November 2002 in Philadelphia, USA

CWG Meeting November 2002 in Philadelphia, USA

At November 7th and 8th the Configuration Work Group met at the SAP headquarters in Philadelphia.

Highlights

Besides an update on the latest developments in SAP's product suite on product configuration, introductions to customer projects and updates from the CWG Focus Groups, there was also opportunity to get insight in some innovative approaches on product model generation and representation in an XML schema, as well as on graphically supported configuration guidance. An overview on People Centric CRM based on mySAP CRM 3.1 and a market overview on Sales Configuration Systems was also part of the general assembly.

On the second day detailed discussion in 4 parallel sessions of the CWG Focus Groups and experience exchange in a modeling session with the Product Modeling Environment of the SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator (SAP IPC-PME 3.5) were offered.


Major Topics

In the introduction the chairman of the CWG, Steve Yip, HP informed about the growth of the CWG, that meanwhile includes more than 250 members from more than 90 organizations. Besides spinning of the offline configurator SAP IPC, the CWG was engaged in defining the Product Modeling Environment SAP IPC-PME. Major assignment of the CWG today is the integration of progressive and approved configuration tools provided by SAP - for the whole bandwidth of configuration complexity, from simply configurable consumer products up to complex system solutions - throughout the complete business process chain.


The update on the SAP standard development for product configuration included:

  • the progress achieved within 2002 for the standard development of SAP Internet Pricing and Configurator,
  • the mid- and long-term topics on integrating the advanced configuration capabilities with the SAP R/3 backend,
  • a status report and outlook on the future maintenance tools for product configuration, the Product Modeling Environment SAP IPC-PME,
  • and a status report on the Web based standard configuration user interface.

In the customer presentations an introduction to various implementations of product configuration solutions with SAP was given. A general trend is to extend product configuration applications and to enlarge the number of potential users. While some customers have to solve some quite complex solution tasks, many configuration problems are rather simple - at least from point of view of interactive configuration.


In the updates from the CWG Focus Groups it turned out that the activities have been significantly increased in the last year. There has been a lot of discussion on integration and conceptual improvements - the CWG Focus Group on Modeling achieved a lot of enhancements that will be included to SAP IPC 4.0.


One of the direct achievements from this CWG meeting is the adoption of a CWG recommendation on the XML representation of knowledge base documents and variant pricing documents according to an XML schema proposed by a CWG task force. The proposal basically covers the concepts of SAP IPC-PME 3.5 - and some self- evident extensions like variant pricing conditions.


Some innovative approaches on product modeling based on MS Excel and introducing graphical 2D and 3D interaction to product configuration envisioned future potentials.


The meeting notes and presentations have been 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.