My focus is on entrepreneurial innovative SAP surround opportunities.

I have a 5 year B1 Visa for USA. This is itself may be a business opportunity.

SAP Installations typically have 30-40% capacity peak. My idea is to use the idle time to build caches.

Say NA to HANA and get sizzling MIS & Portals in R3!

Bri Briefly this is my scheme 
a) target SMB SAP customers  

a)  b) typically peak load is 8 hours and idle time 16 hours for SMB SAP
    use idle time to do ETL inside SAP

a)  c) report through simple PHP Apache, Rails or J2EE portals
    use web tech as per client preference

a)  d) implement vendor and customer portals  

a)  e) implement mobile apps based on Adobe Flex 4.5

a)  f) support standard SAP R3 services
    that includes EDI, all core SAP R3 module support
    including maintain & grow

My expectation is that some SAP SMB Customers esp. those in cost cutting mode,
will also see the benefit of reduced license costs by moving reporting to portals.

I might be US partner arm in Kolkata and use alliances as per business flow.

ABAP work; my ETL technology; low cost portals; mobile apps
are some innovative areas where I myself alone can do a lot.

We can do some innovative Mobile Apps for Senior management.
Security will be by password in addition to device id and mobile no.

Areas we can cover -
a) Access to a visually attractive app that gives charts and trends

b) Instead of push technology as email or SMS is
    Senior Managers can Pull info from anywhere in the planet
    and anytime

c) if a person quits organization; immediately the device will be blocked
    so a mobile id and device id etc is very helpful;
    though we will also have passwords

d) PO PR approval can be done remotely
    Organization efficiency goes up without compromising passwords

e) custom Workflow apps like Product Complaints of Customers
    can be on mobile; giving speedy approvals and alerts;
    resulting in better Customer Service

f) Innovative Workflow apps can be designed;
   leading to all round efficiency improvement

g) Plant process parameters can be seen on line;
    Benefit – senior Managers alerted to deviations early

h) Plant Maintenance can be integrated;
    Condition based alerts viewed in Mobile

i) Knowledge Bank access for Senior Managers

Senior Managers may find less time at office looking at above areas.

They can do so in leisure of home or while travelling from airports and hotels.

We will develop on Adobe Flex4.5 and also use PHP developers
for Java Scripting extensions; this gives hardware independence;
Will work on Android(Google), Apple, Winphone(Microsoft) and Blackberry(RIM)

Below are my ideas on Reporting and Portals.

This may more relevant to SMB SAP clients.
Large clients have muscle power for ALL of SAP products BI BO PI …

BUT large clients who are open to innovative area specific solutions may also be interested.
The borderlines between true BI and MIS portals are often blurred.
My ideas Portal (Customer or Vendor) BI MIS services with Web(Desktop Portal) and Mobile(Android iPhone) integration around SAP installations.

Backend part ABAP, PHP or J2EE.

Frontend by Flex4.5 or AJAX.

I have 3 very successful portals LIVE at PCBL, Spencers & Century Ply.
All 3 on PHP Apache. PCBL & Century for Customers, Spencers for Vendor.

My message is very low cost EP and BI using approach detailed below.

LOW COST, SIMPLICITY and ability to meet SPECIAL NEEDS of Clients

BUY NOTHING but our services
Install a PC grade web server with Apache & PHP

And MIS up and running from 1^st to 3^rd month. After that maintain and grow with our service

The ONLY CON is that we are selling a service with a framework rather than a branded product.

The truth is there are NO PRODUCTs but only tools and be it BO or QLIKVIEW you need to build apps.

You need skilled people to build custom applications.

Even SAP BW book author stated that very little of SAP BW “content” can be directly used.

Other than SAP BW it is all build from scratch ….

I have no idea of Cognos but recently I used QLIKVIEW a bit with SAP.

QLIKVIEW needs skills to extract and skills to build apps and I found no report
with non time dimension additive KPI like stock or pending orders.

Stock as you know is tricky; in SAP you can have normal stock and various types of special stock
-      customer consignment
-      vendor consignment
-      subcontracting
-      PS project stock by WBS
-      stock in transit
-      pipeline stock as in GAS

Pending orders is very tricky
-      STO stock transfers to ware houses
-      SD customer orders
-      PO of trading goods
-      PR of trading goods

B2B, FMCG, FMDG(durable) all will have different styles and needs

Our MIS is useful and low time to market, very low cost and works very well
for balances that are not time additive - stock, pending orders etc.

I can understand and build exactly what is needed by business
NOT generic stuff that work well in specific areas

Our MIS can show "cross cube" data easily. Sales in Stock report. Stock in Production.
May be deployed on Android and desktops using Flex4 via cheap PHP & Apache.

FAST MIS FROM R3

Background: ETL is well established technology and objective is to separate out the reporting and analytics workload from production transaction servers.  Towards this end SAP Oracle and others have created Data Warehouse applications. SAP’s offering is BW. However for some SAP customers retaining BW talent and managing BW applications is sometimes a challenge.

My Innovation: I have successfully managed highly pragmatic ETL within R3 itself. My success stories are Spencer’s Retail with 250 stores all over India, PCBL a chemical industry and recently Century Ply a large building materials company with very high volume of transactions.

The mechanism is to run jobs at night which create cache tables (SAP INDEX Database or BLOB tables) or even flat ZIP files in server say date wise plant wise sales, transfers, pending orders, production and stock. I look back 2 posting periods FI & MM only for backdated lagging transactions as SAP does not allow posting date earlier to the open periods. I extend this to important large master data even. These jobs take 3 minutes max 40 minutes total elapsed time.

During the day users take their MIS from these ZIPped BLOBs in Tables or Flat Files. The result is response time in the order of few seconds for almost any query. The “magic” is possible as I make use good use of in-memory hash tables.

Stock is the trickiest challenge as stock is non-additive over the time-axis. Also business variables like “pending” orders are difficult if not impossible to calculate back dated. The approach to such problematic variables needs specialist approach that has to be designed for particular customer situations.

Additive variables like sales or production are easier to deal with.

Another very interesting addition is my cache injection technique. In Century Ply certain key production parameters are entered next day say by 11am to 1pm. During day time users may optionally request “Want latest” when the last 4 days cache is injected or updated. This is an USP as it gives a clear advantage over 1 day stale info in conventional ETL.

In Spencer’s too I made sure stores sending data late were immediately updated into cache after late arrival of info. This gives clear “time to market” advantage in ETL inside SAP.

Considerations: The tricky variables like Stock or Pending Orders are a pain in conventional BW. In my solution these work nicely. Also “joining” info across cubes needs expertise but in my solutions it is easy.

To use any dashboard effectively we need to give very fast response for any MIS. Pulling conventional info from databases or R3 or BW is a challenge when ensuring reasonable response time. My home-grown ETL inside R3 is therefore an important component in delivering data to  to the complete satisfaction of MIS users. 

My approach is also similar to QLIKVIEW as I too believe in Reporting direct from R3
which gives all the advantage in “time to market” info besides “stock & pending”.

Low cost portal

a)    It is easy to develop a PHP based Web portal which will be integrate the SAP server We may also use J2EE and JCO(SAP Java Connectivity “Java Component Objects”) if PHP skills not available.

b)    The web application will work on a connected business model where our development will be in PHP/J2EE ABAP platform.

c)    The website will be a 100% browser based delivery.

d)    The website will use only SAP  database

e)    A few Z tables “inside SAP” will be used for application security logs.

f)    Business will be in SAP server side RFC enable Function Modules.

g)    Wherever SAP standard RFC (mostly BAPI) are available we will use standard.

h)    The PHP/J2EE application will ONLY do presentation logic delivering HTML PDF and maybe XLS. 

i)     PHP/J2EE will invoke RFC through one anonymous SAP user say J2EEUSER

Comparisons

ETL within R3 Advantages

a)   No need for additional servers; uses R3 itself for storing Though if so needed we can use external server
As reporting from ZIPs and does no SQL there is very low impact of our reporting on concurrent transaction load

b)   Data is extracted incrementally and zipped and stored in BLOB tables.
This gives opportunity to do anytime delta extracts giving near real time information availability

c)   Good for Stock and balance like pending orders; KPIs that are NOT additive over time are good in our scheme
We can build complex KPI logic; specially suited to the business

d)   Very fast response for Daily, MTD and YTD figures; and this is true for BOTH time additive(Sales, Production) and
non additive(Stock Pending Orders)

e)   Easy to show cross dimensional figures; Ex. in Stock Aging you want to see Sales/month
In Production report you want Stock, Pending Orders and Sales

f)    Response time very consistent and very low as it works with cooked zipped data

g)   low cost PHP Apache solution to publish reports on Web Could be Flex4 or Excel downloads
Needs no client; ONLY a browser

h)   NO Costs other than OUR service; Other infrastructure like PHP web server very low cost
Our service costs to maintain and grow also small

i)     Unlimited user license from web or intranet; From desktop, laptop, tablets and smartphones

j)    We up-front state that all businesses will have special needs for reporting
B2B FMCG etc and we build a custom fit that delights; We also are able to change to business change demands
All of above at very affordable “Indian Labour” rates

k)   SIMPLICITY is key word; Results up and running 1 to 3 months; Incremental rollout

  

Competition Weaknesses

a)   Needs additional servers to extract out and store ETL data
3 for BW and 3 for EP usually in addition to 3 for R3; DEV QAS & PROD

b)   Data normally extracted nightly and hence 12-24 hour information lag

c)   KPIs that are NOT additive over time need either huge additional storage
or need to be calculated to give point in time results

d)   Good response for Daily, MTD and YTD figures
BUT this is normally true for additive(Sales, Production) but usually slow
for non additive(Stock Pending Orders)

e)   Needs highly skilled people to do cross dimensional reports;
Ex. in Stock Aging with Sales/month or Production report with Stock, Pending Orders and Sales

f)    Response time normally varies widely from fast and acceptable to often slow & disappointing

g)   Normally special client tools; Web publishing with restrictions and often slow

h)   Significant Costs; Costs of multiple Servers (3 for BW and 3 for EP)
License costs; High service costs to develop; High costs to maintain and grow

i)   Restrictive licensing; Often needs special client software
Will not run only on MS IE with ActiveX
May need additional investment to deploy on tablets and smartphones

j)    Demos are deceptively attractive;
when it comes to addressing then expenses shoot up
Building good apps is expensive; maintaining them expensive
And reacting to changes sluggish owing to complexity

k)   COMPLEXITY high; Results take time to come