SAP

In case you were looking to include a new tab in a business object that displays related sales orders for a customer, you might have stumbled across the standard screen /BYD_COD/SalesOnDemand/SalesOrder/UI/COD_SALESORDER_EC.EC.uicomponent.

The problem with this screen was that the "RequestFireOnInitialization" flag was set to false - the standard would fire the inport from the customer screen, so didn't need this setting.

I've raised an incident regarding this and with the latest C4C hotfix (1911.03) SAP have set the above mentioned flag to true.

Most C4C users are certainly aware that SAP has switched off HTML5 with the 1911 release and that it is - according to SAP - "technically impossible" to re-enable HTML5 from 1911 onwards.

I did have some doubts if a) that is really true (it's "only" a frontend) or if that was just to encourage customers to switch to Fiori (which they should - takes some getting used to, but I've come to like it better) and b) if it is a good idea to make it technically impossible to switch back as they will have certainly forgotten some features.

When I read this article recently, I was instantly reminded of the problems my customers face when SAP makes yet another unannounced change. The facts in the article are:

TL;DR: If you are asking yourself whether you need two solutions, you don't. If you do need two solutions, you will not be asking yourself this question.

I read some articles yesterday that largely discussed the sense and non-sense of SAP providing ABAP as a programming language in SAP Cloud Platform.

SAP & Psychology?

When I studied economics, the discipline that most fascinated me was behavioral economics. Fascinating because it contradicts classical economic theory quite heavily by claiming that human beings are generally not able to behave rational (in the sense of being consistent in your choices) and do not always optimize their utility (in the sense that decisions you make are not always good for you).  And it explains why, using psychology.

Little known to the larger audience, C4C does not behave the same to all customers.

When switching from on-premise to the cloud we all needed to learn that standard modifications and skipping upgrades are in the past. Every three months, SAP upgrades C4C to a new release, with hotfixes inbetween. And we all have to live with them. Or do we?

The preprocessing for purchasing info records (German: Einkaufsinfosätze) is not quite straight forward.

The following is what I found out regarding its logic:

Admitted, transaction SARA has not changed a lot in recent years (decades?), so it's fair that with ILM SAP have released a web interface that allows easier (though limited) access to archiving functionality and has the same look-and-feel as the interfaces for ILM rule and policy definitions.

When SAP first introduced C/4 HANA there was a great confusion among my customers. Could it be a new product nobody had heard about? After all, the similarity in name to S/4 HANA (which is the next evolution of SAP ERP) was striking.

However, at least for the time being, C/4 HANA was "just" a marketing term used by SAP when speaking about their various "customer clouds" (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Customer Cloud etc.) and not a new product.