Our PME VC Improvements Are Out!

Finally all of SAP's quality gates are behind us, and the new ERP 6.0 Enhancement Package 5 is released for customers and entering the ramp-up phase.

For me this means that finally, after having talked about the significant enhancements we've made to the PME VC (remotely) in Vienna already, and in Marco Island again, I can finally say: it's out, it's there for you, and if you're using ERP 6.0 you can upgrade without much trouble and (of course) free of charge to EhP5 and use the new features.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, here's the new PME VC features we've implemented in EhP5:

• My favorite one: you can now enter values for your reference characteristics before simulating your configuration, and they are saved to the database as well (user-specific) so you can reuse them in later sessions (also see attached image).
• You can easily change descriptions or longtexts of characteristics and values now. Adding data for a new language is much easier now.
• You can add new characteristic values now.
• You can easily create and change visual designs (characteristic groups) with drag and drop. Just drop characteristics on a  group and they'll be added to it.
• You can maintain (fairly complex) selection conditions for BOM items with drag and drop as well.
• You have more freedom in which configurator (VC or IPC) to choose for simulation or productively.
• You can now view BOM details in PME VC (that's "view", not "edit", but it's still a major improvement over before where you could just see an ID), and you can edit the BOM item's dependencies there.
• You can incorporate freshly changed data of a global characteristic into its overwritten version in a class.

If you're interested in more details, then just take a look at my presentation from Marco Island: http://www.configuration-workgroup.com/webfm_send/1825

The videos that shows the new features in action can be found here (caution: 12 MB RAR file unpacking to a few hundred MBs of AVI files): http://www.configuration-workgroup.com/webfm_send/1828

If you now are overwhelmed by the urge to have the new features available, please get in touch with your SAP contact on how to join the ramp-up. If you don't know how to do this, just drop a comment to this blog and I'll get in touch with you on how to proceed.

[Edit: added two more features that were missing]