QUARTERLY 1

TOPIC OF THIS ISSUE:

2011: The year we made contact

NOT TO BE MISSED!!!

Q4 issue 2011

Continue reading the article by Susan Keohan on page 16

Continue reading the article by Martin Gillet on page 14

Inside Track IndiaBY SOMNATH MANNA, PAGE 8

Hunting for Better Processes

Joint task force of SAP, DSAG and Gregor Wolf tell you about the German way of doing the Custom-er Engagement Initiative in every day life. And they also report the results and achievements from the past. There is a lot to re-port here!

Read on page 4

Inside Track Washington

covered twice!

SAP_WIT, what have you do for me lately

Recent Washington IT is covered twice in this issue! Both authors - Tammy Powlas and Tridip Chakraborthy presented their sessions there, so you can feel the atmo-sphere from two different perspectives.

In the spring of 2010, some evil plans were put in place at the ASUG Annual Confer-ence, sometimes also known as Sapphire. A small and stealthy (but passionate!) group began to form, to ‘represent’ the underdogs of Business Process Management, the SAP Workflow developers. These developers are everywhere – enabling business processes that run on SAP systems to run faster, and better. But SAP Workflow was in mainte-nance-mode, meaning break-fix only. We had to do something about that!

Development byDesign

Development for SAP Business ByDesign is currently a hot and fre-quently discussed topic. How can you learn it and what are the reasons you should do so? This article provides some answers.

Read on page 10

Read on p. 7 and 19

While reading the article one could be mislead to think Professor Hasso Plattner does not know what the user exit is. But who would believe such a statement, right? Forgive us a joke.

ABAP the simple wayKISS: Keep it Simple because I’m StupidBY MICHELLE CRAPO, PAGE 12

Mentors` mentorsBY ABESH BHATTACHARJEE, P. 3

Dear reader,the Mentors Quarterly team and myself, also in the name of all the contributors,

would like to thank you for your interest in our articles. It is exactly a year now when we issued the first Quarterly and then four regular issues have come this year. We hope we made you think, we made you laugh, maybe even taught you something. It`s been a pleasure. We had a lot of fun putting this paper together for you. We wish you Marry Christmas, personal as well as professional success in the coming year and we hope you will have fun reading Quarterly again. Otto Gold

QUARTERLY2

HOW I FEEL ABOUT IT #SAPMQ4 2011

To me, being a Mentor means much more

It means much more than I can describe in one sentence. Here is an attempt:

An amazing group of people that I am humbled to be a part of

• A support system of smart and caring people

• Mentor values• SAP experts• Access to SAP executives at

SAPPHIRE NOW and SAP TechEd• The opportunity to learn from

the best• Celebrating winners at Inno-

jam/Demojam• A professional and personal

network• Pride• And I could go on…

But let me begin from the start...

While working for SCN for three years, I had the privilege of getting to know many of the mentors on-line, via their blogs, phone calls and projects on SCN. In addition, we got to to know each other in person at the SAPPHIRE NOWs and SAP TechEds in the USA and EMEA.

I had always admired this group for their skill set but also their spirit. For such a diverse group, there is incredible team spirit, and many shared values (without acting ex-clusive).

In my job for SCN, I was respon-sible for organizing the expert net-working sessions in the Clubhouse at TechEd, but I could no longer support this activity when I moved into a new role in the social media area. Always up for some good fun

and challenging the "authorities", a few mentors decided to start a #NataschaToTechEd campaign on Twitter and SAP Idea Place. They actually managed to get Mark Yol-ton, the head of SCN, to pay for my trip, and to convince my manager to let me go :-). (THANK YOU!)

Year of 2011That was in 2010, and this spring

I became a proud SAP Mentor. It really was an amazingly happy day in my life! I am the first mar-keting person to be bestowed with this honor and I take it seriously. From day one, I've been thinking about how I can make a contribu-tion to the group.

The Influencer Summit

The most recent example of men-tor “power” for me was the Influ-encer Summit.Organizing and ob-serving the social media activity for

One SAP Mentor’s Views on the Wolfpack

the event from “the inside”, it is obvi-ous that the key Tweets of the event came from many SAP Mentors.

As I followed the Tweet stream #SAPSummit, I was amazed by how much insight many of the mentors added when commenting on what was going on at the event.

Gaps were filled, questions asked and conclusions drawn. Once again, it was also clear that the mentors were having a good time getting together in Boston. I dialed in to a Connect session with Raj Nathan and the mentors, and the spirits were surely high.

I wish every SCN member a won-derful Holiday Season and New Year 2012! Health, happiness, wisdom and a lot of fun lie ahead of us and I look forward to sharing a lot of it with you all!

Read more and see great pictures here: http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/27426

Natascha Thomson

This is the official description of an SAP Mentor: "SAP Mentors are the top community influencers of the SAP Ecosystem. Most of the ~100 mentors work for customers or partners of SAP. All of them are hands-on experts of an SAP product or service, as well as excellent champions of community-driven projects.“

Natascha Thomson and Gregor Wolf at TechEd.

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MENTORS´ MENTORS#SAPMQ4 2011

I first met Dipankar Saha in a hot and dimly lit hostel room at the Re-gional Engineering Col-lege, Tiruchirappalli, TN sometime in 1999. I was just a “fresher” in my first year of my college and he was in his third year of the course. Everyone in the room, irrespective of their age was referring to him with his nickname “Jethu” which literally means “Pa-ternal Uncle” in my mother tongue Bengali but contex-tually “a responsible and caring person”. Over the next twelve years I would understand exactly why.

He was one of the few who had a desktop in his hostel room, a luxury at that time and I would go into his room irrespective of the time of the day or night and play games or just look at him develop something cool. It was then when the first seeds of developing something new with code were un-knowingly sowed in my heart. I work as an archi-tect now but the joy that I derive just from writing code is sometimes quite baffling to me as well.

When it came to person-al traits and temperament we were and still are poles apart. Dipankar is gener-ally quiet, gentle and puts a lot of thought before putting something into action and I completely the opposite, short fused and impulsive. But over the years I think a tiny little bit of his nature has rubbed off on me. I now put a little more thought

analysis of the situation, the various options at my disposal to deal with it and the pros-cons of each. But that’s it. When I ask him given the choices what’s the path he’d have taken he always patient-ly explains that it is I in the end who would have to take the final decision

and then leave it at that. Taking a decision, after that, is generally not too difficult.

Even in my professional life I’ve sort of shadowed him. First in SAP Labs In-

It was then when the first seeds of developing something new with code were unknowingly sowed in

my heart....

before I open my mouth or do something. When-ever I am stuck in a prob-lem either in my personal and professional life I can trust him to come up with an extremely objective

dia where he helped me pick up nuances of the vast world that is SAP and then SAP MII (Manufactur-ing Integration and Intel-ligence) and then I even-tually followed him into IBM as well. Changes are difficult but I have never felt more at home because he’d made it easy for me

both personally and pro-fessionally. So when he got an offer to author the first ever book on SAP MII, he pulled me in too!!!

I owe a very large part of what I am today to him, to the extent, my parents ask me to consult him before I take any major decision. We have our fights too but he always wins in the end. It’s difficult to bulldoze through his practicality and logic most, heck, ev-ery time !

Today Dipankar is not only my Mentor but a men-tor to a lot of others, both in the organisation as well as in the SAP Community. I can’t wait for the day when my kid grows up and starts calling him “Jethu”.

Abesh Bhattacharjee

When you owe for a large part of what you`re today...

Two geeks in suits at the very first community day in Bangalore

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#SAPMQ4 2011CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

The focal point of the Sales & Mar-keting DSAG special interest group lies on implementing business pro-cesses for sales and marketing with-in the Business Suite solutions SAP Customer Relationship Management (SAP CRM) and within the SD com-ponent of SAP ERP. Within the many different subject areas involved, such as campaign and marketing planning, target group selection and key account management, the main focus lies on the continuous improvement of existing SAP solu-tions. It is here where the special interest group benefits from the Continuous Improvement initiative (CI). “Continuous Improvement”, the term commonly used among DSAG members, is officially called “Customer Connection” within SAP.

It was one of the first committees to be chosen as a pilot for CI. Gregor Wolf, acting spokesman for the Sales & Marketing special interest group, said of the initiative: “We have been extremely impressed by the first re-sults, not least because some of our suggestions for making improve-ments have already been realized.”

The majority decides the topics

Anyone wishing to make sugges-tions towards continuous improve-ment must be willing to implement the resulting functionality within their own IT system, as well as to test that it has the requested func-tionality, and when that is fulfilled to use it productively. At least five companies must be willing to use

a particular function productively in order for SAP to consider imple-menting it. “Having five parties supporting a topic is vital in order to avoid developing outside of the customers’ needs. The more people there are supporting a proposal, the more confident we can be that the chosen topic is the right one,” explains Chris Fastabend, product manager at SAP AG. After overcom-ing this hurdle, the experts at SAP must then check to see whether the functionality can be realized as part of continuous improvement and downported to previous releases.

Pool for collecting improvements

During the initial pilot phase, top-ics were still collected using the spe-cial interest group’s DSAGNet forum. Since early 2011, the “Idea Place” which can be found within the SAP Community Network has been used as a pool for collecting all improve-ment requests. While the Customer Connection section of the Idea Place is available to all SAP user groups, there is a spe-cial DSAG area re-served for DSAG members alone. Interested members can be given access to this DSAG area by send-

Hunting for Better Processes Continuous Improvement experiences in the Sales & Marketing special interest group

The Sales & Marketing special interest group was one of the pilots for the new SAP and DSAG initiatives that deal with the continuous improvement of shipped products. Its recipe for success: The more companies come forward to input their thoughts and proposals, the quicker all SAP customers will benefit from new functionality.

The Sales & Marketing Special interest groupWith 1300 members in its ranks, the committee aims to facilitate

the inten-sive exchange of information and experience within the highly-varied and highly-complex world of sales and marketing busi-ness processes in field sales and inside sales. The special interest group enables process flows to be mapped more efficiently and with greater simplicity within SAP and also works on improved system usability. The SAP Customer Relationship Man-agement (SAP CRM) Business Suite solutions and the SD component of SAP ERP lie at the centre of these activities.

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CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT#SAPMQ4 2011

ing an e-mail containing their SAP Service Marketplace user ID to the central e-mail address ideaplace@dsag.de.

In Gregor Wolf’s opinion, “the Idea Place is a very good idea,” however there is still room to improve it even further. Continuing in more detail, the acting spokesman explains: “Ini-tially, this input channel as a whole was simply not acceptable.” Many of its teething troubles have since been ironed out, however. Improved navigation, clearer templates and the introduction of far simpler in-put options have all improved the acceptance of the tool significantly – which is not to say that no more improvements are needed. “It is still not possible to see the status of an idea to see the current progress of individual topics,” Gregor Wolf ad-mits openly. The process should be able to be traced all the way from submitting the idea, the SAP review-ing phase, the “Coming Soon“ phase featuring a clear indication of the progress and status, right through to when it has the status “Delivered”. Furthermore, it would be very help-ful to see whether the improvement is to be shipped as an SAP Note or as part of a Support Package.

Stability is priority number one

Different criteria are used to de-termine whether or not the topics submitted to SAP via the Idea Place are short-listed for implementation. “We start by evaluating the idea from an architectural perspective. In other words, we check whether the requested change can be made to the existing system without any risks being involved, and whether

it can be downported to older re-leases. In all cases, ensuring and maintaining the stability of the exist-ing releases is our top priority,” ex-plains Chris Fastabend. In the ideal scenario, relatively small changes are made available using SAP Notes. Modifications that are more exten-sive are occasionally delivered as part of a Support Package. This lat-ter category was used in the case of Marketing Permission Management, for example, an area involving the

Results of the Continuous Improvement InitiativeCentral Edit Button, SAP Note: 1602520One hit display, SAP Note: 1658819Product enhancement: Field historyAvailable in CRM 7.0 for simple value help fields. Cannot be used with

older versionsProduct enhancement: Display key valueSupport Package: SAPK-60012INCRMUIF, SAPK-70008INWEBCUIF SAP Note 1486503 is available, however a Support Package is a pre-

requisiteProduct enhancement: MarkersSAP Note: 1554307Product enhancement: Open transaction / accountAvailable as of CRM 7.0. Cannot be used with CRM 2007Product enhancement: APA transaction text formattingAvailable as of CRM 7.0 EhP1. Cannot be used with older versionsProduct enhancement: APA field focusingAvailable as of CRM 7.0 EhP1. Cannot be used with older versions

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#SAPMQ4 2011

permissions granted by customers for receiving marketing measures. These permissions must fulfil the legal requirements in each case: if customers refuse permission to be sent marketing material, companies must comply with this at all costs. The processes here should affect how master data is modeled, and should go so far as to impact target group segmentation and campaign activities. Another item on the agen-da is to improve integration between CRM and order man-agement in SAP ERP. Further topics to be tackled in the future include user guidance and improvements within the service area, as well as simplifying segmen-tation options within customer care.

New functions can be activated or deactivated

Leaving future improvements aside for one moment and reverting back to the enhancements that have al-ready been made, we find enhance-ments like SAP Notes 1602520 and 1658819, for instance. These im-provements implemented the mea-sures “Central Edit Button” and “One Hit Display” by the end of the second quarter of 2011, and falls under the category of usa-bility. “Before now, if a user looked up an object and the system found only one hit, the user

then had to click the link that was displayed within the re-sults list. In future, the system will instantly dis-play the unique hit along with its de-tailed information,” says Gregor Wolf, outlining its advantages. Thanks to another improvement in SAP CRM 7.0, an entire document can now be switched to change mode with just one click. Until now, users had to re-peat this action for every single as-signment block within a document. Both of these functions are available as of SAP CRM 2007 (6.0) SP 06 and can be implemented by calling trans-action SNOTE. Like all features that are inte-grated into a product using continuous improvement, these func-tions can be switched on or off – after all, not all users will need to use these options. As well as the suggestions submitted by DSAG, SAP is also im-plementing improvements requested by many customers in the area of Territory Management and MS Out-look and Lotus Notes integration.

Make your choice and vote for it!

“As part of our special interest group, we have decided to create dedicated DSAG areas – one for CRM and one for ERP SD – in the DSAG section inside the Idea Place. We would like to use these areas to collect topics which can then be voted for and put forward as poten-

tial continuous im-provement proj-ects,” Gregor Wolf continues. The first task is to encourage companies to get involved in the initiative and to actively use the Idea Place – only then will SAP initiate further con-tinuous improvement projects. The course of action recommended by Chris Fastabend is brief and to the point: “Make your choice and vote for it,” he appeals. Looking at the topics that have already been im-plemented in the CRM area shows that the initiative is already prov-ing very successful, which is why even those who are not in-volved in the Sales & Marketing special interest group should feel encour-aged to submit their topics to the DSAG section within the Idea Place. “Show that you are also interested, add your vote to support the sug-gestions that have been made – and submit your own ideas. It’ll be worth it!” rallies Gregor Wolf, ap-pealing to fellow members to show their support for the continuous improvement initiative run by SAP and DSAG.

Author: Thomas Kircher, DSAGInterviewed: Gregor Wolf,

Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH and Chris Fastabend, SAP AG

P.S.: We thank DSAG for the trans-lation of the article. We invite you to follow DSAG`s Twitter account.

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

QUARTERLY 7

INSIDE TRACK DC#SAPMQ4 2011

To get in the Ronald Reagan build-ing you have to go through security and a metal detector. The floors are secured, so I was fortunate that Tri-dip Chakraborthy recognized me in the lobby and we made it up to the SAP Labs floor. Good start.

We had many nice pieces on schedule so let me introduce them with their topics briefly:

SAP Mentor Martin Lang spoke about how SAP Runs SAP with mobile technology. He showed the Playbook, and offered to help any-one in the room with their compa-ny’s mobile device technology. He gave some interesting demonstra-tions of the new augmented reality tools that SAP has. Does this sound like the new virtual reality?

We were fortunate also to be joined by SAP Mentor and Director of Community Advocacy Marilyn Pratt. Marilyn asked each of us around the room to introduce ourselves and discuss our involvement with SAP Community Network. Many said they were not active on “SDN” but she explained it is now “SCN”. She also provided a preview of the “New SCN coming next year”.

As Marilyn’s birthday was around the corner John Astill surprised Marilyn with flowers, birthday card and a birthday cake. The SAP Com-munity ROCKS!

Tridip had a Q&A session with the product team on “where is Procure-ment heading”. While I did not at-tend this session in person I spoke with many attendees in the hallway who said it was one of the best Question and Answer sessions they have attended.

SAP Mentor Rich Heilman showed a live demonstration of NetWeaver BPC 10.0 and the Excel add-ins that come with it. Special thanks to Rich Heilman for all of his Adobe Con-nect help and support during the many sessions.

Inside Track Washington DC SAP Inside Track Washington DC was held December 2nd at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington DC. It was headed up by SAP Mentor and SAP TechED DemoJam Madrid winner John Astill. And John was a generous host (did you know his cube has a sign that says “will code for food”).

SAP Mentor Greg Myers discussed the politics of upgrades. He said you needed a project champion, a “pitcher” to explain the project to higher-ups, how you need to make the business analyst “your friend” to overcome fears of change.

Next up was Derek Loranca dis-cussing trends in learning BI and how the FREE online learning is available on the SAP Community Network. People who attended commented afterwards that they did not know this material was available on SCN.

The end of the day celebration included pizza and discussion sur-rounding great videos found on jd-od.com

Special thanks to John Astill and all the speakers at SAP Inside Track DC! Check also the Wiki and/or the blog by John Astill about the event.

Tammy Powlas

Check the event Tweetdoc: http://www.tweetdoc.org/View/30928/SAP-Inside-Track-

Sneak into the Ronald Reagan building with its high security was part of the fun!

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INSIDE TRACK INDIA #SAPMQ4 2011

Finally the day arrived for a com-bined SAP Inside Track India simulta-neously taking place at Bangalore & Kolkata (along with remote present-ers from Europe, North America).

People, Place and Passion

The event details along with pho-tos can be found in this blog by Di-pankar, Koustav and Satyanaraya-na so this article is not going to talk about that. Instead we shall focus on some other aspect of the event which now-a-days is gaining importance. First highlight was the power of 3P – People, Place and Passion that made the event hap-pen. Most of attendees came in

through word of mouth (thanks to @singhkumud) at Bangalore and Dipankar at Kolkata. In addition Jim Spath (@jspath55) spread the word through Twitter and blog. Al-most all attendees were new to this kind of an event (there was none who attended last year’s event) and many did not know what to expect but they decided to give it a shot in pursuit of knowledge and networking opportunity.

Those brave enough to speak in public

The second point was those brave few took on the challenge to speak and present publicly at the event. For Kumud Singh and Jansi Rani Mu-

rugesan at Bangalore and Sangeeth Parvatam at Kolkata, presenting at SIT India was almost first time pre-senting in public (outside work of course). The other presenters Nilay Ghosh from IBM Kolkata and Sudip-ta Shankar Dasgupta from SAP Labs Bangalore are seasoned profession-als having prior experience present-ing before larger audiences be it TechEd or client meetings. Congrat-ulations to the Bravehearts! Surely they would remember this experi-ence for a long time and it would boost their confidence tremendous-ly. Hope to see them active in terms of Blogging in SCN and present (or motivate others) at future SAP In-side Track or such events.

Moments to remember from Inside Track India 2011Multiple locations, one awesome event!!

Now seems to be the season of SAP Inside Track events all over the world. In past few weeks there has been back to back SITs at Brazil, Brussels, Netherlands, Washington DC, Istanbul and India. Last year we had the first ever SAP Inside Track at Bangalore and this year we planned to make it bigger. So when we started planning for the event, along with Bangalore, Kolkata was the other location where Dipankar is based.

Bangalore attendees

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#SAPMQ4 2011 INSIDE TRACK INDIA

CodeExchange showcase

The third highlight of the event was presentation by SAP Mentors – Gregor Wolf and Thomas Jung showcasing Code Exchange proj-ects and future enhancements in Netweaver Business Client respec-tively. Both Gregor and Thomas showed some cool stuff and most of the audience being ABAPers themselves got hooked. In fact few of them had been following Code Exchange projects and they were simply awed sitting in a presenta-tion by the owners / architects of the project.

C5 on air againThe final highlight was almost re-

peat from last year where C5 team presented their work. This year we had roundtable discussion with Jon Reed, Leonardo De Araujo and Martin Gillet giving their perspec-tive of new technologies that SAP has brought about but most impor-tantly what that means for common developers, consultants like most in the audience. What skills should they focus for, how to ensure their experience does not obsolete and more importantly how they can ride ahead leveraging their current ex-perience in this fast changing SAP world. There was a solid discussion

with good many questions asked by the participants (almost rapid fire mode) making the job of the Mod-erator challenging yet the outcome of the 45 minutes of discussion was very fruitful.

Community spiritSo net net the feedback from par-

ticipants was from being amazing, simply great event, getting to know like minded people beyond your or-ganisation and in some cases within your own organization, visibility to SCN Community and SAP Mentors in particular thanks to their remote sessions and local presence at both locations. But one big takeaway was one pre-senter who pointed out these kind of event actu-ally helps build the bridge from one TechEd to an-other as one year is a long time with so much of technology flux going on. To the point we ended the event just in time to go back home and see @vsikka tweet about Suc-cessFactor acquisition that opened a flurry of tweets.

Kolkata attendees

arrange venue, lunch at Bangalore, to all presenters, SAP Press for book sponsorship which were given away to presenters and a lucky person at each location along with discount coupon to all and of course Aslan for supporting behind the scenes. Special mention to some Bangalore attendees who stayed back to made a quick video for Jim plus presenters and wished happy birthday to Mari-lyn Pratt.

More details about the event ses-sions and recordings can be found in SIT India 2011 Wiki page.

Somnath Manna

Thanks to Ramkrishnan Parthasarathy from SAP Labs Bangalore for help Lucky draw winner Suvonkar Bashak

QUARTERLY10

DEVELOPMENT BYD #SAPMQ4 2011

Development byDesign

Development for SAP Business ByDesign is currently a hot and frequently discussed topic. How can you learn it and what are the reasons you should do so? This article provides some answers.

SAP’s recent enterprise solution for small and medium businesses, SAP Business ByDesign (BYD), is gaining traction. The On-Demand solution has brought along an all-new software development kit (SDK) and programming languages. It’s time for a brief introduction and a pointer to further ressources.

Why should I careWhy you should care? The num-

ber of BYD customers is grow-ing exponentially. The solution is

young and gives room for custom add-ons. The recently launched SAP Store (http://store.sap.com/public) provides a platform to eas-ily market and sell your solutions world-wide and, at the same time, a stimulating buying experience for potential customers. And last but not least, rumors say that the SDK will eventually become the common platform to develop not only for BYD, but also for other SAP On-Demand solutions, such as Sales OnDemand that share BYD’s

platform – same environment, just other business objects…

The SDK, coined “BYD Studio”, is built upon Microsoft Visual Studio (second part of that blog) as the IDE. It allows the development of custom add-ons and supports the process of deploying builds to the SAP-hosted runtime infrastructure. With the current release 3.0, SAP deliveres a variety of new features and a boost in stability and perfor-mance to the SDK. And given the pace of improvements since my first hands-on experiences in November 2009, it will not take long for more features to be delivered.

What languages do I have to speak

There are three separate pro-gramming languages: BODL (for business objects), ABSL (for busi-ness logic) and SAPRuby (for the UI). Yes sir, no more ABAP or Java. But don’t be afraid, those new lan-guages are rather simple to learn.

The first important fact to know: there are no classes - only business objects. And as they don’t offer static methods, you always need a business object instance to execute your code, which requires some re-thinking.

Secondly, there is no direct data-base access. If you want to retrieve any data, you have to use queries and get back business object in-stances.

Thirdly, there is no inheritance. In-

Many of our readers are hardcore ABAPers (does Javers make any sense to you by the way?), but with ByDesign new opportunities are coming. That`s why you can understand the pictures around as an illustration of the ByD “hello world!” application. This picture show the “final application”at runtime. check others for the development steps and languages.

General overview and “Hello World!” for the ABAP and Java folks

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DEVELOPMENT BYD#SAPMQ4 2011

stead, the SDK offers associations, which reduces the number of run-time data at a given time. For exam-ple, consider the three business ob-jects business partner, customer, and supplier. With inheritance, all three would contain the same basic data (name, address, …). In BYD, only business partner contains such ba-sic data, while the other two objects have an association to it. For me per-sonally, this was the biggest change I had to get used to when designing an application architecture.

Here is another example. Prod-ucts can be used in Sales Orders. Now imagine you want to create a Product Bundle that can be used in a Sales Order just like a single Product. With inheritance, this is straightforward: Product Bundle would inherit from Product. So, how do you do that with associations? Remember that you cannot sim-ply add your new object to a Sales Order, as it is not of type Product. Instead, you have to modify Sales Order first to accept your new ob-ject. This might seem complex and time-consuming, but is actually an advantage with respect to security. What if behavior of your new object is exactly not what the developer of Sales Order assumed?

After getting used to these three key facts, development with the

SDK is easy. Thanks to numerous wizards, e.g. to auto-generat UI’s, approval tasks, data sources, re-ports, or even web services, devel-opment is also very fast.

Where should I go from here

So where to look out for further information? As the SDK is current-ly available to selected “Solution Partners” only, the main source of information, the SAP Business Cen-ter (http://sme.sap.com), is only available to eligible users. However, there are alternative ressources available. I recommend Thomas Schneider’s book “SAP Business ByDesign Studio – Application De-

velopment” (ISBN 1592293670) in case you are interested and don’t have access to the business center. Also, check out Jon Reed`s blog and podcasts (http://www.jonerp.com and also my own blog on SCN (http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/u/252132092).

I am also planning to launch a ByDesign development website with tutorials and how-to’s. If you are interested in joining forces, please send me an email or contact me via twitter (@andeiss).

I am proud to be part of SAP’s cutting-edge technology and hope I can motivate many more people to develop for BYD and to create a large and vivid community.

Andreas Eissmann

BODL (Business Object Description Language) is used to define business objects (e.g. ServiceOrder, Employee, Customer etc.), which is typically the first step in the development process. The object-oriented language is syntactically similar to C# or other high-level programming languages.

After writing the BODL part, you have to activate the business object and create scripts for your actions and (if desired) for events. You do this with Advanced Business Script Language.

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ABAP THE KISS WAY #SAPMQ4 2011

OOP is SimpleNo I don’t think OOP and structural programming are

so different. I don’t even begin to think I’m the best at OOP. In fact I’m probably near the bottom. SO --- This should help. I’m learning with you.

OOP Michelle Style I forget about the big words inheritance, friends,

polymorphism, and encapsulation. Throw those out the window. They just seem to make everything harder. It sounds kind of scary.

I think about your structured programming. Start-of-selection.Perform load_data.End-of-selection.Form load_data.Select from into itab.Select join into itab2.Select..Endform.

The dataWhat could be simpler than that? I am pulling data

into internal tables to use later in my program. Of course I will be using them for a purpose. Now I take a step back and think:

]I’m selecting:• from s022 – Order Operation Data for Work Center• From Jest – Order status• From AUFK – Order Master data• Mara – Material Master Data• Marc – Plant Data for Material• from mch1 - BatchesAnd so there are certain records I need from each

group of tables. So what would happen during my structural programming? I would slowly test my se-lects. I may have some records I expect to get back, I may have a number of records, I may have some selects. Sounds easy right? Of course. It’s structural piece of cake.

Data is used – how?Now let’s look at this from a different way. And yes

all of you OOP perfectionist out there, you should probably look at the program as a whole write out your linkages, etc. Ah but I’m just starting and want things simple.

• from s022 – werks, arbpl, matnr, aufnr, rstze, beaze, gstrs, mgvrg, ruest, bearz, meinh, charg

• From Jest – OBJNR, stat, inact• From AUFK – AUFNR, objnr, werks• Ltbk –aufnr werks lgnum, • Ltak – lgnum benum kquitfrom • from mch1 – mara charg vfdat

Classes based upon usageSo easy I would have 6 different classes, one method

each to pull the data. Right? No. But it still is easy just different. I would look at the data and think about what it is used for. I’m creating a VERY simple program for ordering the manufacturing of orders.

• S022 gives me the order operation• Jest tells what status the order is on• AUFK – pull in the objnr that will be used with jest• Mch1 – gets the expired date• LTBK – Gets the transfer requirement• LTAK – Get the Transfer order

So now I know the data and what it is used for. I did the same type of thing with a structured program. YES! Still looking easy to me.

• S022, JEST, and AUFK are order type tables (ZCL_Something)

• MCH1 – Material expiration date (ZCL_Some-thing2)

• LTBK and LTAK – are Transfer order/requirement tables. (ZCL_Something3)

AH HA! I have before me 3 classes. I would create all three classes with a constructor method for each. This can be called multiple times, and so the construc-tor will be set up with the following:

ABAP the simple way

That’s my motto and always has been. And so, when I started writing about ABAP objects instead of my old tips and tricks routine, I was shocked! So many people do not think this is KISS. Why I ask myself? It’s breaking things down to the most basic level. That’s what I do when I code anyway. Write a piece of code, test it, then write some more, until gradually I have a working program. This is when I don’t use objects. So is it really that big of a difference?

KISS – Keep it Simple because I’m Stupid

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ABAP THE KISS WAY#SAPMQ4 2011

Returning EO_Something type ref to ZCL_somethingAll the fields will be parameters in these classes.

Great each constructor will pull in the data I need for all of the tables based upon parameters passed in. NOW I can test. I can test each one as I create them. Sound good?

Create the main class!Now I need the main class: Z_manufacture_ordersI have a main class, I have methods that pull the

data. Yes – I think these would be my normal forms. But what are you doing with those attributes?

Get_Open_Manu_OrdersGET_EXPIRE_DATEGet_Open_TOWrite_open_orders.

Let’s take an example of get_open_manu_orders method. The parameter would be a returning EO_OPEN_ORDERS type ref to ZCL_Something. This meth-

od will return all the attributes in the form of an object. Oh no! Not an Object.

During the get_open_orders method will retrieve the open orders returning a table. That table will be used with an ALV in write_open_orders.

Mmmmm… This is just returning. What about pass-ing the data into the method. Well classes have special methods that run first each time you create the object. Those methods are constructors. We have been using them. So I can put my selection fields I need as param-eters into the object. So I create the constructor class and put in my parameters. As a personal preference I move those fields to an attribute in the class, Z_manu-facture_orders via the method constructor.

Now I can test my method to get_open _manu_orders by using the test button. Wow! I know I can get those orders by the object returned. You would do something similar for each method.

Finally the programSo let’s go back to the program. In my case it may

still be a structured program.Begin-of-selection.Create your object – automatically run the constructor.Data: go_orders type ref to z_manufacture_orders.Data: go_manu type ref to ZCL_Something.Create go_order( Exporting charg = lv_charg ).

Now I have access to all the open orders for the batch I sent to GO_ORDER. Cool huh? My internal table really becomes the object.

And easy as that you have created your first object. Now you can use the methods in that object.

And so let’s use the method we created.Data:g o_something type ref to zcl_something.gO_something = Go_order-> get_open_orders( ).Go_something->write_open_orders

Now I have access to all the attributes in ZCL_SOME-THING. Yes! O_something in this case it is pulling the

open orders and then writing them. You could put methods in between. What if you wanted to delete_all_orders_with_to.

Later you may find you have used that same class get_open_Manu_orders in many different programs. To change it you now have one place. Those who com-pare a function module to a class? Well I would have to say polymorphism, inheritance, and encapsulation. And that is not the point of this article. The point is to show how easy it is to create and use OOP.

There are a lot of reasons to start working in objects. Don’t let them scare you away. It’s just a different way of thinking. OOP can be simple, easy to understand and straight forward. The words don’t really matter much until you want to move forward with your program-ming. Then the words may be good, but the under-standing has to be there.

Michelle Crapo

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OUR LEADERS #SAPMQ4 2011

What is it that you do ?Have you ever had this feeling it

is nearly impossible to explain what your daily job is ?

Well being a SAP consultant, it’s not an easy thing to explain to fam-ily or close friends. I usually settle for a cheap explanation such as I’m working on computer and in an IT department. No way I can keep at-tention with the standard explana-tion of ‘What does a SAP Consul-tant do ?’ Well First you would have to explain what is SAP then what is consulting…

This year… my life just got a little bit easier regarding the explana-tion of my daily job as I met, along with the SAP mentors peers Hasso Plattner….

Where it all began…

Once upon a time at DKOM

This year, thanks to the SAP Mentors, I was fortunate to be in-vited to the SAP Developer Kick Off Meeting (DKOM) in Germany. Al-though it is an internal event with many non disclosure agreements, we were fortunate to make an en-counter.

Professor Hasso Plattner made a very inspirational speech during that event. Hasso Plattner is for me like my first encounter with my Mac Computer at 10 years old or my first encounter with Bill Gate’s products… These brilliant minds are setting the bar very high at many

levels such as entrepreneurship, creativity vision and inspiration. I was just overwhelmed to be in the same room as Hasso Plattner, and technically breath the same air as him.

One sentence that struck me is that Hasso Platter underligned ‘We need more fun at SAP!’.

I’m a privileged community mem-ber of the extended family also known as SAP Mentors and I do trust that having fun in what we do not only makes the daily life easy but also strengthen our creativity and team player attitude.

I was attending Hasso Plattner’s speech with SAP Mentors col-

leagues and I said, let’s walk to Hasso Plattner once he’s getting down from stage. Of course it was a bet as many said, we’ll never make it; because of his ‘entourage’ and busy schedule… ‘No guts no glory’… or like my Mom would have said ‘If you don’t try, how would you know, besides, all you risk is to have No for an answer’…

So we all walked to Hasso Platt-ner in a mini wolfpack and… we made contact… we introduced the SAP Mentors… and highlighted the fact that we were fun:))… and that we also had, besides nice jerseys, stickers… Hasso Plattner picked one and hold it… for the picture…

The year we made contactStory about an experience that nearly every man working with SAP would like to live

Well, it’s been awhile since I promised a little word about the encountering with Hasso Plattner. I finally take a moment to wrap it up in a nutshell.

SAP Mentors meet SAP executives at Sapphirenow

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OUR LEADERS #SAPMQ4 2011

‘I stop at every user exit’… (he was mumbling ‘What am I holding… ?’ then look at the sticker and said ‘What the heck is a user exit ?’….

We exchanged a few words all to-gether but most important we made contact and engaged that day.

I bet like my Mentor mates, there was many more things or topics we would have loved to discussed but we were not prepared or rather we were speechless… we were standing in front or a brilliant mind, one amongst the one who gave birth to a great product know as Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing…

The event went on… with our hearts and minds filled of this unique moment….

Sequel! At Sapphirenow!

Our Wolfpack leader Mark Finnern pursued Hasso Plattner assistants to get a time slot so a greater num-ber of Mentors could actually also meet face to face Hasso Plattner and get inspired in real time … I

do believe that our first encounter at DKOM helped and I’m glad things worked so well at the end… Mentors got over 80’ of Hasso Plattner with a great number of Mentors… Some people just wait their whole career to

be sitting in room… and there we were in a private meeting with such a distinguish individual ! We all got the chance to engage in different themes, sometimes laughing out loud… like when Hasso Plattner

was appointed honorary SAP Men-tors bearing number 007. Many other anecdotes would remain but we having neither the place in this article to list all of them or the op-portunity to reveal insights from this private moment of clarity….

ConclusionThe lesson learned is that no mat-

ter how important and how much impression one can do to you, nev-er hesitate to engage with someone you admire and/or you are inspired from. Like my Mom used to say ‘They have two arms and two legs like you’… go for it.

If you are attending SAP events like Sapphirenow and Teched, you might be fortunate to run into such brilliant individuals on the show floor and demo pods.

Martin Gillet

Like my Mom used to say:

‘They have two arms and two legs like you’

Professor Hasso Plattner with the right to invent the Killer (S)app!

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WORKFLOW #SAPMQ4 2011

Furthermore, the SAP Workflow Certification had disappeared and showed no signs of coming back. And the SAP Workflow develop-ers were still using sticks and dirt to build their workflows. (check http://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/scn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/24131)

This group was spurred into ac-tion by the results from an ASUG-sponsored survey, which was opened to SAP workflow developers and users between March and May 2010. During that period of time, over 181 responses were logged – which is roughly 3 times the size of similar surveys. What on earth could that mean? It meant that this group of people (let’s call them the WFers, for short) were under-represented, under-supported, not to mention under-appreciated. Something had to be done.

How did we kick it offStep one was collaborating with

the awesome ASUG SIG Chair for Workflow and BPM, Tammy ‘I can do it all’ Powlas. Next up, we pulled in the unsuspecting, but forever supportive Ginger Ga-tling. The plan began to form. We would pull together the results of the ASUG survey, and let SAP know

that WFers needed some support. We also called on two of the brightest and best WFers (who also happen to be SAP Mentors, coin-cidentally) for addi-tional heavy lifting. Mike Pokraka, one of the co-authors of ‘Practical Workflow for SAP, v2’, and Thorsten Franz, who never met an underdog he wouldn’t go to bat for, were drafted. We decided to call ourselves the Workflow Influence Team, and even got a Twitter ID, @sap_wit.

The team was formed, great. What next? First, how are we go-ing to work together? How often is too often to meet? Can we pun-ish each other if a member fails to show for a conference call? How will we collaborate without sending large documents into unguarded email inboxes? And who would be the lucky recipient of all our hard labor (once it was done) and what did we expect of them?

Fortunately, as I mentioned, we had Tammy Powlas on board. Tam-my put together a Team Charter – just to lay down the ground rules. As it turns out, punishing other

team members was frowned upon. But we did get some key assump-tions made, and because we had a Charter, a Twitter ID, and a Team Logo, we were well on our way!

We had also had the good sense to chat with Jon Reed (@jonerp) and Dennis Howlett (@dahowlett) of the ‘Certification 5’ team to find out what worked and what did not in their efforts to improve SAP Cer-tification.

Excerpt from our Team Charter

Benefits 1. Represent the collective cus-

tomer voice regarding the future solution enhancement direction of the SAP Business Workflow

2. Provide customer direction and enhancement priorities to SAP Workflow

“SAP_WIT, what have you do for me lately?”

In the spring of 2010, some evil plans were put in place at the ASUG Annual Conference, sometimes also known as Sapphire. A small and stealthy (but passionate!) group began to form, to ‘represent’ the underdogs of Business Process Management, the SAP Workflow developers. These developers are everywhere – enabling business processes that run on SAP systems to run faster, and better. But SAP Workflow was in maintenance-mode, meaning break-fix only. We had to do something about that!

Some time ago Workflowers were under-represented, under-supported, not to mention under-appreciated. Not true anymore!

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WORKFLOW#SAPMQ4 2011

Key Assumptions WIT will be at least monthly in

online collaborative webinarMembers are expected to attend

at least 75% of meetings Google Docs will be our collabora-

tive workspace Meetings will be held every two

weeks, between 2-3 PM EST (8-9PM UT). Members are expected to at-tend, but meetings will proceed with the members at hand

The Team has agreed that pub-lication of working documents or interim bodies of work will not be made public unless the entire team agrees to it. The exception may be posting a relevant discussion to the SCN Mentor Forum.

Focus on better product – for wider adoption as opposed to sin-gular needs

Strategic view as well as tactical (tomorrow’s needs too)

On the road...So the meetings commenced.

There was a ton of data in the ASUG survey (thank you to all who partici-pated) – we had plenty of questions that asked for write-in answers, which in some cases may be the only ones that matter. The SAP_WIT fil-tered thru all this data and worked on categorizing it by priority, effort, risk, etc.

Meanwhile, another covert but terribly important effort was going on. Trying to locate that person (or people) within the monolithic orga-nization that is SAP was not going to be easy. Thru Ginger’s efforts, and with the help of Peter McNulty, we identified a person. And he gra-ciously introduced us to Mike Stam-back, Solution Management Lead at SAP. We prepared a little briefing report for Mike, just so he would know we weren’t messing around.

And parallel to this? Ginger was working her magic again, bribing or berating the folks at SAP Education to consider bring-ing back the SAP Workflow Certi-fication. If you know Ginger, you’d think that she re-ally didn’t need to bribe or berate because she is just really persuasive

no matter what. But I suspect she bribed people, so now that’s out there for you to consider.

At some point, we began to meet with Eduardo Chiocconi, who works for Mike Stamback. Even though he is new to SAP (or maybe because he was new to SAP?) Eduardo seemed to grasp, right away, that this group was very pesky and tenacious, and we would probably not let him rest until he at least listened.

All during the summer of 2010, the SAP_WIT group toiled in the grueling sun, foregoing vacations, summer picnics, and the obligatory sunburn. SAP_WIT began to pull it all together, and created a very compelling white paper, which was presented to Eduardo in the sum-mer of 2010. We had several meet-ings with Eduardo (he may have just pretended to listen, but you can judge that later on) – documents were exchanged, passionate pleas for help for the poor WFers was de-livered in cracking voices.

It did take Eduardo some time to

Portraits of the members of the

WIT group

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WORKFLOW #SAPMQ4 2011

get his bearings. I imagine he also had some background checks run on us as well. And it was probably a pretty risky undertaking, since his passion (and his charter) involve BPM – which some might perceive as the successor to SAP Workflow. But Eduardo met with us in early December, and let us in on a little secret. Coincidentally, totally seren-dipitously, Walldorf had been work-ing on some of the very same issues that SAP_WIT had identified! Sure, not everything was in our stock-ings, but quite a bit of what we had documented was. Number one on the list, an updated BOR editor was there! A lean inbox was there! Im-provements in the background jobs were there. The only thing missing, in my opinion, was a pony, which Eduardo assured me would arrive on my doorstep soon (although I was going to be disappointed on that front).

Of course, that’s not the end of the story. That’s the beginning. Be-cause in the past year, SAP has had a Customer Connection for WFers – which has resulted in the back portability of the functionality to use an SE24-like editor for BOR objects. And SAP Education has distributed a survey pertaining to the various skills that a Certified Workflow De-veloper should have, with the intent of bringing back Workflow Certifica-tion! The SAP Community Network E-learning category on Workflow keeps getting more and more mate-rial. A Quickstart guide to Extended Notifications has been provided in OSS Note 164056. Oh, and let’s not forget the podcast with Thor-sten and Jon Reed – appropriately entitled ‘The Utter Sexiness of SAP Business Workflow’ too.

Recent achievementsSo what have ‘we’ – people in-

terested in SAP Workflow, includ-ing SAP_WIT done for you lately? I view this as big a project (well al-most) as raising a child – without the epidural. And you know what it takes to raise a child? Truthfully, there is a very large village of peo-ple who are passionate about SAP

Our Community• 1161 members of the MIT-Sponsored SAP-WUG mailing list (in exis-tence since 1997)• Over 5000 members subscribed to Workflow/BPM SIG of ASUG• Over 115,000 hits for ‘SAP Workflow’ on Google• Over 42,880 hits for ‘Workflow’ on SAP Community Network

o At MIT LL, there are over 65 workflow-enabled scenarioso At Canada Post, there are 103 productive workflowso Nationale-Nederlands have over 60 productive workflowso International Paper – 36, including 11 in CRMo Old Dominion Freight Line – 83 productive workflows

SAP Workflow in a nutshell• SAP Workflow has been around since 1997. It used to be considered nice-to-have.• Now, workflow is integral to core business processes.

o You can’t shop in SRM if you don’t have workflowo SCM, CRM, MDM – all use workflowo Workflow is heavily used in HCM processes (XSS, E-Recuiting)o Auditors are accepting technical workflow logs for complianceo Workflow is a key component of the Finance Closing Cockpit and Schedule Manager, ensuring best practices for financial closingso Newer product, Master Data Governance also uses Workflow

• SAP Press Workflow 2nd Edition has been a top-5 SAP Press best seller since the book was published last June. The original edition, published in 2004 was a best-seller for 5 years.

Why are we here?• ASUG WF/BPM SIG, in conjunction with VNSG, DSAG, and SAUG (to name a few) sponsored a survey in early 2010. • Over 190 (nearly 3 times the respondents to a similar survey) re-spondents answered numerous questions on Workflow, including:

o How critical is Workflow to your core business? (over 60% said very important to critical)o How could workflow be improved?o When asked if they wanted Workflow Certification, 73.7% said ‘Yes’

• The last significant enhancements to SAP Workflow were delivered in NW2004s• We have all this great information, as well as people who are totally passionate. What can we do now? We would like to offer the use of the survey information, as well as the passion of our community to SAP in order to help bring SAP Workflow into the 21 century

Workflow out there. They’re a little like Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy, supposedly mythical creatures that only small children believe in when they need to pull a tooth out. But in reality, the passionate people about workflow *do* exist. There’s no end in sight for what we want to accomplish.

Susan Keohan

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INSIDE TRACK#SAPMQ4 2011

Experience #SAPITWDC

It was a special event more be-cause, it was one day before Mari-lyn Pratt’s B’day where we got to meet and greet her and also have a piece of the cake, specially served by Marilyn Pratt.

So we have one of the answers of the hashtag #whatwouldMarilyn do?

John Astill, event organizer and co-ordinator is a Demo Jammer from the soul, his ability to act as an an-chor and the same time be a ses-sion handler are one of his few traits. John was running from pillar to post b/w the Independence and the Constitution rooms that were dedi-cated to the sessions, not once did we have an outage of any kind that led to event stall...All thanks to the seamless moderation from John.

Sessions all the way from 9AM until 4PM and the folks tuning in from the Install Customer base, Partners, SAP Mentors and Washington DC SAP employees and also on-line stream-ing demonstrates the element of thirst that the world has around the magical word called SAP.

Mine and Rebecca’s Gig

As an SAP Mentor, I always wanted to have a thought-leadership ses-sion, where I wanted to showcase the power that SAP Procurement So-lutions bring to the overall SAP Road-map and Strategy.

Our session cut across all the quadrants of SAP Procurement, Sup-plier Relationship Management, Sup-plierInfoNet and more.

I also was tweeting live from the event so that our SAP Procurement community that was streamed via the twitter social stream had a seamless overview of the SAP In-

Like every SAP Inside track, ours was special too, it had the flavor of various SAP tracks like HANA, Mobility, SUP, Analytics, SAP Procurement, HTML5, SAP BoBJ, SAP BW, SAP StreamWork and more.

side Track Washington DC with one powerful hash-tag #SAPITWDC.

...So lets see the ex-cerpts and visuals of the entire day with the hash-tag #SAPITWDC, so that you get a feeling that you were there

...#wishyouwere-there

Event timeline6:45 AM: #Sus-

tainable ride to Wash-ington DC with the #DemoJam Winner ...Mr Astill.

John offered me a ride and was wearing the #Sustainability hat that helped me save on the Drive to DC which

level of Sugar that was required to start the day, also picking up the relevant badges and being aware of all the vicinity around

- 2 Conference Rooms, Inde-pendence and Constitution and 1 break-out room

- the wait was getting more anx-ious as we were hitting the 9AM mark and were still waiting for a full-house, a full-house it was finally as we headed for the Agenda

What was the Kick-off Agenda?- Welcome Keynote by John Astill- #SAPRunsSAP by Martin Lang,

deep-diving into Mobility Apps from the SAP App Store

- An introduction session followed by our very own Marilyn Pratt set-ting the stage to spill the beans on the new SCN launch that is sched-uled for early next year.

Event organizer John Astill

was option 1 and the DC Metro + Parking at 24 $/day

+ #carbonfootprint which was option 2. So this meant that it

+ was a Sustainable start to the day with #carpool and help

+ compliment #SAPs Sustainabil-ity and CSR initiatives. Not only us, almost all the Mentors that made it to the show including Tammy, Greg, Derek and Marilyn, all took Public Commute.

8:45-10 AM: Check-In, Wear your badge, meet’n greet, sign Marilyn Pratt’s sweet B’day card, eat breakfast, tweet !!!

Getting ready for the welcome note by John, followed by #SAP-RunsSAP by Martin Lang and #newSCN by Marilyn Pratt.

30 Donuts and Muffins, again or-ganized by John Astill assured the

QUARTERLY20

INSIDE TRACK#SAPMQ4 2011

Contributors for this issue in order of appearance:

Natascha Thomson, Abesh Bhattacharjee, Gregor Wolf, Tammy Powlas, Somnath Man-na, Andreas Eissmann, Michelle Crapo, Martin Gillet, Susan Keohan, Tridip Chakraborthy

With Blagbert by Alvaro Tejada Galindo

Why the Q&A?With so many new diversified

offerings from the SAP Procure-ment shop, it became necessary for a session like this to help bring the community, customers, part-ners and end-users on the same page with the latest. Procurement topics covered as Q&A: SAP SRM, SAP Sourcing, SupplierInfoNet, Crossgate SAP IIC, SAP Rapid Deployment Solutions, Mobility in procurement, On-demand.

10 Questions covering the Length & Breadth of SAP Procurement

Q1:Can you walk us through a road-map of the SAP Procure-ment portfolio and the vision for the next several years?

Q2:On-demand procurement solutions from SAP, strategy, di-rection and benefits to customer?

Q3:Can you give us a perspec-tive on Supplier InfoNet - the new Business Social Networking prod-uct designed to help predict sup-ply disruptions?

Q4:How can a customer benefit from the SAP Supplier Lifecycle management solution?

Q5:Rapid Deployment Solutions

(RDS) from SAP for SAP Supplier Relationship Management?

Q6:How does SAP Procurement Strategy align with SAP’s mobility strategy, Apps, Use-cases?

Q7:SAP Procurement for Pub-lic Sector, difference with the Core SAP SRM offering, benefits to Public Sector&Government customers?

Q8:What was the vision behind the Cross-gate acquisition by SAP, what does it mean to SAP Procure-ment customer?

Q9:Collaboration Workspaces for SAP Procurement with SAP Stream-Work, any use cases?

Q10:What is the role of SAP Solu-tion Management to Customers and user groups, Influence council?

10 AM to 4 PM: Sessions on #StreamWork, #HT-ML5, #Mobility, BusinessObjects Analysis, Business Ob-jects Planning and Consolidation #BPC 10.0, Trends in BI 4.x / Crystal Reports 2011, SAP Carbon Impact

It will be difficult to compress the great stuff that we all learnt and shared from the sessions #BacktoBack, so with the twitterratti stream, I would like to leave it to your imagination to decipher what took place during the entire day.

There were times, when the presenters had to dis-able twitter due to the massive traffic that the hash-tag #SAPITWDC was generating, this just shows, how active the listeners were that they could learn under-stand, decipher and then compress their emotions on a certain topic area in 140 characters.

Tridip Chakraborthy

Our Gig: Expert Networking session: Where is SAP Procurement heading?

3 important topic areas in SAP Procurement

SAP Procurement has a strong presence on the YouTube platform and we had chosen 3 important questions from the Q&A covering the topic of SAP SupplierInfoNet, SAP Procurement Road-map and Strategy and also the Mobility use cases for SAP Procurement, this is a 5minute video that we highly recommend for any SAP Procure-ment aficionado. We would be posting the blogs on the new SCN platform that is coming live on the Jive Platform on 12/12/2011 for this session, so lots of content to be generated in the weeks to come.