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Newsletters
(Oktober, 2000)
- Other Facts And Experience On Support Strategy For Epplication Environment
- SAP Trainee
Other Facts And Experience On Support Strategy For Epplication Environment Tilbage
123
ABSTRACT
Depending on the maturity and sophis-tication of the IT department within an organisation, the range of tasks pertain-ing to the role of support can change widely. I will not try to cover the nature of support as such, but rather give straight-forward and useful hints as I have learned.
SITE PECULARITIES AND IDIOSYNCRACIES
Environment is not always the result of installed technology. It can be highly performing and highly confusing at the same time. That is the superficial appear-ance to the just arrived support program-mer to a new business environment. The dilemma as to whether one should rely primarily on oneself, may hold true. But it is best, however, to establish a working communication level with the following profiles: the system support profession-nal, the operating leader, the pertinent application co-ordinator.
METHODS
In the dimension of problem-solving methods, one can enumerate a number of ways: top-down, target oriented, heu-ristical, ad hoc procedures developed on the customer site.
In the first place, do not expect too much about methods. To work with the user, the supporting programmer must know who the user is. It may be in any part of the company, and it may be tech-nical or non-technical.
Unfortunately the key-user is hard to identify. With DeMarco, we can find the responsible, the system owner, the hands-on user. Be fortunate to establish this as an early task.
TOOLS AT DISPOSITION
There are tools from the strictly product oriented and debugging ones, to the ad hoc self made and hidden assembler programs.
Data Query facilities, Data Retrieval packages and other utility programs within the Online support environment, are documented for you and provided from the very beginning.
Whether specially written assembler programs turn out to be an advantage in doing the task, will depend on the per-sonal experience you have gained on the
site. Nobody will tell you about which files, and how to access the proper rec-ords for updating erroneous data in criti-cal situations. It will happen. And de-pending on the workload involved for cor-recting the failures, writing such programs can be a rewarding help for future and very similar situations.
KEEPING ABOVE THE CROWD -RECIPES FOR CRUDE DATA PROCESSING SUPPORT
It is always a winning strategy to keep perspective in doing the intricate actions required for correction. In difficult cases, one can follow up a step-by-step proce-dure, to be recorded at discretion, and re-usable.
Why spend hours of analysis, if one can elegantly reproduce the failure, and program a specialised dump of storage?
Explicit error messages on the job, re-spectively, at the console, will provide a new dimension to work on. There, nobody can misspell the information or confuse it. Getting to the “hardcopy” of Sysout is half of solving the problem.
RECEPTION OF USER STATEMENTS AND USER ALLEGATIONS
That part of the job as a supporting programmer and supporting consultant can bring surprises of its own.
The involvement of application de-partment staff for getting certain clues of information covers a large spectrum of answers. Without getting to the detailed stories of error reporting and comments received on the desk of the co-ordinating management, it is worthwhile to be pre-pared for every kind of situation.
From the “flair ambience” of the store and distribution department, to the self-conscious, under-cooled and desperate laconics of other book-keeping accounts departments.
The specialist has to be prepared on varied attitudes and answers to have to cope with.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST, THE REWARDING USER SATISFACTION
This is the ultimate point for the sup-porting programmer for finally getting the reward of his determination in doing the tasks.
SAP Trainee Tilbage
123
EDUCATION – TRAINING
Persons who are not in a process of permanent further education can hardly fulfil today’s demands in the business world. Especially the development in information technologies demands a continuous training of the IT-specialists.
It is not easy to find qualified IT employees. However, until now it was possible to find programmers for IBM Mainframe and Oracle, whereas it is almost impossible to get enough people skilled in SAP.
We decided, therefore, to offer a first step into the SAP world to motivated persons with a completed education and sound economic background. We advertised in newspapers and had many application talks with interested people. Our recruited SAP trainees have specialised training or several years of experience in one of the following areas:
- Accounting
- Marketing
- Logistics
- Production Planning
- Human Resources
- IT
Most of our SAP trainees had been wishing to change to an IT department since some time. But did not get the right way in, or could not in spite of all effort and attended IT courses the new knowledge uses in business.
THEORY AND CASE STUDY
In a 10 week period of training we will give our group of SAP trainees the theo-retical knowledge. During the first part of the education they will learn about:
- R/3 Basis Technology
- ABAP Workbench: Overview
- Workbench Techniques of List Processing
- Transaction Processing
- Communication Interface Programming in ABAP
- Data Transfer
- Enhancements and Modifications
- ABAP Dictionary
- SAPscript: Forms Design and Text Management
At the end of the course of theory the trainees will solve a case study, based on an example from practice. The education will be completed with practical training at one of our customers’ sites.
PRACTICAL TRAINING
Dear customer,
for our prospective SAP junior programmers we are looking for companies which are able to provide them a practical training position. Please get in touch with us in order to discuss a possible deployment.
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