Category: Technology
Quick View for SAP Notes
In my ever growing quest to provide quick and easy access to SAP Notes (which Dagfinn Parnas started a couple of years ago with the Android Note Viewer), I recently finished creating a windows version of a small app to make opening notes just a little easier.
When deciding if I should get this done, it was purely out of personal need. Having spent the last few months building up a couple of Gateway test, stage and Prod systems, the ability to open a SAP note quickly, always seemed to elude me. Open service.sap.com/support -> click on Help & Support -> Type the note and go. Albeit the app developed still has some user interaction (until Google Glass arrives?) … it does make it a little simpler. I also found a small cmd script online which looked helpful.
Practical Big Data Use Cases
Background
Source:
https://www.kaggle.com/wiki/DataScienceUseCases
For each type of analysis think about:
- What problem does it solve and for who?
- How is it being solved today?
- What are the data inputs and where do they come from?
- What are the outputs and how are they consumed- (online algo, static report, etc)
- Is this a revenue leakage (“saves us money”) or a revenue growth (“makes us money”) problem?
Use Cases By Function
Marketing
- Predicting Lifetime Value (LTV)
- what for: if you can predict the characteristics of high LTV customers, this supports customer segmentation, identifies upsell opportunties and supports other marketing initiatives
- usage: can be both an online algorithm and a static report showing the characteristics of high LTV customers
- working out the proportion of a customer’s spend in a category accrues to a company allows that company to identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities
- usage: can be both an online algorithm and a static report showing the characteristics of low wallet share customers
- Churn
- working out the characteristics of churners allows a company to product adjustments and an online algorithm allows them to reach out to churners
- usage: can be both an online algorithm and a statistic report showing the characteristics of likely churners
- Customer segmentation
- If you can understand qualitatively different customer groups, then we can give them different treatments (perhaps even by different groups in the company). Answers questions like: what makes people buy, stop buying etc
- usage: static report
- Product mix
- What mix of products offers the lowest churn? eg. Giving a combined policy discount for home + auto = low churn
- usage: online algorithm and static report
- Cross selling/Recommendation algorithms/
- Given a customer’s past browsing history, purchase history and other characteristics, what are they likely to want to purchase in the future?
- usage: online algorithm
- Up selling
- Given a customer’s characteristics, what is the likelihood that they’ll upgrade in the future?
- usage: online algorithm and static report
- Channel optimization
- what is the optimal way to reach a customer with cetain characteristics?
- usage: online algorithm and static report
Discount targeting – What is the probability of inducing the desired behavior with a discount – usage: online algorithm and static report
- Reactivation likelihood
- What is the reactivation likelihood for a given customer
- usage: online algorithm and static report
- calculating the right price for different keywords/ad slots
Sales
- Lead prioritization
- What is a given lead’s likelihood of closing
- revenue impact: supports growth
- usage: online algorithm and static report
Logistics
- Demand forecasting
- How many of what thing do you need and where will we need them? (Enables lean inventory and prevents out of stock situations.)
- revenue impact: supports growth and militates against revenue leakage
- usage: online algorithm and static report
Risk
- Credit risk
- Treasury or currency risk
- How much capital do we need on hand to meet these requirements?
- predicting whether or not a transaction should be blocked because it involves some kind of fraud (eg credit card fraud)
- Predicting the probably a liability can be recovered given the characteristics of the borrower and the loan
- Using machine learning and fuzzy matching to detect transactions that contradict AML legislation (such as the OFAC list)
Customer support
- Call centers
- Call routing (ie determining wait times) based on caller id history, time of day, call volumes, products owned, churn risk, LTV, etc.
- Putting the right data on the operator’s screen
- predicting call volume for the purposes of staff rostering
Human Resources
- Resume screening
- scores resumes based on the outcomes of past job interviews and hires
- predicts which employees are most likely to leave
- recommends specific training based of performance review data
- looking at objective measures of employee success
Use Cases By Vertical
Healthcare
- Claims review prioritization
- payers picking which claims should be reviewed by manual auditors
- Tackled at the claims processors, EDS is the biggest & uses proprietary tech
- Hospital operations management
- Optimize/predict operating theatre & bed occupancy based on initial patient visits
- Embedded devices (productized algos)
- Exogenous data from devices to create diagnostic reports for doctors
- Predicting who won’t comply with their prescriptions
- Hospitals want to retain Drs who have admitting privileges in multiple hospitals
- Analyse survival statistics for different patient attributes (age, blood type, gender, etc) and treatments
- Analyse effects of admitting different types and dosage of medication for a disease
- Predict risk of re-admittance based on patient attributes, medical history, diagnose & treatment
Consumer Financial
- Credit card fraud
- Banks need to prevent, and vendors need to prevent
Retail (FMCG – Fast-moving consumer goods)
- Pricing
- Optimize per time period, per item, per store
- Was dominated by Retek, but got purchased by Oracle in 2005. Now Oracle Retail.
- JDA is also a player (supply chain software)
- Pioneerd by Tesco
- Dominated by Buxton
- This is called “plan-o-gramming”
- when to start stocking & discontinuing product lines
- In particular, perishable goods
- Theft analytics/prevention (http://www.internetretailer.com/2004/12/17/retailers-cutting-inventory-shrink-with-spss-predictive-analytic)
- Rates of failure for different components And what are the drivers or parts?
- What types of customers buying what types of products are likely to actually redeem a warranty?
Insurance
- Claims prediction
- Might have telemetry data
Construction
- Contractor performance
- Identifying contractors who are regularly involved in poor performing products
- Predicting that a construction project is likely to have issues as early as possible
Life Sciences
- Identifying biomarkers for boxed warnings on marketed products
- Drug/chemical discovery & analysis
- Crunching study results
- Identifying negative responses (monitor social networks for early problems with drugs)
- Diagnostic test development
- Hardware devices
- Software
Hospitality/Service
- Inventory management/dynamic pricing
- Promos/upgrades/offers
- Table management & reservations
- Workforce management (also applies to lots of verticals)
Electrical grid distribution
- Keep AC frequency as constant as possible
- Seems like a very “online” algorithm
Manufacturing
- Sensor data to look at failures
- Quality management
- Identifying out-of-bounds manufacturing Visual inspection/computer vision
- Optimal run speeds
Travel
- Aircraft scheduling
- Seat mgmt, gate mgmt
- Air crew scheduling
- Dynamic pricing
- Customer complain resolution (give points in exchange)
- Call center stuff
- Maintenance optimization
- Tourism forecasting
Agriculture
SAP Netweaver Gateway T-Code Summary
Here is a list of useful SAP Netweaver Gateway TCodes, please add a comment for any I am missing and I will gladly update. The intent of this post is to summarize the relevant TCodes for posterity and to be used as a quick lookup.
Gateway Runtime
| Title | T Code | Description | SP Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway Client | /IWFND/GW_CLIENT | SAP NetWeaver Gateway is a powerful tool that enhances the existing Error Log. Also allows you to simulate service execution. (Similar to tools like RESTClient for Firefox) | SP04 + |
| Error Log | /IWFND/ERROR_LOG | The Error Log for SAP NetWeaver Gateway hub systems is a helpful addition to the existing Application Log Viewerand provides detailed context information about errors that have occurred at runtime. | |
| Application Log | /IWFND/APPS_LOG (Gateway Hub System) | Log and Trace Filesa specific viewer for application log entries created by SAP NetWeaver Gateway processes. | |
| Application Log | /IWBEP/VIEW_LOG (Business Suite Backend) | Log and Trace Filesa specific viewer for application log entries created by SAP NetWeaver Gateway processes. | |
| Application Log Cleanup | Over time the application log amasses a lot of entries, which periodically need to be cleared. As default the application log should only store one entry per request. In addition, there is no need to store these entries for more than a day or a few days. Application log cleanup is a standard requirement in productive systems and helps to improve the performance of the systems in your system landscape. | ||
| Clear Cache | /IWFND/CACHE_CLEANUP | Cleanup Gateway Metadata Cache | |
| Disable Cache | /IWFND/MED_ACTIVATE | Disable Gateway Metadata Cache | |
| Gateway Node Activation | SICF | Includes various functions for monitoring, analysis, and troubleshooting in the ICF environment. You can also make use of the central Application Server analysis functions to identify issues such as performance problems in ICF applications. | |
| Alert Monitoring | RZ20 | SAP NetWeaver Gateway is monitored automatically within the Computing Center Management System (CCMS) in SAP CCMS Monitors for Optional Componentsfor Information Worker.In the monitoring process, information is collected about SAP NetWeaver Gateway. Here you can see which applications are in use, and how often they are called up. The information is updated hourly and relates to today’s date, since on the first collection after midnight all values are initialized once they have been read out. | |
| Performance Trace | /IWFND/TRACES | The Support Utilities offering for SAP NetWeaver Gateway has been extended to include a Performance Trace tool. This tool enables developers, administrators, support consultants, and end users to monitor system performance at service call level. You can trace the performance of both the SAP Business Suite backend system and the SAP NetWeaver Gateway hub system. |
Gateway Design
| Title | T Code | Description | SP Required |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gateway Service Builder | SEGW | A completely new design-time transaction, which provides developers with an easy-to-use set of tools for creating services. It has been conceived for the code-based OData Channel and supports developers throughout the entire development life cycle of a service. | SP04+ |
| Model Composition for Integration | Model composition is provided for complex scenarios for the integration topics, such as SAP Business Warehouse, GenIL and SPI. It allows mashing up multiple services within IW-BEP. | ||
| Service Validation | /IWFND/SRV_VALIDATE | SAP NetWeaver Gateway Service Validation Tool validates the runtime for all the SAP NetWeaver Gateway services to ensure that all the services work fine. Service Validation tool runs without user intervention and performs the runtime validation on a single service document. | |
| Register/Test Backend System | SM59 | Your backend system has to be registered as an SAP system alias in the SAP NetWeaver Gateway Implementation Guide (IMG) on your SAP NetWeaver Gateway system. In addition, an RFC destination has to be defined in transaction SM59. | |
| Create a Service | SE80 | Design time ABAP Workbench | |
| Register a Service | /IWFND/REG_SERVICE | Replaced with SEGW | |
| Maintain a Service | /IWFND/MAINT_SERVICE | Replaced with SEGW | |
| Activate a Service | /IWFND/IWF_ACTIVATE | Activate or Deactivate a service | |
| MOC | /IWFND/MOC_PARALLEL | Parallelize Multi-Origin Composition | |
| WebGUI Workflow | /IWFND/WF_WEBGUI | WebGUI For Executing Workflow Item | |
| Configure Message based Authentication | /IWFND/WSS_SETUP | Configure Web Service Message-Based Authentication | |
| GenIL Generator | /IWGIL/GENIL_SRV_GEN | Gateway Service Generator for GenIL |
iOS App: Production Insights for SAP
Aesthetically, this was probably one of my most enjoyable projects. I spent a considerable amount of time designing and working with users on understanding their needs, and then subsequently transforming those needs into requirements and into the app design.
The app displays Work Centers and then displays the production orders, and their details assigned to the each of them. This allows supervisors to quickly and easily oversee the production orders, and their progress toward their targets from their mobile device such as an iPad or iPhone.
Production Insight for SAP gives production and operations managers, planners and personnel an overview of manufacturing performance and progress on their iPads. The user can also take pictures of quality issues, or machines and easily email to collegues or maintenance for MWO repairs. The app also has a “timelime” feature which shows a history or events, notes, photos and emails created, which gives a clean overview of the tasks and history tracking.
iOS App: Blaze for SAP Netweaver Gateway
A couple of months ago I was working on creating services for a SAP App store app called Production Insight for SAP. While working on the app I constantly found myself using RESTClient for Firefox to test, debug and view the attributes of my service while I was developing in XCode. Eventually I pulled up the metadata and service implementation on my iPad and used it as a second screen for reference. This made my life much easier. After having done this a couple of times over the past few months, I figured it wouldn’t be a bad idea to create an app which not only lets you view the service and its details, but also save requests, test them against multiple servers and also view the details easily. Which is why I built “Blaze”, it does all this and a little more. It is a free app and available in the app store as of yesterday, if I could put a “demo” or “beta” sticker on it: I would. (but apple won’ approve anything like that!) for all you “gatewayers” out there, please test it out and let me know what you like and don’t. My intention is to create a iOS client for gateway which is useful to developers like myself. The app can also handle other OData servers and services like Netflix and XS Engine from HANA.
2012 SAP TechEd and MOB205
Well …. TechEd has passed and it was a great time. InnoJam was probably the best experience and I managed to be a part of a great collaboration which was fun from the start – I will blog a little about our solution in some of my free time in the coming weeks, but back to the topic at hand, since this was my first time as a speaker at TechEd I was slightly intimidated and anxious … my session was on Friday at 8:00AM, the night after the 3 Doors Down concert and I was skeptical if *anyone* would even show up 🙂 . The morning came, and to my surprise, the room was full and even had multiple people standing at the back. I was impressed so many people attended, and showed that my investment of time and resources into the enterprise mobility space over the last few years was worth the effort. The presentation went well and thankfully I had the “Demo Gods” on my side connecting from the Venetian (iPad) to Amazon Web Services (Gateway) to Walldorf (ES Workplace) and back 🙂 . After the presentation wrapped up I had great comments and questions from the audience but ran out of time answering all of them, I figured I would share the premise of the presentation here for everyone and hopefully encourage more companies to take a few easy steps to start their journey into the mobile enterprise.
What SAP Netweaver Gateway is NOT ….
I believe that there is a lot of talk online where people are asking the question … Why should I use Netweaver Gateway if I have Netweaver Process Integration (PI) or vice versa. I was recently on a SAP mobility call which included a great slide entitled “What SAP Netweaver Gateway is and is not!”. I thought I would share this with everyone and a couple other posts and links I have come across on the web, which hopefully people wanting to learn more about what Gateway has to offer, will find useful.
SAP Netweaver Gateway is NOT:
– The SAP Gateway process in the Netweaver Application Server ABAP that enables external communication (e.g. RFC).
ASUG Presentation – Wilmington, NC – August 2012
Enterprise Mobility Newsletter – April 23rd 2012
The SAP Netweaver Gateway 2.0 Developer Tool for XCode was released a little while ago after showing up at a Innojam event and Vishal demo’ed it back in 2010 at TechEd, but after multiple attempts at getting just a basic app to function from start to finish has been a challenging one. http://scn.sap.com/community/netweaver-gateway/blog/2012/04/23/using-netweaver-gateway-development-tool-for-xcode-and-gateway-21 for one of the issues I ran into.
Apple configurator is a new product recently released and updated (v 1.0.1) which runs on OSX Lion gives mobility admins a basic MDM platform for deploying and managing apple devices in the enterprise. This is perfect for a small company where some basic management features are needed within the mobility space. You can read a little more about the software here. Apple also recently updated the Apple Configurator which allows you to create and deploy profiles for iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices. These profiles contain security policies, email account settings and certificates enabling enterprise integration. The new version of the software is 3.5 and adds policy restrictions for Siri, voice dialing and photo stream to name a few. You can check the out the change log here.
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