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Showing posts from 2009

Rainy October

It feels like I need to build an ark with all the rain happening around here lately. It almost parallels what I have been up to lately, so let's do a recap - Future of SAP CRM webinar - ASUG Virtual Education Summit session recording - Vacation in San Diego - ASUG Virtual Education Summit chat session - SAP Teched Phoenix for the SAP Mentor Program - My daughter's 3rd birthday Yeah that is probably more than enough with everyday life. Which reminds me also I'm also helping my wife get ready for our second child due in January.

Green/Sustainable CRM

So eventually I'm going to blog on this topic on SCN. However until all my research is done, let's outline a few concepts: Drive to eBusiness Sales e-Commerce real time retail availability Prevent consumers from making unnecessary trips by providing up to date in store inventory. electronic mailing Send out all communications via electronic methods webinar based selling Conduct followup "sales visit" using web conferencing and reduce number of physical trips paperless discounts Eliminate all paper based discounts, including coupons and rebates. Marketing Communication preferences Keep customer preferences up to date and gear people towards electronic medium. Only use physical marketing materials when preference expressed electronic mailing Once again use electronic channel to reduce junk mail etc. Offer different types of e-goodies to replace traditional promo items given out improve targeting Reduce physical materials by better segmentation and analytics Service

End of June

Wow it is almost the end of June and things have gone by so quickly. I'm looking back at this month and realizing that I have about 4 works till my Anniversary trip with Karon and 8 weeks until vacation. I'm looking forward to vacation as I'm going back to San Diego with Karon and get to take Emily out there with us. Karon and myself love San Diego and went there on our honeymoon. It will be special to take our daughter out there to see everything out there. I'm also have been gradually working on getting the room that acts as my office in my house ready to be painted. Unfortuantely there is a lot of junk that needs to be moved out, packed up and some of gotten rid of. However I have a few weeks to get the room fully ready, and by the end of this week I plan on packing/moving another bookshelf out, plus empty most of the closet. Well I probably should get going here, but I will post more later on some CRM related topics when I think of something good. Take care.

Thank you and other thoughts

I wanted to follow up and once again thank in generally everyone who sent their congratulations and thank yous after the SAP Mentor News. I'm impressed with how friendly/welcoming all the SAP Mentors have been. The group itself is quite impressive, so it is quite a honor just to get to associate with this group of people :) I think I have been given a great chance to learn, but also help other people grow. Here is what I would like to try to accomplish during my year term as a SAP Mentor. Community Goals - Further build the CRM online community by encouraging blogging, wiki gardeners and participation beyond answering questions in the forums. - Continue to grow the CRM online knowledgebase(wiki, blogs, and wikis) so that common questions can be found easily and discussions grow more technical - Attempt to bring people who won't participate on SCN due to "noise/other issues" to participate, even if on a irregular basis - Spread the word about SAP Mentor Program and

Feeling Better and SAP Mentor

Well it has been interesting last couple of days. I'm now feeling almost 100% after getting sick last week, which is good considering I'm done with the meds prescribed. The weekend was interesting as my wife's car has been in the shop since Saturday and hopefully it will be finished tomorrow. In addition my father broke his arm on Saturday and is still trying to recover from that issue. The last couple days have been busy as we over at my parents on Sunday to visit my dad. Monday night I headed over again to help getting his wireless setup and moving some furniture. Tuesday was taking care of the household, and tomorrow if it doesn't rain I'm hoping to cut the yard again. Thursday is the wing ding at Bass Pro near my house, so the week is pretty jam packed. On the work aspect of life I found out on Friday from a phone call that I was selected as a SAP mentor . I had the first welcome call this Monday, which was pretty interesting. I'm still working on my prep

A few personal thoughts

Normally this blog tends to focus on the CRM related aspects of my life. However let's a take a quick detour and go through the last week or two. This week has been quite interesting. I started out the month with trying to establish a regular workout routine, only to have that stopped by getting pretty sick. Now keep in mind whatever I had was there before I worked out on Monday evening. I ended joking to Karon about getting a doctor's appt for wednesday and good thing. By dinnertime on wednesday I had about 101.8 fever, but I broke it over night. Luckily doc gave me some good meds to fight the sinus infection, but I must say I'm just still not a 100%. I'm definitely a little crankier than normal, and not as focused. Doesn't mean I can't get stuff done, but need to definitely "organize" in order to move forward. I also found getting sick helps your weight loss goals. I have been supporting Karon on her biggest loser challenge and I'm about

Catching up

A quick recap of what's been going on/keeping me from blogging: - Karon's Birthday on Memorial Day - Got sick earlier this week - Playing 1vs100 on the xbox360 - pretty cool - work, without it I can't blog lol... I'll pick a topic for the next post. Take care, Stephen

iphone, bacon salt, and "iPope"

It's almost the long holiday so let's take a look back a few topics: iphone - still enjoying it and it gets useful each day more often bacon salt - just arrived at the house today, thinking of ways to use it iPope - At this point does blackberry, palm, nokia and motorola give up? I mean the Pope will have his own iphone app. No word on whether you can get your iphone blessed, by your local parish priest. Take a look at http://tinyurl.com/pxyonf More details at 11.

Behind the what's the bdoc blog

https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/14308 You can tell I got pretty motivated to post a "ranting" blog on SCN about a question that was asked. Well here is the background on why I posted what I did: I have been hanging around on SCN for about 4+ years since March of 2005 under my current id. I lurked for about a year or so before then, when I worked for my old employer. The main reason drew me to SCN was the content available. SCN was a radical concept for SAP knowledge sharing that who knows why it took SAP so long to come up with such a site, but lets not digress in that direction. It was useful when I did my first CRM 40 implementation as both the technical and functional lead. Now in the beginning I was a like a lot of people and really posted answers to questions on SCN hoping to get the points. I honestly wanted to get one of the t-shirts and try to "show" off that I could answer the most SAP CRM related questions. During this early stage after a while

iphone, woot, and bacon salt

A few random thoughts for tonight: iphone doing great so far, battery life is my main issue, but overall experience is turning me into an apple fanboy Woot & Bacon Salt - Another woot off today and finally ordered the hopefully tasty bacon salt. There are some inventions that mankind can not top. Well I might post more while waiting for that boc

Social CRM Followup

Back in march I was probably a little harsh on the social CRM strategy from SAP. After seeing it grow for a couple months, I have the found twitter feed to be somewhat interesting. A lot of the content however is links to blogs, which was lousy on mobile until I got the iphone. SAP decided to add another interesting blog to this whole area: https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/wlg/14261 The only problem I have now is yet another CRM resource not on SCN.. that is blocked by the corporate firewall. Yes facebook , twitter , blogs are blocked even if they deal with SAP CRM. Luckily for me I have mobile web access via my personal cell phone. The same problem however with vibrant customer participation I think is still there. Vijay Vijayasankar and myself are working on a solution. The hint is that organization is not there from the general community side within SCN/BPX. There needs to be more than people answers questions on forums for points to have a community.

iHype or not

I must admit that I'm a cheapskate and never want to overpay for the latest gadget. In this case I waited out for the iphone 3G and only broke down three days after I could renew at the "new customer price". I will post later about my thoughts on the iphone, but for now lets talk about the customer experience getting there. First issue I had was the fact that my wife wanted, no actually needed a new phone. She was using a "hand-me down" LG, due to the fact that her phone broke and she didn't want to pay full price for a replacement. Her goal was to get a new phone with a qwerty keyboard. As you know mother's day is recently and so is her birthday towards the end of the month. I wanted to be a good husband and try to get her something new. My first problem is that I couldn't spend a lot over rebate. She told me that she would wait if it was too expensive. AT&T had "qwerty" dumbphones for about $200 after rebate unless you wanted a panate

Goal to Problem

I wanted to talk about this yesterday, but my latest facebook addiction consumed more of my time. The topic today is about whether we from IT practice CRM when we deal with our customers? Now I personally work in a very laid-back, informal shop. The CRM guy part of me, says that we need to apply what the business is doing, with what we are doing with IT. So if I'm not using those practices via the system, I should be at least applying the concepts in practice. I try to take every question with serious consideration, even if some give me a chuckle at times. The problem is how do you provide a great "user experience", with limited resources. The goal I have to is to provide "white glove" help with every question. I want to make sure that even if we do not solve their goal, we provide a solution to their problem. I bet you are confused about the goal part. Well every user comes in a with a goal and a problem. The goal is what they think is wrong and the

Are we social by being one way broadcasters?

Sorry folks, but I don't buy into SAP launch of the CRM with "social media". I mean honestly the twitter feed is less than revealing, my wife posts more photos in a day than what they have done in the last week, and the you tube videos are "cute" at best. I mean they don't even tag the photos in the flickr set, so who knows who is there, unless you are there. No I'm not jealous that I'm not at the conference. I much rather be here in St. Louis converting about 40 sets of data in our CRM system in colder weather. However the weather is nice, but I guess I will have to settle for no visits to Disney right now. Personally the whole lack of social online ecosystem, is that is not customer driven enough in the CRM space. BPX/SDN/Consulting for Free or whatever you want to call it, doesn't have a lot of customer created content in the CRM space. Yeah a lot of people answer forum questions, but that is easy enough to do. It takes a lot more effor

CRM and Tigers??

The question you may is why CRM and tigers? It's an easy answer that explains my blogging here. First part is that I work fulltime as a CRM system analyst supporting SAP CRM. The second part is that I'm a Mizzou grad whose mascot is the Benegal Tiger. Combine the two backgrounds and you have me.