West Michigan (USA) Chapter

A precedent was made with the formation of a CWG Chapter in Western Michigan (Grand Rapids Area, USA) that began meeting in 2008 and is now meeting about every other month with at least 7 member companies including: Steelcase, Haworth, Siemens, and Whirlpool to name a few.   

Thanks to Steve Schneider and Kevin Meyer, this is a thriving chapter.  The chapter has round table discussions, presentations, challenges for modeling problems, and current updates from SAP and interesting topics from members.   Their meeting is usually scheduled for an afternoon and then always have some networking time after hours.  Meetings are usually hosted by a member company.  A LinkedIn Group has been created for CWG members in the Western Michigan area and is open to CWG Members living and working in the area.

May Face to Face Meeting!

Yes, we will be gathering together again on May 11, 2010 from 1-5pm.
We will be at the Haworth facility, with a networking event at the New Holland Brewery.  

66 E. 8th Street

Holland, Michigan 49423

Our tentative agenda is;

An overview of selected April Conference presentations given in the European meeting. These will include (but are not limited to)

• Searching variant tables
• PLM Improvements (hopefully presented by SAP)
• Pricing
• Best Practices
• Misc Tips and Tricks

We will also discuss what the Next Steps for our chapter will be including;

• Nomination of leadership.
• LinkedIn Group
• Next WebEx

For event registration, please visit this url;    http://maywmicwg.eventbrite.com/

January meeting of the SAP Configuration Work Group (CWG) West Michigan Chapter

From Steve Schneider's Blog...

We met on January 19 at Steelcase. Our topics were;

• External Configurators (presented by Configura)
• Impacts of VC on Materials Management
• PDR (Presented by eSpline)
• Engineering Change Management

We had one of our better meetings (per Steve Schneider).   Many thanks to the folks from Configura and eSpline for being willing to present to our little group. eSpline presented via LiveMeeting and conference call, which worked very well.

Overall, we had 19 people in attendance. Much better than our last attempt at getting together!! The Networking event was also a success, with 14 people in attendance.

Next up is a webcast, and our next face to face meeting will be held sometime in May. Exact dates and times are still being worked out, along with agenda items. With a little bit of luck, at our May webcast we will have some folks from SAP presenting!!

I strongly encourage you to become involved in a local chapter. In my humble opinion, it really makes the CWG experience just that much better…

If you are interested in presenting, please send Steve Schneider an email with a brief description of the topic you'd like to cover and the amount of time it would take.

You can reach Steve at sschneid@steelcase.com