CWG Meeting November 2003 in Philadelphia, USA

Summary

With 65 participants the autumn user group meeting on product configuration with the Internet Pricing and Configurator (IPC) and SAP Variant Configuration (VC) was the largest meeting the Configuration Work Group so far had in the United States. Besides 38 attendees from 21 customer companies 14 attendees from 9 partner organizations and 13 representatives from the SAP development organization and two SAP subsidiaries participated the CWG meeting. 23 attendees (35%) were new CWG members.

Two intensive work group sessions with the core members of the CWG on November 3rd and 4th preceded the general assembly at November 5th and a series of parallel sessions on November 6th. The feedback in general was very positive, especially the parallel sessions focusing on expert talks and the possibility to network with other customers and experts in informal talks were appreciated most.

General Assembly

CWG Meeting Philadelphia 2003 - General Assembly.

In the Introduction Dick Reimink, Steelcase & CWG co-chair, described the current two major challenges of the CWG as follows:

Enabling & improvement of standard configuration for broad user community (SAP Variant Configuration executed by the IPC)
Standard business software empowered by configuration excellence (IPC advanced mode integrated with SAP ERP)

The overview on member statistics showed that the CWG currently enlists more than 320 members from more than 120 organizations – that is a net growth of 29% (within the last 12 months).

In the SAP Roadmap presentation Marcus Behrens, SAP AG, explained the product strategy on variant configuration with SAP.

In the presentation on Guided Selling with mySAP CRM e-Commerce Manfred Muench, SAP AG, showed how to integrate needs analysis (Guided Selling) with interactive product configuration in the mySAP CRM 3.1 or 4.0 standard.

The Customer Updates included 4 project presentations - all based on standard scenarios.

Rob DeSisto from the Gartner group talked about the Vision on the Configuration Space and pointed out that only 39% of interviewed organizations receive demonstrable return on investment with their implementations on product configuration. One of the major reasons is not understanding the big picture and underestimating the implications of product configuration with Product Lifecycle Management, Supply Chain Management, Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise Resource Planning.

The Focus Topic of the autumn 2003 CWG meeting was Product Configuration with SAP Internet Sales (R/3 Edition). In the overview presentation Mike Lake, from SAP America, elaborated that SAP Internet Sales (R/3 Edition) enables companies to rapidly turn the Internet into a profitable sales channel – without a full-blown CRM deployment. The Internet Sales & IPC consulting team of SAP America had set-up a Web shop as front-end application to an existing SAP R/3 implementation (total effort 2 days expert consulting). The demo included the whole suite on product configuration functionality, including fuzzy search for product variants, conflict explanation, conflict resolution, 3D-visualization of product options, the dynamic product image.

The Updates from the CWG Focus Groups gave an overview on the work of the last six months and encouraged CWG members to participate in the active work and close discussion with the SAP development organization.

Modeling Focus Group (Daniel Naus, HP)
Integration Focus Group (Steve Yip, HP)
Engineering Change Focus Group (Robert Eramo, Lam Research)
Interactive Configuration Focus Group (Thomas Regele, Sybit)

In the Market Overview on Configuration Tools Don Cochran, TSC, gave an update on changes in the market. The general trend on seeing best-of-breed configurators facing more and more difficulties and integrated product configuration gaining market share could be reaffirmed.

In his presentation Optimized Product Models with SAP Variant Configuration, Advanced Mode what is it? Henk Meeter, Integrity, pointed out that most configuration tasks whether simple or very complex can be modeled with SAP Variant Configuration as is in place and fully integrated since 1995. Object orientation, constraint based modeling and table driven approaches are state of the art and can be used to leverage product configuration integrated with SAP R/3. Only a certain range of network type configuration that requires multi-instantiation for a compositional approaches and abstract data type variables for object linking will require the so-called “Advanced Mode” capabilities.

In the Conclusion the next CWG meeting was scheduled for week 19 2004 (May 3rd till 7th).

At the CWG Dinner (sponsored by TSC) the meeting attendees had opportunity to network with other CWG members while discussing further aspects of product configuration and other topics of general interest.

Parallel Sessions

The first block of parallel sessions of the second meeting day included special topics of interest:

Constraint based modeling, Henk Meeter, Integrity: This workshop showed how the application of the base principles on abstraction, analysis and deductive inferences are to be implemented with the SAP classification system, the decomposition via bills of materials and constraints that rely on normalized variant tables. Along with examples from project experience guidelines towards a methodology in working with SAP Variant Configuration were given.
Meet the Consulting Experts on product configuration with SAP Internet Sales (R/3 Edition), Mike Lake, Michael Josephson & Jim Mossey, SAP America: The team that implemented SAP Internet Sales upfront an existing R/3 implementation explained the steps that have to be made in order to get the Web shop up and running on configurable products. Participants had opportunity to get hands-on the implemented shop and thus experience browsing and shopping in the SAP Internet Sales business-to-business application.
Feedback Session – approaches to a future product modeling user interface, Marcus Behrens, SAP AG: While ideas and concepts of next generation maintenance environments for product configuration where presented participants could give feedback and discuss concerns as well as bring in new ideas. The necessity to also take into account the maintenance for variant pricing was brought up by several parties.

In the second block of parallel sessions the CWG Focus Groups had their meetings:

Modeling: Discussion of IPC runtime enhancements and R/3 compiler improvements currently in action.
Integration: Discussion on further proceeding with business case definition on integration of IPC advanced mode to SAP R/3 production.
Engineering Change Management: Demonstration of the ECM Undo in the system landscape of Lam Research.
Interactive Configuration: Discussion of the “top ten” user interface triggered requirements and definition of the further proceeding on more detailed specifications for single items.

The final session was on Graphical Modeling with Integral. Henry Kurz, Henk Meeter and Peter Illing, Integrity, showed the current state of this graphical modeling tool that can be used to elaborate configuration models in an MS Visio graphic. Latest extension enables reading an SAP R/3 Variant Configuration model from an XML file (according to the XML schema recommended by the CWG in 2002) and transferring it to an Integral model in order to view this model as connection diagram with the Integral browser.