setup procedure; more specifically, it involves setup of inbound and outbound mail, to and from SAP, in SAP Web Application Server 7.10.

The first step in setting up your SAP mail is to become familiar with SAP OSS note 455140, “Configuration of Email, fax, paging, or SMS using SMTP”. This article will act as a supplement to this SAP note, and illustrate a real setup in an ECC 6.0 system.

ProcedureAfter ensuring that the native mail functions are work-ing on your server without SAP, you will be ready to configure the SAP parameters for email. You can check the native Operating System mail by simply sending an email to your personal address from the SAP user ID,

4On Basis

you’ve got Mail: A guide for Setting Up your SAP® Mail Configuration

By Eric Walter, SAP Consultant

icm/server_port_2 = PROT=SMTP, PORT=25000, TIMEOUT=180

icm/server_port_3 = PROT=SMTP, PORT=25001, TIMEOUT=180

is/SMTP/virt_host_0 = *:25000;

is/SMTP/virt_host_1 = *:25001;

Figure 1: Adding and Activating Parameters

Figure 2: Email Profile Parameters Needed to Activate SAP Email Functions

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4On Basis

Now that the mail user has been set up, the SU01 transaction code will be used to alter all users, and to add an Internet mail address for them to receive mail from the SAP system. This will need to be entered for each user, and will be in the form: “[email protected]” (where sap.company.com will be defined in transaction code SCOT – still to come). Figure 4 shows a communication method definition example.

Next, in transaction code SICF, you will need to define the host data, the service data, and the handler list.

Note: The method to do this may be a bit confusing if you are following the SAP OSS note for this part of the procedure. The screen shots in Figures 5, 6, and 7 show the methods for setting these values.

Figure 3: User Creation Transaction Code (SU01) for Mail User as Type “Service”

Figure 4: Example of Mail Setup Needed for Each User in Transaction Code SU01

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4On Basis

• Press the F8 function key, or click the Execute but-ton from the Maintain Services screen (Figure 5) to launch the services overview screen.

• The Maintain Service screen shown in Figure 6 will appear. From this screen, you will need to double-click on the SAPconnect option…to drill into the SAPConnect details.

Figure 5: Maintain Services Screen: Press the “F8” Key or Click the Execute Button

Figure 6: Maintain Service Screen: Double-Click on the SAPconnect Option

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4On Basis

• This will bring you to the Create/Change a Virtual Host screen (Figure 7), where you will enter your SAPconnect data.

As promised a few steps back, we will now be able to set up our SAPConnect Administra-tion options (i.e., sap.compa-nyname.com). This will all be performed from transaction code “SCOT”.

All SAPConnect settings are client dependent, so you will need to make any changes needed in each client you are using for sending or receiving emails. Once again, this por-tion of the SAP OSS note is very confusing in the manner that the note was written. We are currently describing step 4 of the OSS note. Once you are in transaction code SCOT, you will need to use menu options “Settings‡Default Domain”. This will open the entry window to enter your Default Domain. This is shown in Figure 8.

Figure 7: Create/Change a Virtual Host Screen

Figure 8: SAPconnect Entry Window for Setting the Default Domain

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4On Basis

If you have upgraded to ECC and previously used R/3 mail with the former emailing methods, you will also need to deactivate the R/3 node by using menu option “Nodes‡Delete” in transaction code SCOT.

Next you will need to verify or create your SMTP node settings. There should be an SMTP node automatically created for you, however, you will need to define your SMTP mail server settings. To define this, double-click on the SMTP node and you will get the screen to define your company’s mail server. This is shown in Figure 9.

Finally, schedule the batch job RSCONN01 (with ABAP program RSCONN01) to run every five minutes. This job will enable the send and receive functions for email with the settings you have entered in transaction code SCOT. There are several variants you can also use for faxing, paging, etc. The job details are shown in Figure 10.

This completes the setup needed in the SAP application. In addition to this SAP setup, you must also configure the mail program that is running on your operating system. For instance, if you are using UNIX, you must configure sendmail to route your domain name (sap.company.com) to port 25000, as we defined in the first steps in profile definitions.

Once you have all of these steps completed, you can test by going to your Business Workplace (Transaction Code SBWP) and creating a mail (sending it externally to

Figure 9: Setting Your Company Mail Server for Directing Email from SAP

Figure 10: RSCONN01 Batch Job Details for Email Setup

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your own user ID). You should see this email appear in your company’s email application. Remember, you may need to wait five minutes for the mail batch job to run in SAP.

If you followed these steps, your mail should work for inbound and outbound messages. If you have sent mail and you want to monitor its progress in SAP, you can use menu option “View‡System Status” in transac-tion code SCOT. Furthermore, if you are finding that your mail is not working, you can troubleshoot this by looking at the work process details (dev_traces) in the operating system. These are located in /usr/sap/SID/DVEBMGS##/work/dev_icm.

That will conclude your mail setup and monitoring technique. If you follow these procedures, your mail should be set up for inbound and outbound messages to and from SAP.

Eric Walter is a senior consultant specializing in SAP Basis technologies along with J2EE and Java inte-gration with SAP. He has eight years of experience with SAP R/3 Basis and security, UNIX administra-tion, Oracle database administration, and five years with Java technologies, integration servers, and portal environments. In this time, he has led and supported numerous public and private implementations of these technologies along with developing and implementing architecture at all levels, from programming interfaces to hardware improvements and upgrades. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

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Editor’s Note: In our non-technical lives, we’re so used to having menus created for us that we don’t think twice about it. These are the choices; take ‘em or leave ‘em. Occasionally, we ponder what it would be like if we could add to or delete from a menu based on our own needs. Well, the good news in SAP is—you can! Maria Nikolova demonstrates how easy it is to tailor menus to support the needs of the business, so that you and your users can access the things that are important to you with a simple double-click!

IntroductionIt is often said that the strength of SAP lies not in the functionality it provides, but rather its flexibility to cre-ate functionality to fit specific business processes and transactions. One of the most useful areas in the system is menus that can be tailored to support the needs of the business. Menus in SAP provide easy access to module transactions and reports, as well as Web-based applica-tions and files. You can reach all of these with a simple double-click.

There are many types of menus found in SAP. This article discusses the configurable menus that make the business more efficient and drive more value from the SAP investment. These include area menus, role menus, and the Favorites folder as follows. Specifically, this article will address:

- Standard Area Menus

- Company Area Menus

- User-Specific Area Menus

- Single Role Menus

- Composite Role Menus

- Favorites

The screen prints in this article are based on SAP R/3 4.6C; however, the information in this article is general and is valid for other releases, too.

4On Basis

Configurable Menus in SAP®: An easy Way to Access Module Transactions

By Maria Nikolova, SAP Senior Expert, National Electricity Company, Bulgaria

OverviewIn SAP Easy Access, there are two icons located on the Toolbar: One for the SAP menu (menu path: MENU‡SAP menu) and one for the User menu (menu path: MENU‡User menu). SAP has proposed standard transaction codes for searching in the SAP menu and in the User menu. The respective transaction codes are: SEARCH_SAP_MENU and SEARCH_USER_MENU. These searches give you information about the position of a transaction in the menu tree. It is recommended to insert transac-tion code SEARCH_USER_MENU in the role that is assigned to all users in the company. I do not recommend this for transaction code SEARCH_SAP_MENU, as you may not want to allow all users to search the SAP menu.

For the purpose of explaining menu use in this article, let’s consider the following business scenario.

In this scenario, we will assume that there are more transactions available than those that are included in the standard SAP menu (Figure 1). Then the company menu contains fewer transaction codes than those in the standard menu. This is true because the SAP standard installation does not include all transactions neces-sary to support the business processes of all companies. However, we have the flexibility to create transaction codes that are designed especially for our company’s specific needs. For these transactions, we will configure easy access through area menus, role menus, or our Favorites folder.

In order to insert the new transactions into a menu, we have to create the so called “company menu”. Let’s add to our scenario some users that need user-specific area menus; for example, some Plant Maintenance experts.

Menus in SAP provide easy access

to module transactions and

reports, as well as Web-based

applications and files.

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In this example, we might have a PM expert who performs specific activities that we can group in a user-specific, or role-based area menu.

In some areas, it does not make sense to create menus for certain transactions. In these cases, the most effective way to access them is through the Favorites folder, which is entirely user-definable. Here we will consider it as the smallest menu unit. Of course, the Favorites folder might be bigger than the Role menu, but here we will assume just the opposite scenario.

Figure 1 presents an overview of all the menu types that I will address in this article. Later in this article, you will find a detailed description of every menu type.

Note: It is important to mention that we are not restrict-ing authorizations by composing a new menu.

Standard Area MenuThe default menu that SAP provides is assigned to transaction code S000. If you want to modify it in order to be in accordance with the functionalities of your company, you have to copy the menu in the Area Menu Editor (transaction codes SE43 or SE43N).

In order to set the initial area start menu, use transac-tion code SSM2. By default (for the SAP R/3 system), the initial assigned menu is S000 (see Figure 2).

Note: Not all transactions in SAP are included in the standard menu S000. The full list of standard SAP transaction codes that are defined for the system you are currently working with can be seen via transaction SE16, tables TSTC, and TSTCT. Note also that the letter “T” added at the end of table TSTC indicates the text description for the data in the table.

Company Area MenuCompany Area Menus are menus that are not provided out of the box with SAP, but rather are created by the user. These are designed by the user to meet the specific business needs of the enterprise.

Probably, you have created your own transaction codes to meet your business’ needs. They are not included in the SAP standard menu, so you’ll have to insert them into your own company’s menu. This is done via the Area Menu Editor (transaction codes SE43 and SE43N). You just have to copy the standard area menu into your own (e.g., Z000). This way, you can add addi-

4On Basis

Figure 1: An Example Structure of Menu Areas

Figure 2: Set Initial Menu System-Wide Screen (transaction code SSM2)

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tional menu transactions in the SAP main menu without affecting the original SAP default area menu S000. The customer namespace or name range for creating your own area menu starts with “Y” and “Z”.

In the Standard Area Menu, there are country-specific transaction codes. It is much better to review them and to leave in only the transactions that are useful for your business in your company area menu.

Role MenusSAP allows a lot of flexibility by providing functionality for both single and composite role menus.

In a single role menu, you may incorporate menu structures from the following sources: standard SAP menus, other role menus, area menus, or imported from a file. You also have the option to design the menu on your own without importing from other structures.

A composite role menu is a collection of single role menus. Here you also have the option to design the menu on your own – without inheriting the menu from the single roles incorporated in the composite role.

In the default SAP system, there are already some single and composite role menus. If you have created and assigned a composite role menu, you will not see the single role

menus. The role menus, both composite and single, are displayed as the User menu, to all users assigned to the role.

Single Role MenuSingle role menus contain authorizations. Composite roles do not contain authorizations. When we are talk-ing about menus, it is easier to create the authorizations for user access via the single role menus.

The Profile Generator tool inserts those authorization objects that are related to the transaction codes inserted in the single role menu. You create single role menus with the transaction code for role maintenance, PFCG. On the Menu tab, you’ll assign transaction codes, Web addresses, or documentation links. You can create fold-ers, name them, and translate them. You can assign separate transaction codes, or you can insert menu branches from existing area menus, SAP standard menus, from another role, or you can import them from a file. See Figure 3.

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Figure 3: Single Role Menu Screen (transaction code PFCG)

SAP allows a lot of flexibility

by providing functionality

for both single and composite

role menus.

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Composite Role MenuA composite role is a collection of single roles. We create composite roles to simplify user administra-tion. It is important to note that you can assign composite and sin-gle roles to an unlimited number of users. Composite (or Collective roles) contain only single roles. Composite roles cannot be com-prised of other composite roles.

Figure 4 shows an example, com-posite role Z.PM_EXPERT_HV_4010, which contains five single roles. In the Change Composite Role Screen – Menu tab (Figure 5), we can create the menu of the com-posite role. We can read the menu for all single roles to determine how we can reorganize these in a composite role menu, by delet-ing and renaming some nodes. Of course, as a first step, we read the menu (and in this way, generate the composite role menu).

When we press the Read menu button, the Composite Role Menu will be generated (from the menus of the Single Roles that are insert-ed in the Roles tab). In this case, the Composite Role Menu will inherit the menu characteristics of all single roles. In other words, the composite role menu is construct-ed from the menus of the roles it contains. After the generation of the composite role menu, we can reorganize it to suit our needs. For composite roles, only the menus of the single roles (contained in the composite role) can be imported and restructured on the Menu tab. If we assign to the PM expert in our scenario a composite role, she or he will see the reorganized com-posite role menu, not the menus of all assigned single roles (shown on Figure 4).

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Figure 4: Composite Role Screen – Roles Tab (transaction PFCG)

Figure 5: Change Composite Role Screen – Menu Tab (transaction PFCG)

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User-Specific Area MenuUser-specific menus are assigned to users via trans-action code SU01. In the Defaults tab, Start menu field, you may insert whatever area menu you want. For example, let’s look at the following case:

In transaction SSM2, we have set the company menu to be the default one for more than 95% of the users in the company. Let’s assume that the other 5% are technical SAP consultants and adminis-trators, and they have to view the whole SAP menu – S000. For these 5% of users, we want to provide the user-spe-cific menu, to allow them easy access to every area of SAP that they may need.

You can assign a specific menu to a single user. The assign-ment is done via transaction code SU01. You fill in the user name, and in “Change mode” go to the Defaults tab. Fill in the Start menu field with the menu that you want to assign to the user and save the change (see Figure 6). This figure shows a User-Specific Area Menu with a code PM01. The Company Area Menu may have a code that starts with Y or Z, (e.g., Z000). We can assign Z000 to be set as a default menu for all users, via transaction SSM2.

In the SAP Easy Access screen, you will have the User-Specific Area menu, which can be different from the company one as well as from all other menus. If you want to assign a User-Spe-cific Area menu to multiple users, you can do this via a transaction code for mass changes SU10.

Another way a user can change the defaults (if autho-rized) is by following the menu path System‡User profile‡Own data. This is shown in Figure 7.

Note: The System and Help options (on the menu bar) are circled in Figure 7. These options can be found on every SAP transaction screen.

This menu path, by default, is assigned to transaction code SU3. A similar transaction code for changing the records of a user profile can be found in the Start menu field of the Defaults tab. This is transaction SU0. The difference between SU0 and SU3 is shown in Table 1.

Figure 6: Start Menu Field (transaction code SU01)

Figure 7: Menu Path to “Own Data” Screen

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If we set an SAP standard Area Menu system-wide via transaction code SSM2 in the SAP Easy Access screen, this will result in the SAP initial menu being activated by a simple click (on the SAP menu icon ). If we set the company area menu as an initial system-wide, the same icon will activate the company menu system-wide. If we have created and assigned a composite role menu or a single role menu to a user (via transaction code PFCG), that user will be able to click on the User Menu icon to launch his or her menu (whether a composite or the single role menu). If we set up (transaction code SU01 on the Defaults Tab in the Start Menu) a start menu for a specific user, when he or she clicks on the SAP menu icon, he or she will see (after logon) his or her user-specific area menu.

For multiple users, if we want to set the start menu, we have to use transaction code SU10. Table 2 describes the various menu settings and respective results.

FavoritesIn the SAP Easy Access screen, you can organize your own work just by group-ing your most frequently used transactions, Web-based applications, and files in subfolders of the main Favorites folder. Each user

can restructure his or her own favorites with just a drag and drop. You can change the name of your favorites as well as the names of the transactions in the folders. You can delete some nodes that you are not going to use any more, and you can also download/upload favorites. Figure 8 shows the options for your Favorites folder.

Table 1: Comparison of Transaction Codes SU0 and SU3

Transaction code Tcode Text Tabs Mode

SU0 Maintain Own Fixed User Values Address Change

Defaults Change

Parameter Change

SU3 Maintain Users Own Data Address Display

Defaults Change

Table 2: Menu Setting Results in SAP Menu and User Menu

Figure 8: Favorites Activities

4On Basis

Result If we set Via transaction code SAP Menu User Menu

/Start Menu/ /Role Menu/

SAP standard area menu SSM2 SAP standard area menu n/a

company area menu SSM2 company area menu n/a

composite role menu PFCG n/a composite role menu

single role menu PFCG n/a single role menu

user-specific area menu SU01 (single user) or

user-specific area menu n/a

SU10 (multiple users) n/a

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Download to the PC The favorite transactions are usually stored in .xls format for easy download. You can edit the file in Microsoft Excel and upload it again. This is useful if a user wants to duplicate your folders, and then tweak them for her or his specific needs. Simply download your favorites to your PC and upload the file to the user who wants it. You can also save your Favorites folder by downloading a copy.

The steps for this are:

1. Create your Favorites menu.

2. From your Session manager /SAP Easy Access screen, go to menu Favorites‡Download to PC.

3. Choose a folder on your PC to where you want to do wnload.

4. Write down the file name.

5. Choose a file format that ends with .xls.

6. Save.

Note: When you add a file or a transaction code in your Favorites folder, you do not need to save it – it is saved automatically.

Upload from the PCYou can upload the file containing your Favorites folder transactions as easily as downloading.

The steps for this are:

1. From your Session manager /SAP Easy Access screen/, go to menu Favorites‡Upload from PC.

2. Choose the folder where you have stored your SAP Favorites menu.

3. Choose the file with the SAP Favorites menu.

4. Upload from the PC.

Favorites are not switched on and off. They are, by default, always in the navigation area on the SAP Easy Access screen.

Note: Should you want to delete the Favorites root, there is a message that reminds you that you are going to delete the folder: “Delete all favorites? Yes/No/Can-cel”. However, if you mistakenly delete a subfolder that is in your favorites root, the system will not alert you that you are deleting! I hope this will be corrected in future releases.

When you want to delete a file or a transaction code from your Favorites folders, you should know that you do not delete the file itself, or the transaction. You only delete the shortcut link to the respective object.

On the SAP Easy Access screen, follow the menu path Extras‡Settings to change the user settings in the User menu. These are described in Table 3.

Menu Customizing KeysFor globally controlling (activating, and deactivat-ing) the relevant menus for users, you can customize

Table 3: User Settings for the SAP Easy Access Screen

When you add a file or

a transaction code in your

Favorites folder, you do not

need to save it - it is saved

automatically.

User Setting Result

Display favorites at the end of the list The system displays favorites at the end of SAP menu or at the end of User menu.

Do not display menu, only display favorites The system does not display the User menu or the SAP menu and the respective buttons on the toolbar. Only the Favorites folder is displayed.

Do not display screen The system does not display the image on the right side of the SAP Easy Access screen.

Display technical names The system displays the transaction codes. If this switch is off, you will see only the texts of the transaction codes.

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the SSM_CUST table using transaction code SM30. This is shown in Figure 9. The changeable parameters (keys) are shown in Table 4.

If you want to prevent a user from having the option to see anything other than the SAP menu or the User menu, you have to check the desired menu (for that user) in the USERS_SSM table, which is also accessible through trans-action SM30. This is shown in Figure 10.

Figure 9: Maintain Customizing Keys in Table SSM_CUST (transaction code SM30)

Functionality Key in SSM _CUST Value Description

Controls the user Access ALL_USER_MENUS_OFF Yes User menu is switched off

No User menu is switched on

Controls the SAP menu SAP_MENU_OFF Yes SAP menu is switched off in SAP Easy Access

No SAP menu is switched on

Controls the removal of DELETE_DOUBLE_TCODES Yes Deletes double transaction codes redundant transaction codes

No Does not delete double transaction codes

Controls the sorting of SORT_USER_MENU Yes Sorting is switched on the user menu in SAP Easy Access

No Sorting is switched off

Controls redundancies CONDENSE_MENU Yes 1- Transactions that could globally, on the menu level be found more than once in the

menu are shown only one time

2- Redundancy in text is avoided

3- The system removes empty folders

No 1- The second appearance of transactions will not be removed

2- Text redundancy is not avoided

3- The system does not remove empty folders

Table 4: Customizing Keys in Table SSM_CUST for Controlling Some Menu Settings

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ConclusionIn this article, I have shared some tips about configura-tion of different menu types in the SAP system. I do not recommend that you take these tips as rules. They’re just to provide you with information on how to design menus in a way that meets the needs of your enterprise. The article reveals the mystery behind menus in SAP, and their configuration. If you learn how to work with menus and how to customize menus in SAP, you will see on your own the benefits that they provide, such as:

• Working from menus saves time.

• Menus organize the work for a user, or for a group of users, in a convenient way.

• Menus are user-friendly links to transactions, Web addresses, and files.

I hope you will put these principles to use and enjoy the benefits of custom menus in SAP.

Maria Nikolova has worked as a senior SAP expert for the National Electricity Company (NEK) in Bulgaria since January 1999. Maria has a master’s degree in telecommunications as an engineer from the Technical University in Sofia, Bulgaria. She has experience with an MIS project implementation of SAP R/3 (headquar-ters and rollout), the authorization concept and user administration, SAP CCC, SRM, and the SD, HR, CO, AM, MM, and PM modules. Prior to joining NEK, she worked as a manager of Equipment Engineering Ltd. for four years. You may contact the author at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

Figure 10: Maintain Entries in Change View Screen of Table USERS_SSM (transaction SM30)

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4CIO Corner

Editor’s Note: When we think of adopting SOA in a corporate culture, we often think that the driv-ers of this technology reside in the IT department. Not so fast…there’s a lot of Web-savvy talent that exists in other areas of the company that can help drive this solution. Jon Reed takes a page (or several) from Mashup Corporations, a ground-breaking new book, to illustrate how innovation, coupled with Web 2.0 experience, can lead to a success story. While this is a fictional account of SOA in the corporate world, the lessons learned from this book could translate into some great realities for many companies.

Introduction The Challenge of SOA Adoption and How Mashup Corporations Can HelpIn my last two CIO Corner articles, I wrote about the potential of SOA in SAP® environments, and also touched on the challenges this new architecture poses. The first article (Oct/Nov 2007 issue) explained how SOA can empower SAP customers to return to a busi-ness process-driven approach to ERP, as opposed to having to give up their specialized processes to conform to a standard ERP system. The second article (Dec 2007/Jan 2008) illustrated how SAP customers can use “mashups” to get the most out of their BW/BI analyti-cal data, without necessarily having to invest in a big upgrade to the enterprise core.

Both of my articles have alluded to the organizational changes that a full adoption of SOA requires. We have posed the question, “Is SOA hype?” Or to put it another way, “Is SOA worth the hassle?” From my research so far, the preliminary answer is yes. SOA is going to deliver on much of its potential, but I believe the true rewards of SOA, at least from an ROI perspective, will go to the SAP customers who use SOA strategically, and that means anticipating the organizational and cultural changes that SOA poses.

SAP has begun the work of documenting eSOA case studies, but there is more to be done. One book in par-ticular, Mashup Corporations, is a key step in the SOA education process that should be read by all companies who are evaluating their SOA approach.

Although Mashup Corporations is not solely focused on SAP, one of the authors, Paul Kurchina, serves as the Director of Communities on the ASUG board. He is also the chair of ASUG’s Enterprise SOA and Enterprise Architecture Communities. Paul is an influential voice on eSOA adoption within the SAP ecosystem, and in the book, there are SAP-specific references and examples that tie in the lessons of Mashup Corporations to ERP environments.

In this article, I’m going to highlight a few of the most important lessons from Mashup Corporations, exam-ined through an ERP mindset, where innovation has to be balanced with stability and security in the high-vol-ume ERP core.

Written by Andy Mulholland, Chris S. Thomas, Dan Woods, and Paul Kurchina, Mashup Corporations uses the fictional narrative of appliance maker “Vorpal, Inc.” to describe the challenges that CEO “Jane Money-maker” and her team face as they are confronted with a new SOA-driven revenue opportunity that, in order to capitalize on, requires a host of organizational changes.

Each chapter in Mashup Corporations tells the next step in the story of Vorpal Corporation, with practical tips at the end of each chapter in the “Putting the Rules to Work” section. The story of Vorpal begins with a tale of “disruptive innovation”. Hugo Wonderkind, an upstart Marketing Manager, has developed a “mashup” on his own blog, that has opened up a whole new business line

SoA from the outside in: Applying the Lessons from Mashup Corporations

By Jon Reed, JonERP.com

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4CIO Corner

for Vorpal: selling customized Vorpal popcorn poppers to fraternities. These poppers feature the school’s team logos emblazoned on the side.

From the beginning, CEO Jane Moneymaker can sense the opportunities created by this new Web 2.0 inspired target market. Properly leveraged, this could be a whole new customer base for Vorpal’s products. Eventually, this repackaging of team-specific “sports poppers” will lead Vorpal to a licensing deal with the NFL. But along the way, there are many organizational obstacles to be overcome. Hugo’s initial blog-driven “mashup” is not secure enough, or scaleable enough, to be easily utilized on a corporate level.

So, there are numerous technical and cultural chal-lenges involved here, and the narrative of Mashup Corporations takes us through Vorpal’s journey towards SOA effectiveness. But of course, there is a bigger issue to consider: if this SOA-driven project opens up a whole new market, how does a company encourage this kind of innovation on a broader level within their organiza-tion?

And how can this all be tied into the existing ERP technical environment and meet all the requirements for security and regulatory compliance? Creating a culture of innovation is not as easy or slick as it sounds. Jane Moneymaker is determined to get Vorpal down that road, but it’s not as simple as issuing a pronouncement from on high. She needs a different kind of buy in, and the specifics of how she and her team accomplished this feat are the real takeaways from the book.

Let’s take a closer look at some of the SOA tactics brought to life in Mashup Corporations.

1. Harness the Power of “Shadow IT” “Shadow IT” is the phrase used by the authors of Mashup Corporations to describe a new, wired genera-tion of employees who are, in some cases, better versed in new Web 2.0 technologies and platforms than the IT department itself. In most cases, these “Shadow IT” folks are Web-savvy, but are not actually a formal part of the IT department. “With every class of graduating students, a more tech-literate labor force emerges,” the authors note. “They bring with them new methodolo-gies and models for working that line up directly with service orientation.”

So how can this enthusiasm and Web savvy be built into the corporate landscape? We have to achieve buy-in from both sides: the “Shadow IT” folks need to be pulled into the corporate loop, but the CIO still needs

to feel like he or she is steering the ship. The way to do that? Create an evaluative process, managed by the IT leadership, that allows for employees to develop and submit services that are then assessed for business potential and technical feasibility.

The resistance to utilizing Shadow IT may come from more places than IT. SOA-driven changes upset the apple cart of any department that has a traditional “let’s use the older tools we already invested in” mental-ity towards Web-based projects. The authors of Mashup Corporations point out that the cost of ignoring Shadow IT is high: “Failure to embrace and support Shadow IT in the long run means wasted resources, an inability to maximize the value of your company’s collective candle-power, and lost opportunities.”

2. Don’t Wait to Do a Big SAP Upgrade - Build a Service Now

Mashup Corporations features many lively discussions between leaders with different agendas when it comes to maximizing SOA. One revealing exchange involves the CIO of Vorpal, Dave Lovecraft, who at one point suggests holding off on building any services until the full SAP ERP 2005 upgrade, which is a fully service-enabled release, is complete (we could substitute “ERP 6.0” as of this writing).

The authors’ response? Don’t wait! Implement a ser-vice now that can support a key business driver, and start building some bottom-line momentum for the SOA projects of the future. In Mashup Corporations, our impatient CEO doesn’t want to wait on the ERP upgrade to move ahead with SOA, primarily because by this point in the book, customer demand for the service-driven custom poppers has been established, and she doesn’t want to lose the interest of this new market.

In a moment of frustration, Moneymaker declares her intention to push ahead with services projects before the next ERP upgrade: “We need to get these services to people who need them and let our infrastructure play catch up. I don’t believe that the costs we’ll save

“If this SOA-driven project opens

up a whole new market, how does

a company encourage this kind of

innovation on a broader level?”

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4CIO Corner

will ever outweigh the opportunity cost of waiting six months – I think the negative impact of the delay is incalculable. How many times do I have to fight this battle?”, vents Moneymaker. She continues: “I’m not opposed to the upgrade – I understand why we need it, and why it will be worth it – but improving our system doesn’t get the highest value stuff in the hands of our people or our customers.”

As the book continues, the leadership team gets on the same page and Hugo’s service is officially moved from his blog to inside the corporate firewall. This does not mean Mashup Corporations advocates a kind of organizational anarchy where services are created across the company without central management or gover-nance. But the best way to start the path towards SOA is through a clear win that connects your company to customers or suppliers in new, value-added ways. The rest you can solve as your profit margin increases.

3. Cultivate “Disruptive Innovation” Along the Edges of Your Company

One of the most useful aspects of Mashup Corporations is its recommendations for how to utilize “disruptive innovation”. SAPtips readers have probably noticed that SAP has been emphasizing this hip phrase in recent conference keynotes. More than one NetWeaver™ product manager personally told me that they envision the specific role of “disruptive innovator” to become a standard part of SAP project teams. But the response from SAP customers is more hesitant. As one Basis manager told me, “I don’t want a disruptive innovator on my project team.”

There is obviously a disconnect here, but it’s a discon-nect that a close reading of Mashup Corporations can fix. The resistance to disruptive innovation comes from several angles. One is the image of someone acting in a cavalier manner without guidance from management. Another is the idea of disrupting core business processes that need to be stable and secure because they handle such a high transaction volume. Disrupting those kinds of transactions is a CIO’s worst nightmare.

But the kind of disruptive innovation advocated in Mashup Corporations is neither of these things. The authors present a methodology that will cultivate innovation by supporting “Edge IT”. Edge IT is all about putting SOA and Web 2.0 tools in the hands of those employees who are directly connected to the areas where such innovation will have an immediate ROI impact. We could call these “customer-facing” positions, though enhancing supplier relationships is just as valu-able. Either way, providing those in “outward-facing” roles with their own SOA building blocks is the key to harnessing Edge IT.

The “Edge” of IT also includes those who are not for-mally a part of an organization but who are still stake-holders with a vested interest in improving processes, such as high volume customers. “There’s untapped value in using an SOA to extend IT to the edges of your organization, and beyond,” write the authors, “even to your customers themselves – if there’s an opportunity to involve them in activities that create value for both sides.”

The lesson of Mashup Corporations is that if you encourage this kind of innovation “along the edges” and provide the people in those roles with re-usable services, Web 2.0 tools, and other SOA tools, they will come up with revenue-producing ideas that go outside the box but still fit into the overall business strategy. Vorpal’s custom-branded poppers, which started out as a mod-est service for the “Delta Rho Upsilon” fraternity, but eventually became a significant new business channel, are one such example.

I liked how the authors explained the collaborative power of this kind of innovation, and how the involve-ment of outside parties, in this case fraternity members, contributed to the organization’s collective business smarts. “Collaborating and working with your ecosys-tem of fellow travelers is a new corporate competence. As the young men of Delta Rho Upsilon prove, when it comes to discovering new market opportunities and galvanizing product opportunities, the more brains the better... Your company may know its existing customers well, but how can it possibly know all of its potential customers? Exposing a service offers opportunities to outsiders – including your customers – to impact and extend your business and theirs.”

4. Promote a Culture of Communication.When you look at the cultural changes advocated by Mashup Corporations, the common theme is com-munication – but not just across the boardroom table.

The best way to start is through

a clear win that connects your

company to customers or suppliers

in new, value-added ways.

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Indeed, the market potential of the custom popper would not have been realized if a mid-level marketing person had not felt comfortable running his idea up the food chain.

It’s common knowledge that poor communication chan-nels have a negative impact on morale. But now the stakes are even higher. As the authors point out, if you can’t pull your employees into the SOA conversation and leverage their use of Web 2.0 technologies, huge potential assets will never be developed. “The good news is that many of your employees have already cre-ated their own tools,” they write. “The bad news is that they are hiding them from you.”

The cultural changes required to foster an SOA-friendly environment and to lure out these new ideas are not simple. The authors acknowledge that their portrayal of Vorpal is an exceptionally smooth version of the SOA transition process. In every company, there will be political challenges posed by these projects that need to be anticipated and addressed – head on.

Perhaps we can tackle more of these change manage-ment themes in future editions of this column. But the lesson of Mashup Corporations is clear: SOA is not just a “nice to have”. It’s a key to competitive advantage, and it’s better to start down the road to SOA now than to chase your competition from behind.

The good news? The authors have found that once you start building services and pulling people in from the ERP project team to support processes that span departments, everything starts to click, and “the over-whelming logic of redesigning applications around busi-ness process flows gradually breaks down resistance.”

ConclusionSo Where Do You Start? In this early stage of SOA adoption, it’s apropos to conclude our article with “where do you begin?” We already talked about starting with a service that pro-vides a bottom line value and helps to build momentum for heavier SOA investments.

In terms of choosing that service, I’m going to leave the last word to SAP itself. During its “Best Practices in eSOA: Customer Insights and Experiences” presentation at SAPPHIRE 2007, SAP’s Christian Hastedt-Marck-wardt and Rudolf Hois used a series of customer case studies to emphasize a key point: your first SOA project should center around one important business driver. Examples of business drivers in SAP’s presentation

ranged from bringing acquisitions online faster (Valero) to cost reduction and cash flow improvement (GiSA), from customer-centricity (Standard Bank) to managing growth and value chain collaboration (Profine). (This presentation can be viewed online in the “Community” section of SAP.com – select Online Events >SAPPHIRE ‘07.)

So when it comes to SOA, there are plenty of places to begin. But if Mashup Corporations is any indica-tion, the starting point may well come from an excited “Shadow IT” employee who bursts into the office to show off a widget on his or her blog. The first response may be to laugh. The second response might be to take some careful notes. Business is changing, but listening to your constituents remains a constant.

I’d like to thank Mashup Corporation authors Paul Kurchina and Dan Woods for reviewing this article and providing their input. For more details on Mashup Corporations, including ordering information, go to MashupCorporations.com. All the profits from Mashup Corporations are donated to charity. Paul Kurchina’s next book, co-authored by Pat Kennedy of OSIsoft and Vivek Bapat of SAP, titled “In Pursuit of the Perfect Plant”, will be released in April of 2008.

Jon Reed, JonERP.com. Jon Reed is an independent SAP analyst who writes on SAP consulting trends. He is the President of JonERP.com, an interactive Web site that features Jon’s SAP Career Blog and his podcasts for SAP professionals. Jon has been publishing SAP career and market analysis for more than a decade, and he serves as the career expert for SearchSAP’s “Ask the Expert” panel. He is the author of the SAP Consultant Handbook. From 2003 to 2006, Jon was the Managing Editor of SAPtips. You may contact Jon at [email protected]. Be sure to mention the author’s name and/or the article title. ≈

“The good news is that many

of your employees have already

created their own Web 2.0 tools...

the bad news is they are hiding

them from you”


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4CIO Corner

Editor’s Note: So, you’ve got a Project Man-ager and a team all lined up, the project is a go, you’re ready to rock and roll—this should be smooth sailing from here on out, right? Ummm…not necessarily. If there’s one place that Murphy’s Law prevails—scratch that, make that RULES—it’s an IT project. CJ sums up the reality of why IT projects fail—including the realities of proj-ect planning for IT and the warning signs of when to drop and run.

The Plan Sounded Good“So what will this system do for me?” The beefy-looking CEO had heard the answer to this question several times over the past few months, but psychologically must have needed to hear it one more time. He was the final barrier in a series of hurdles for approval of a multi-million dollar informa-tion technology project. The sales team leader was cool and confident, going through the spiel one more time.

According to the plan, using this new technology would increase the accuracy of the data relied upon by the CEO’s sales force. It would take them less time to get the information, freeing them up to sell more. More time would mean more sales, which would mean more prof-its. By all accounts, this project was the way to increase business health.

The CEO eventually acquiesced. Everyone - the CEO, the Sales Team, even me - everyone thought it was a great decision. But this was more than fifteen years ago; my first multi-million dollar project. I had a lot to learn.

Bad Technology Decision?In the end, the project was not exactly a complete failure. The CEO continued to praise the system to the bitter end. The vendor installed the system and got paid. But I could see the disappointment in the eyes of the CEO. I felt the sinking feeling behind his sigh when he discovered the outcome wasn’t what he expected. I watched as the requirements magically modified to adjust from the-wished-for to the-possible. Eventu-

ally I reached the conclusion that the project had been doomed from the start.

Over the following two decades, I was to be involved in this cycle hundreds of times, both from the vendor side of the table and the buyer side of the table. I have seen spectacularly successful projects that returned multiples of the originally expected investment and contributed significantly to the long-term health of the business. Much more often, however, I’ve seen devastat-ing failures - projects that cost millions of dollars that achieved few or none of the designed objectives. These project failures either sickened the business and made it weaker, or (if the business was already weak) killed the business entirely.

Over time, I learned why the failures failed and the successful succeeded. I was able to discern, long before the project concluded, the factors that influenced the ones that triumphed. Unfortunately, there are still many decision makers who can’t tell the difference until it is too late.

Bad Technology Decisions Are CommonThe Standish Group, a technology project research firm, estimates that $130 billion has been wasted over the last two years on failed technology projects. Less than 16% of technology projects in mid-size companies, and less than 10% in large companies, fully succeed.

Maximizing Planning and Technology Usefor Business Health

By CJ Rhoads

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• Does the technology focus on improving the quality or quantity of products or services?

• Will the outcome lead to increased sales or services at better margins?

• Do we have a dedicated, hardworking, and well-man-aged project team?

• Is there a close and positive partnership between ven-dor and customer?

• Is there a close alignment between the people, process, and systems chosen?

If the CEO had asked the same question (“So what will this system do for me?”) of someone other than just the vendor, he might have recognized his own unreal-istic expectations before he invested millions. If he had listened to his own staff, he would have known that the problem he was trying to solve could not be solved with technology at all. If he had integrated his own people into the project team instead of relying entirely on the vendor, he would have been able to achieve much more alignment with the company goals with the project. Information technology cannot improve a poor process - only reengineering can do that. Information technol-ogy cannot process a inventory full of duplicates and incorrect items - it must be manually cleaned up before it will work. Information technology cannot make a judgment call - only a human being can do that.

Most importantly, once the CEO realized that the proj-ect was actually going to fall short of his expectations, instead of continuing to praise the system to save face, it would have been much smarter for him to admit the mistake, cut his losses, salvage what could be salvaged, and start on a new, better path. The FBI finally did so (albeit after 170 million dollars was wasted).

Businesses don’t stay healthy because they never have a failed project. Healthy businesses stay that way because they learn to recognize when a previously-thought-suc-cessful project is going bad. To ensure that projects don’t negatively impact our business health, our plan must allow for many “stop points” - moments in time when we make a continue/don’t continue decision. The key is to proceed only when the signs point to a suc-cessful project. If you know you are holding a bomb, continuing to hold onto it hoping that it won’t go off is not a good strategy. If you know that it’s a bomb, drop it! It always blows up; it’s just a question of when, and the earlier you drop it, the better your chances of avoid-ing an explosion.

One high profile example; the FBI revealed that they had spent 170 million dollars on a Virtual Case File project that they had to completely trash in 2006.

Reading about this and other projects, I realized a very important point. Often these projects are destined to fail before the first requirements document is even written.

Why do perfectly intelligent, hardworking, and dedi-cated people fail to plan and fail to make the right deci-sion? I believe the top five reasons are:

• Reliance on poor advice

• Proliferation of hype in the industry

• Lack of support within the company

• Lack of knowledge and experience with information technology

• Senior leader ego and internal politics

The shame of it is that failures are avoidable. Increased knowledge and proper planning will allow any decision maker to recognize the signs of a project-failure-in-the-making. Once you can recognize those signs, it is easy to invest only in the successes.

How To Properly PlanA realistic project plan run by a good project leader should answer the following questions before a single dollar is spent with a vendor:

• Is this technology a real solution to a real problem?

• Are the sources of information about this technology diverse and unbiased?

• Does this project benefit from support both from above (senior leaders) and below (line staff)?

If you know you are holding a

bomb, continuing to hold onto

it hoping that it won’t go off

is not a good strategy.

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Answer these questions several times throughout the life of the project:

• What changes have been forced upon the project plan based upon initially faulty knowledge?

• Is this technology still a real solution to a real prob-lem, or will it only solve part of the problem?

• Does the part that it will solve still have enough of a return that we should continue the project?

• Does this project still have support from above (senior leaders) and below (line staff)?

• Do we still have a dedicated, hardworking, and well-managed project team?

• Is there still a close and positive partnership between vendor and customer?

Too many negative answers to these questions means that the project has turned into a ticking bomb.

What About A Formal Project Plan?Almost 20 years ago, I taught project management for the Project Management Institute (PMI). I taught proj-ect management despite the fact that I was not actu-ally certified; but since they were just starting up their certification, there wasn’t anyone who was certified who could teach. I hugely respect PMI and believe that they have done much to codify best practices and ensure a common language for successful project manage-ment. But over the years and through experience, I also learned first hand some of the limitations of the for-malized method of project management. I now teach a graduate course in the College of Business at Kutztown University on planning for enterprise-wide large tech-nology projects, and what I teach is very different from the formalized methods I taught 20 years ago. Allow me to share some of the lessons that I learned.

Construction Project Management Principles Do Not Translate to Information Technology

Project Management principles such as those espoused by PMI work just fine when dealing with known enti-ties. You can use them effectively to build a house, create instructional tapes, put on a festival, or renovate your basement - thousands of projects. Where it falls apart is information technology.

Information Technology projects cannot be managed using traditional project management principles. Try-

ing do to so is a pure path of frustration. There are too many unknowns, too many immature processes. Let’s look at a typical conversation between a project man-ager (PM) and a software developer:

PM: My notes from last week say that you should be finishing the code for module 3 so John can start mod-ule 4 this week. How far along are you? Can you tell me when it will be finished?

Developer: I’m almost finished.

PM: So when will John be able to start his part?

Developer: When I’m finished.

PM: How long will it be until you are finished?

Developer: I don’t know.

PM: Well, I need to schedule John. If I schedule him to be here next week instead of this week, will that give you enough time to be finished?

Developer: Sure.

Next week, when John shows up to start and the Devel-oper is not yet finished:

PM: John is here to start module 4. How long will it be until you are finished?

Developer: I don’t know. I ran into a bug.

PM: Shall I reschedule John, or will you be finished by tomorrow?

Developer: I don’t know.

I’ve experienced this conversation with conscientious, hardworking developers who are willing to work into the night and over weekends to meet a deadline, so the problem is not laziness or incompetence. The problem is that technology projects are often dealing with issues that have never been faced before. Running into prob-lems with no known solution is very common. If you don’t know what the solution is, no matter how good you are, you can’t estimate how long it will take to solve the problem.

So How DO We Manage Technology Projects? Three things to keep in mind:

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First, recognize that the immaturity of information technology is working against us. Developers often can’t estimate progress accurately (if we can get them to esti-mate at all). Blaming the developer doesn’t help. What does help is to get deadlines instead of time estimates. Second, have multiple contingencies for every critical path. The question is not if something goes wrong; the question is which thing will go wrong and when. Once we know which thing will go wrong, what can we do about it and how can we plan ahead for it?

Third, recognize that features may have to be dropped to meet deadlines, and communicate this to the develop-er. That’s why we need frequent continue/don’t continue decision stop points; we always need to reevaluate the ROI on the project as the requirements change because they are rarely the same at the end of the project as they were in the beginning of the project.

Experienced information technology PMs understand the risky nature of information technology projects. They know they can’t manage the project as if they were building a house. It is only people outside the industry who have unrealistic expectations because when they think of project management, they envision a construc-tion project where the materials obey well-known physi-cal laws. In their minds, if something as complicated as a bridge can be done on-budget, on-time, and with a high enough quality that people will be safe driving across it, why can’t we build an information technol-ogy project using the same methodology? Someday, perhaps, we will be able to do so. But currently, the information technology field is not yet mature enough for that type of stability. We must learn to roll with the punches, and recognize the bombs when they start to tick.

Conclusion: Maximizing Planning and Technology UseIn the final analysis, to maximize planning and technol-ogy use, we must make sure the project has the prereq-uisite conditions necessary for success like full support and buy-in, and enough knowledge to understand how to implement the information technology. Once begun, we should re-evaluate frequently to ensure a positive outcome. Third, we can’t get freaked out when things don’t go as they planned, because they rarely do. Instead, we take the smart road and plan for all contin-gencies.

If our projects are planned well, they will be success-ful. Successful projects increase the strength and overall health of our business, allowing us to reap the benefits for years to come.

Dr. CJ Rhoads is a well-known guru, speaker, and author on how to make better decisions about business strategy and technology. Rhoads is the founder of ETM Associates, Inc., a Douglassville, PA, based enterprise technology management consulting firm (ETMAs-sociates.com). She’s also an Associate Professor in the College of Business at Kutztown University, as well as author of over a hundred published articles, dozens of manuals and whitepapers, and two forthcoming books. She can be reached at [email protected]. ≈


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