Siteco Relies on SDN for its SAP CRM 5.0 Upgrade Applies to: Enterprise Portal Summary Based in Traunreut, Germany, Siteco is one of the leading suppliers and manufacturers of technical indoor and outdoor lighting as well as customer-specific lighting solutions. As an industry leader, Siteco is known for innovation, quality and service within the lighting industry. With more than 1,500 employees, the company has sales offices in more than 20 locations worldwide. Gregor Wolf, senior process consultant and employee of Siteco Beleuchtungstechnik GmbH, uses SAP Developer Network (SDN) daily. The SDN Community has been instrumental in his consulting work at Siteco, but equally vital for his own business, Computerservice Wolf, which provides Linux training and SAP CRM consulting. As one of the original members of SDN, Wolf has a long history with the community, which dates to SDN s inception in 2003. In this Q&A, he discusses why SDN is critical to many of his projects particularly Siteco s upgrade from SAP CRM 4.0 to SAP CRM 5.0 with SDN Senior Editor Talila Baron. Author: Talila Baron Company: SAP Created on: 14 June 2007 Author Bio Talila Baron is senior editor of SDN. She manages the SDN Newsletter, SDN homepage, and other special projects for SDN. 2007 SAP AG 1
Baron: Are you a member of SDN, BPX, or both? Wolf: I m a member of both communities. Though in the future, my focus will turn more to the Business Process Expert (BPX) Community. My job role is switching from development to the business side of things. I m going more into project management. And BPX will give me the best practices, models, and solutions that I need. Baron: What was the challenge or "pain point" that motivated you to use SDN or BPX? Wolf: Getting started with SAP CRM. The pain point was how to install it and get it running. Using SDN, I found people who could help me considerably. Today, we re in the middle of an upgrade from SAP CRM 4.0 to SAP CRM 5.0. I ve sent some OSS messages on this issue. But I ve also asked questions in SDN, and have found that SDN members can help me a lot. With SDN, you get answers, articles, and peers to point out resources. You also get really good response time, often in just a day or two. Baron: How has your use of SDN changed over the years? Wolf: I started using SDN by contributing to and getting answers from the forums. During our SAP CRM 4.0 implementation at Siteco, I moved more to the special SAP CRM Solution forums. The challenge was always to find interesting questions for which I already had a solution, or for which I saw an opportunity to try out some new functionality. Later, I also started blogging about topics that I thought might be useful for others. In fact, I hope that I helped to fix some gaps in the SAP standard documentation. Baron: What are the most relevant industry trends or challenges that apply to Siteco? Wolf: Internationalization is our biggest challenge. We have to migrate our MDMP R/3 Enterprise to Unicode to support the integration of other subsidiaries which use non-western European codepages. Baron: What company-specific business challenges applied when you first joined SDN in 2003? Wolf: We started on an SAP CRM 4.0 implementation with SAP consultants, two internal people from Siteco, and had to figure out how to do it. We didn t take training courses. We just plunged in! After going live, we had no consultants to support us and had to figure it out using SDN forums. Today, not only do I use the forums to find answers, but I also find that I m able to answer many forum questions on SAP CRM. I m also an external moderator and try to give direction to others using SAP CRM. Baron: What is the overall impact of SDN or BPX to Siteco as well as your own business? Wolf: There s really no impact on Siteco. However, through blogging and participation in forums, I ve gotten many consulting jobs for my own business. Lufthansa in Frankfurt recently asked me to do some troubleshooting in their SAP CRM project. Harting Technology Group has SAP CRM 5.0 and asked me for support in connecting their SAP R/3 and SAP CRM. In the past three years, I ve gotten ten new clients due to blogs I ve written on SDN. I never got this level of business even from my own homepage. Baron: How do you work with other developers or business process experts on SDN or BPX? Wolf: I wish I could find more time to work on community-led projects such as Colgate-Palmolive s SAPLink, or the new NW-RFC based connectors for Ruby and Perl provided by Piers Harding (a freelance developer). Like me, Piers is another long-term contributor to SDN. We met in person at SAP TechEd 04 in Munich. 2007 SAP AG 2
Piers brings up a good example of collaboration. We worked together to get Unicode support for the Ruby connector. We used the Siteco CRM system, which is Unicode-based to test the connector. Piers never had direct access to the system, but we got it running anyway. He connected to my PC, then we set up a VPN connection, and he used that connection to compile the connector. While we don t use the connector in a production environment, it was fun to get it running. It made me think I d like to implement authentication as the next step, and use OpenSource to enable single sign-on to SAP technologies. Baron: What are the overall benefits of SDN to community members? Wolf: You find great solutions reading the blogs, articles, and just copying and pasting answers into your system. That s how you get your problems solved. Baron: How much faster can you get answers on SDN as compared to other channels? Wolf: Basically, I only post questions to OSS that are related to bugs or usability. That s because a normal OSS message with a medium level of urgency takes up to 14 days to get answered. I can get the same answer from SDN in one to two days. I simply post the question during the evening, and often, will find it posted in the forum the next morning. Baron: Which resources do you use most frequently forums, blogs, elearning sessions, the Wiki, etc.? Wolf: I use the forums mainly, including SAP CRM, Mac User, Ruby on Rails, Scripting, PHP Development, and Enterprise SOA. Baron: What are your next steps with SDN or BPX? Wolf: I hope to find more time after our upgrade to SAP CRM 5.0 to write useful blogs or articles about the lessons I ve learned. I m also developing a new application that uses the application developed by Dan McWeeney of Colgate-Palmolive. He made a framework available called ABAP JavaScript, or AJS, which lets you easily develop applications that use AJAX-type updating and visual effects straight from BSPs. I also created a proposal Lessons Learned from Enterprise SOA Integration with Typo3 WebCMS for SAP TechEd 07 in Munich. There are a lot of exciting things in the works! 2007 SAP AG 3
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