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These days, everybody in business seems to be talking about the customer experience. Regardless of industry, whether business-to-business or consumer products, private or public sector, you’d better be able to provide an easy way for customers to interact with your organization, or else.

That’s the driving force behind DataXstream, although it might not seem that way at first glance. DataXstream has developed a product called OMS+ – OMS meaning order-management system – which has recently been added to the SAP App Center. I wanted to know more about it, so I caught up with Ron Votto and Tim Yates of DataXstream in late 2017.

The conversation began with an explanation of OMS, which is what organizations use to manage sales and delivery processes, order input, inventory tracking, post-sale service, and so on. Sounds simple? Well, it’s not.

Complex Processes Made to Look Easy

“Take an aviation company delivering a rocket to a government defense agency, for example,” Tim told me. “The sales process might span 25 years or more, involving hundreds or even thousands or transactions, suppliers, subcontractors, partial delivery timetables – and on and on. The people responsible need to be able to manage all that.” Even a much simpler retail transaction taking place in a short time frame encompasses many different moving parts. “From high-touch specialty retail like home furnishings to lower-end, high-volume big-box stores, the people handling the transaction need to enter and access information about the customer, inventory, warranties, delivery, and so much more.”

There are plenty of OMS products on the market today to help manage these processes, said Ron, who is DataXstream’s sales director. What makes OMS+ different is its ability to support the back-end order-management process as well as the front-end, point of sale, with fewer clicks, simple screens and with lightning speed.

What problems does that solve?

“The sales process requires too much user navigation,” Ron explained. “The information needed to execute customer-assisted sales transactions is too spread out, and it’s difficult to answer customer inquiries quickly and efficiently when discussing products and their availability. OMS+ has a simple, intuitive user interface that makes it easy to navigate and access the back-end database that stores all the key information.” And that back end would be … SAP ERP.

Tim, who is one of the founding partners of DataXstream (circa 1996), explained that the company has since its early days been focused on SAP. “The SAP software – SAP ERP and now SAP S/4HANA – is the most powerful engine for this purpose. And both the order-management and point-of-sale processes use the same underlying foundation. But the information was not always readily accessible. Our vision was to simplify and streamline those processes for the user – and to develop a product so easy to use that it requires almost no training.”

And that brings us back to where I started: Provide a simple, intuitive user interface for the people interacting with the customer, and fast access to accurate information, and there you have it: a superior customer experience.

On the Map and Ahead of the Curve

I asked Tim and Ron about their longtime focus on SAP and current engagement with the company – aware that they typically attend all three of SAP’s major events — SAPPHIRE NOW (customer event), SAP TechEd (developer event), and SAP FKOM (internal field kick-off/sales event), each of which has a different purpose.

“SAPPHIRE NOW offers a way for us to showcase our products to customers and engage with the SAP account execs,” Ron explained. “At SAP TechEd, the intent is to have good conversations with developers about the technology we leverage as part of the SAP partner ecosystem. And at SAP FKOM, we get first-hand experience about where SAP is going, which is important because our strategy, road map, and messaging align completely with SAP’s. Being there helps us stay ahead of the curve.”

The fact that OMS+ is now available as a cloud-based solution on the SAP App Center is no coincidence, since DataXstream has closely followed the evolution of SAP’s cloud strategy.

To learn more about OMS+, and even take advantage of a free trial, check it out on the SAP App Center.

Bill Rojas is senior director of Digital Transformation and Partner Enablement on the SAP Digital team. Contact him on Twitter | LinkedIn. http://bit.ly/2EA1nTh #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

By Scott Campbell

As one of the largest companies in North America, Johnson & Johnson has a keen grasp of the corporate social responsibilities often expected from companies its size. Whether it’s child health care sourcing more from women-owned businesses, the New Jersey-based pharmaceutical and consumer goods giant is always looking for ways to leave a more positive impact on communities around the world, according to Len DeCandia, chief procurement officer.

As part of its “Health for Humanity 2020” project, Johnson & Johnson has earmarked a number of improvements to reach, including investments to help develop healthier people, places and business practices. That includes a target goal of ensuring that 80% of its spend occurs with suppliers enrolled in its Sustainable Procurement Program and to double the number of countries with established supplier diversity and inclusion programs.

“One of the hopes we have as a very large organization is how do we use what we bring to world to be able to benefit minority-, women- and veteran-owned suppliers around the world,” DeCandia told Alex Atzberger, former president of SAP Ariba (now president of SAP Hybris) in this video.

A recent implementation of SAP Ariba is helping the company reach those targets, DeCandia said. Selecting a new platform to improve its supplier procurement strategy was an important decision because the technology needed to fit Johnson & Johnson’s culture as well—which meant getting support from the company’s procurement, human resources, finance, IT and other departments. No easy task to get that many companies to agree on anything, but SAP Ariba fit the bill, he said.

“This now gives us the platform to be able to provide greater access and fundamentally engage our 130,000 employees to be part of that journey,” DeCandia said. “We believe in [social responsibility] very strongly and we know [SAP] believes in it as well.

About 80% of Johnson & Johnson’s spend now flows through SAP Ariba and the company has processed more than 250,000 purchase orders on the platform. The implementation allows a 130-year-old company to change the trajectory of health care, DeCandia said, touching one billion people a day.

“This gives us more connected, deeper relationships with our supplier base,” DeCandia said. “[We are able] to use innovation to be insightful through digitization and making the right decisions with the right information to be more responsive to the needs of patients and customers. It’s been an enjoyable experience because the technology has worked and it has to work every day.”

SAP and our Partners. Improving Lives. That is our purpose.

Ashley Tully
Ashley.Tully@sap.com
Director, Global To-Partner Marketing

Follow Ashley on Twitter – @AshleyTully2 http://bit.ly/2ECNWBO #SAP #SAPCloud #AI

Hi,

In this post, I have explained step by step configuration of  Smart Data Access for Hana Database with error resolutions.

One of main challenges that companies are facing today are

1. Get information in real time to make quick decision on time

2. At the same time, we need to keep control over cost for IT and Technology.

By Keeping Business requirement in mind, SAP has introduced Smart Data Access in SAP HANA which is a Virtualization Technique. This feature is introduced from Hana 1.0 SPS 6 in SAP HANA.

What is Smart Data Access?

SAP HANA smart data access enables remote data to be accessed via SQL queries as if they are local tables in HANA, without copying the data into SAP HANA.
Not only does this capability provide operational and cost benefits, but most importantly it supports the development and deployment of the next generation of analytical applications which require the ability to access and integrate data from multiple systems in real-time regardless of where the data is located or what systems are generating it.

Key Concept of SAP HANA Smart Data Access

Smart Data Access is a technology which enables remote data access as if they are local tables in HANA without copying data into SAP HANA.

It is based on local virtual tables that maps to an existing object at the remote data source site.

Data required from other sources will remain in virtual tables. Virtual tables will point to remote tables in different data sources. It will enable real time access to data regardless of its location and at same time, it will not affect SAP HANA database.
Customers can then write SQL queries in SAP HANA, which could operate on virtual tables. The HANA query processor optimizes these queries, and executes the relevant part of the query in the target database, returns the results of the query to HANA, and completes the operation.

With the SAP HANA 2.0 SPS 00 release, virtual tables have been integrated with result caching in HANA. Static caching has been available as of SAP HANA 1.0 SPS 11, what is new in this release is the support for virtual tables. If you choose to enable the caching feature on virtual tables you can look forward to improved performance by means of avoiding redundant computation of identical and frequent queries. You can enable this feature either directly via the ini file or by using SQL. Also keep in mind that you need to define a cache staleness restriction when configuring.

Restrictions on usage of Smart Data Access:

Data in virtual tables cannot be modified i.e. insert, update and delete operations are not possible on virtual tables. However, we can do select on virtual table and put data in HANA table.

Virtual table does not support BLOB/CLOB data type. Workaround of this problem is to create view on remote table by excluding column of BLOB/CLOB type and then create virtual table with the help of view.

Virtual Tables cannot be used in multi node HANA cluster. However, it is possible to access virtual table from one HANA server to other.

Some analytical view does not support virtual tables.

Need to add below entries in odbc.ini file

[HDB]

Driver=/hana/shared//hdbclient/libodbcHDB.so

ServerNode=:31113

->Expand the  folder Provisioning http://bit.ly/2BxQGxQ #SAP #SAPCloud #AI