I have recently set up a new business called Radiant Think dedicated to SAP Variant Configuration and also Training and eLearning.

The new business has different sorts of content on VC than you have found here. On this site there are the “How To” type demos. On my new site there are demo’s but they are more about how VC has been applied to a particular industry.

If you go there you will find some demos for the Home Building Industry, as applicable for the Australian environment. We are always interested to here about companies in Australia who may want to know more about VC or my already have it, but it is not working wel fo them.

Anyway, checkout these demos.

http://radiantthink.com.au/content/radiant-think-home-building-demonstration

and

http://radiantthink.com.au/content/home-building-solution-adhoc-changes-example-using-windows

But on a large VC implementation it does not fit the traditional implementation approach. Most consulting companies like to get all the requirements upfront, document the solution, Build, Test, etc etc.

But in VC it is more iterative. You tend to do loops. Anyway I was recently talking with a Game Developer, and he talked about the Agile and Scrum methodology. I did some research on this and it looks like a better model to use. I found this site a good introduction.

Anyone got any comments. I am really interested to get feedback on this.

Thanks

Anyway, this application is called Klok. Get it from here

It is a time management recording application. Basically it lets you record your time on a project or activities pretty much automically. I wont go into the detail, as I cant give it justice with words. I recommend that if you need something like this, then give it a go. It is a beta but it is free, and seems to be quite stable.

Anyway, I am testing the blog, as I just upgraded WordPress from version 1.5 something to 2.7 something. I am not a techie with this sort of thing, but I followed the help at WordPress and it seems to have worked.

It is interesting times, and being a contractor you wonder sometimes if it is good or bad in these economic times. I am saying good at the moment, but here in Australia we havent had the full hit like the US etc. But we often lag behind the cycle in the US and so perhaps we do have a car crash heading our way in slow motion.

Anyway, I am looking to add some new lessons. I am also beginning to blog at the Configuration WorkGroup which is a must for those in the Variant Configuration world. CWG WorkGroup

Hope to get back on here soon

Sometimes you have to make the effort. In my case Colin Moock was coming to Australia. He is world renown in the Actionscript world for his excellent books and a way of explaining things in a practical way. The seminar was in Sydney, and I live in Melbourne. About an hours flight, but for me about 1:30 drive to the airport, and then the travel at the other end. It was a long day in the end beginning at 4-00am and back home around 10-30pm.

His book “Essential Actionscript 3.0″ is an excellent book, and his one day training session covered the general flow of the “Virtual Zoo” example in the book. In many ways the seminar glued the sections together as he worked through the thought processes of building an application. What I liked was the way he started with the basics, then gradually applied the layers to make the application. For example he gradually explained why you need say private access controls in some cases, while others were public. It seemed to me that when building the application you need a good idea of the structure of the classes you will need, and gradually build up the detail and links as you go. His approach was very much a case of “Well lets get this basic functionality working, then ..and only then add in the next layer of detail.”

The seminar is around 9 hours, and it was probably at around 7.5 to 8 hours that we actually saw the application working on the screen. Basically up to that point it was developing the code, testing, modifying and when happy it hung together he added the graphic elements at the end.

It was well worth the effort, and an excellent way to get a good overview of Actionscript 3.

The lesson in this post is about updating the BOM quantity based on selections made by the user.

In the SAP help they cover this a little, but the solution they give is very basic. Basically they use a simple procedure where they set the quantity based on some IF logic. Taking our box example the SAP solution would have a series of statements for each box size.

eg “Set qty to 0.5kg IF is a small box, Set qty to 1.2 kg IF is a medium box, etc”

In the demo we are doing it differently. I like to separate the data from the code if possible. So I am using a variant table to store the BOM quantity for each box size. If we do it this way it is a lot easier to add a new box size later, by adding a new size to the characteristic BOX_SIZE, and a new entry in the variant table. We do not have to change any object dependencies if we do it this way.

So here is the demo

It seems my blog was down for a period of time. Sorry about that, but if you are reading this then you know it is back. Thanks for the emails letting me know.

There hasnt been any lessons for a while, and it isnt because there won’t be anymore, but more a case of needing to work! Also the system I use to create the lessons on, was recently over written. So I need to rebuild my data to get back to where it was. I am trying to get that done over the weekend.

The next lesson will look at dynamically updating the BOM quantity based on the configuration. So if we order a big box, we use more material than a small box. This can be done with code alone, but might actually try using a variant table to do it. I like the idea of separating data from the code, and clients do as well.

After that I may add some options to the box, say lids, handles, that sort of thing. Always interested in any special requests that you may want to see. Maybe selection conditions, setting defaults? etc

I was on a project a while back where we built a web interface that interfaced into SAP. Yes – using the SAP Portal. I was involved more on the SAP R3 end of it, while a contractor was using Visual Composer. At the time I saw some of the tool in action, but now I am keen to learn how to use it.

What is it? Well it is a tool that when you read up about it, is meant for Business Process Experts, who know a lot about the SAP system, business processes, but knows nothing about programming, java etc.

Now initially I thought it was an application that you would install on your laptop, but it isnt. Basically you need access to a portal system, the correct url, the correct permissions, and you log in to the tool.

Basically it is a tool that in simple terms allows you to drop in a BAPI, then hook forms, grid components buttons etc to the inputs and outputs of the BAPI. This allows you to build relatively complex applications without knowing any code. Thats the theory anyway.

So I will be giving it a go over the next few weeks. One thing I did learn in that it doesnt really work on Windows Vista. It requires the Adobe SVG Viewer to be installed on your computer, and I had no luck with Vista. So you need to be Windows XP. The SVG Viewer is not supported for Vista, and it looks like it wont be either, as Adobe are discontinuing this product.

So look out for some demos in the near future

He has a blog that may be of interest to you.

Basically Flex 3 official release is now approaching and it sounds like the pricing will be a lot more competitive. Maybe because other companies are active in the space. He went through a few quick demo’s on functionality, interesting customer applications like ebay desktop, and moves to open source different aspects of Adobe products. Flex is an area I want to skill up on, in particular the use of it with SAP.

Hopefully in the near future I will have some information on using Flex with SAP, so stay tuned.

Well I am back at work and went to a client thinking they needed some variant configuration help. But it wasnt quite correct. This client doesn’t do variant configuration, but they do have Material Classes type 001. They perhaps should be using Variant Configuration, but in their particular scenario they don’t think the need it.

They create new materials reasonably often.

They want to be able to populate some characteristics (about 15) based on the values entered in 3 others. So by using a Variant table, a procedure assigned to the class, this solved the problem.

So just remember that object dependencies are also useful in other class types and not just limited to class type 300.