Hello Cardboard Spaceship fans everywhere! Anywhere!
Have been released from the "It is August in Europe, and we have all taken to being in the sun and not working, which is way we are all lazy cheese eating surrender monkeys, and going to die or poverty or something..." Specifically, I have been immersed in a bank bid, for once actually here in Geneva, which was a nice change, but it turns out that the commute across town, or to Holland or Belgium, is not that different.
The actual bid was not that difficult, being a standard accounting implementation, but it did have two interesting additions. Firstly, it was all being done in French, which I do speak, but have not used very often for business. (To give you an idea of my prowess, my seven year old son who is being educated in French is reluctant to accept my help with his homework, unless it is maths. Sadly, he`s not wrong...) So, that was a challengette, but I managed.
The other part was creating a demo for the customer. If you think that the life of the May Fly is an ephemeral thing, try and find a good demo system in SAP. I did my usual, by polling those around me as to which of the local systems in Walldorf anyone had been using recently, and what they thought of any particular one, and chased down some promising prospects.
See, demo systems are used to show of the function of the system under different circumstances, some of them foreseen, and some of them not foreseen. The demo dolly (often me) has to set up the new scenarios in the software, and run them for the customer. Now, we are under time pressure, so we tend to work to time, and not quality. If it runs on the day you need it, and it shows what you want, that`s good. But that means that we often do not do all of things that we should, like completing the configuration, or testing the impact on other scenarios, and so on. One common example is that if I put in a new account in the shared chart of accounts, I should put in the English, German, and French text as a minimum, to ensure that when someone logs in in the different languages, they get the localised text. Well, imagine how often that happens...
So, as a result, demo systems are like good cheese. When first released into our grasps, they are theoretically complete, being taken from a reference system somewhere, but they have little character to them, only the bland basics. Soon, however, the industrious massaging of eager technical fingers sculpts and moulds them into an interesting landscape of unexpected twists and turns, as they mature. Traces of colleagues and friends, and others unknown, acrete in the system, until as the cruft builds up the system decays into incoherence and senescence, and is shuffled off to the system refresh in the sky.
As a result, I spent time building some examples, and then capturing them with the internal training tool called SAPtutor, which allows a playback of a kind at a later date. In an odd way they are the wayback machine of SAP demo systems. At one fleeting moment in time, I managed to get all this to work.
(For the hard of thinking, PRODUCTION systems are implemented in a much more considered fashion, over a longer period, with things like testing and quality assurance, or at least with the idea of solving one set of problems, for one organisation, and not trying to do it all at once without a master plan. Honest.)
So, that was the time-consumer over the last week or so. Done now.
I have a trip South Africa in a couple of days, leaving Wednesday, and staying until the following Thursday, which should be interesting. Johannesburg, not Cape Town.
This means that what with my long suffering backside, and my inability to ride a bicycle up and down the aisle of an Airbus, then I`m not getting much training in for the Venthoux ride. Eh, we`ll see what happens. I might have to be a spectator or a sponsor at this rate.
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