May 2003 in St. Leon-Rot, Germany

CWG Meeting May 2003 in St. Leon-Rot, Germany

On May 8th and 9th the CWG was celebrating its 10th anniversary at the meeting in St. Leon-Rot. The motto of the meeting was:

10 years CWG - Pioneering the Advancement of Integrated Configuration Technology

With more than 100 participants (from nearly 50 companies) this was the biggest CWG event so far. The general assembly on May 8th started with a retrospection on the work and acquisitions of the CWG presented by Dick Reimink, Steelcase. Then SAP board member Peter Zencke, responsible for mySAP CRM (incl. SAP IPC), gave a keynote presentation on the significance of product configuration and the future strategy of the SAP product suite.

In the SAP updates the new release of the SAP product configurator, SAP IPC 4.0 were revealed. The new modeling features in the mySAP CRM integration and the newly designed conflict handling mechanisms for improved user guidance were presented on a detailed level.

In the customer update session eight live implementations on product configuration based on SAP IPC were introduced (five in Europe and three in the US). The solutions were ranging from standard mySAP CRM Internet Sales or in-house sales to mobile or custom application scenarios.

In the focus group update session current activities of the four focus groups has been reviewed:

  • In December the Modeling Group introduced a collaboration share for modeling experts in order to ease experience exchange. The Modeling Focus Group also is actively processing a requirements list on modeling issues - a lot of items could be solved with the new release development. />
  • The Integration Group had a lot of discussions on order integration of advanced configurations in the last months. The exiting work will be continued continuously.
  • The Engineering Change Group managed to get the - long discussed - undo function implemented within the engineering change management in mySAP Product Lifecycle Management.
  • The Interactive Configuration Group has realigned, major activity in near future will be to synchronize and prioritize the different requirements for the standard configuration user interface.

In the remainder of the general assembly session Don Cochran from TSC gave an update on the configurator market. The SAP guest presentation was on SAP Master Data Management and focused on how to enable information integrity across the business network. Henk Meeter from Integrity introduced ideas for extensions to the knowledge base interchange format KBIF - a CWG adopted specification of an XML format for the interchange of configuration models based on SAP product configuration master data.

On the second day there have been 11 workshops in three parallel session tracks. Besides the CWG Focus Group sessions there has been a workshop on constraint based modeling, there was opportunity to meet SAP Pricing experts, the more technology oriented participants could discuss technical details in a Techi session and there were in-depth studies on implementing SAP IPC integrated with a CD-ROM catalog or on how to model sales views on an existing production oriented base model. A session on graphical modeling with a Visio based modeling front end and the usability test on the latest version of the standard user interface for interactive configuration were well appreciated round-offs for the second meeting day.

The meeting notes and presentations will be sent to all CWG members. The presentations are also available in the CWG user area of the SAP Service Marketplace. To access the SAP Service Marketplace registration (incl. authentication as SAP customer/partner) is required.