Joke: ERP Implementation in 10 Easy Steps

1. Ask the board of directors for an arbitrary but large sum of money. (Suggestion: $300 million.)

2. Give half the money to consultants. Ask them to select an appropriate ERP package for your company. Consultants will audit your business processes for six months and then select SAP, which they happen to resell.

3. Form cross-functional implementation teams. Hold meetings.

4. Reengineer all your business processes to match the software’s model.

5. Give the other half of the money to consultants.

6. Install the software.

7. Train end users repeatedly.

8. Cross your fingers.

9. Turn on the software.

10. If you’re still in business, immediately return to Step 1 because it’s time for an upgrade.

SAP PM and xMII

Here is presentation which talks about PM integration with xMII.
PM module of SAP is used to handle all the operations with plant. And a plant with intelligence (xMII enabled), should be able to take certain decisions on its own.
However I want to let you know that you can stay updated with the content on this site by subscribing to RSS feeds. And email updates are available too.

| View | Upload your own

A diagram to understand xMII

Sending HTML using Dynamic data

I have been writing blogs on SDN. Thought I should share it here too.

Original post can be found here

https://www.sdn.sap.com/irj/sdn/weblogs?blog=/pub/wlg/8462

Communication in any industry has its own significance and email is a very powerful mode of communication where high tech industry is involved. xMII provides us with the facility of sending email whenever a crucial thing is involved. It has a basic email action block which can be used to send emails for important emails. In this blog I'm going to focus on two things:

• Configuring the basic ‘send email' action block.
• Using a trick to send the information in HTML format.

The prerequisite for the readers of this blog is to have basic knowledge of xMII action blocks and templates.

Configuring the send email action block

Configuring the send email action block is quite easy of a thing.

All he fields can be set dynamically(and ideally they should be used that way using link editor). But for the sake of simplicity, I'm hardcoding these values in this example.

Please note here that I've set message content type as text/html because we are going to use a html template.

Configuring The Data to be displayed

Now we are going to send the status of all the three fans(the default simulator) using email action block of BLS in HTML format.

Write a tag query using simulator with fan1, fan2 and fan3 as output and save it as ‘Demo/Fanstatus'.

Designing the HTML template

Now this trick has helped me a lot. Design a HTML template as shown in the picture. Save it as "d:\demotemp.html".

Here, you may see that I've given following keywords:

• date_it - this will be used for displaying the current date and time in the email.

Following keywords will be used for showing the fan state of the respective fans.

• fn1_st
• fn2_st
• fn3_st

Creating The Business Logic

Since we are done with the things requirement gathering ;). So, we have to develop a transaction which will be used for sending the email in HTML format.

• Go to logic editor and insert a tagquery action block. Call the ‘Demo/Fanstatus' query in it.

• Add a the html loader action block and the load the template(d:\demotemp.html).

• Create a new local string variable and name it ‘message'.

• Add an assignment action block and assign the string content value of html loader action to local variable message.

• Now add one more assignment action block and add the following code to local variable 'message'.

stringreplace(stringreplace(stringreplace(stringreplace(Local.message , "fn3_st", stringif( IllumTagQuery_0.Results{/Rowsets/Rowset/Row/Fan3}==1, "ON", "OFF" ) ) , "fn2_st", stringif( IllumTagQuery_0.Results{/Rowsets/Rowset/Row/Fan2}==1, "ON", "OFF" ) ) , "fn1_st", stringif( IllumTagQuery_0.Results{/Rowsets/Rowset/Row/Fan1}==1, "ON", "OFF" ) ) , "date_it", IllumTagQuery_0.Results{/Rowsets/Rowset/Row/DateTime} )

This code will modify the html template accordingly. It consists of two things:

stringreplace(Local.message , "fn3_st", stringif( IllumTagQuery_0.Results{/Rowsets/Rowset/Row/Fan3}==1, "ON", "OFF" ) )

this code will first search for the keyword called "fn_3st" in the HTML string and then it will replace it with ON or OFF depending on the value we get from fan3 status from the tag query.

• Now comes the final part. Configure an email action block as specified earlier and assign the message variable to the message part of the 'sendmail' action block.

And now run the transaction. The output email will be something like this.

This trick can be used to send detailed informations to the concerned person and can be used to handle more complex scenarios of table generation on the fly using XSLT.

SAP xMII in India

Indian Software solutions providers are really trying very hard to get projects from US. But they are not able to get enough work. The main reason behind this is evolution of small and medium sized companies who are having expertise in xMII and charge much lesser than what our Indian IT Giants are demanding despite of the lack of knowledge.

So the solution providers are moving to Indian customers. But the question is how many companies in India will be willing to implement a multi-million dollar project unless it is a government one.
The rates of an xMII consultant are too high. $80 per Consultant hour is what our Indian giants are charging to the clients as compared $40 for an ABAP. So if they are turning to Indian customers then they have to bring the pricing down.

xMII is a really good tool and will yield profitable results for sure.

In US, situation is different. The charges are high($250-300 an hour) and average salary of an xMII consultant is around $1,20,000 a month. This is one of the reason behind the brain drain that's causing Indian companies to loose the expertise. Even the onsite salary of Indian companies ranges from $100 to $150 a day which is noting in front of that of a proper xMII consultant in US.