Some time ago Microsoft was marketing new versions of its Windows, trying to delight customers with more and more fancy capabilities and functions. But then they listened to the market and said themselves: "Ok. Hold on. Let's stop producing gadgets and spend some time on improving and ensuring SECURITY".
"SAP’s standards of quality are determined by its customers and competition, as well as by its own employees." "At the core of the approach are constant enhancements to products, processes, and services, which lead to increased customer satisfaction [...]" "SAP Sigma [...] shed light on the underlying cause of problems, and ensure sustainable improvements"
Microsoft has changed the dimension of the product development. I think this is what SAP has to do with its BI product. Look at what is existing and set the dimensions of its further development. And as for MS Windows the gap was Security, in my opinion for SAP/BI it should be SUPPORTABILITY.
Those who are experienced with SAP/BW are probably highly frustrated with facing and resolving all kind of issues with BW - during development and production cycles.
Getting errors like this:
in fact means that besides system, you are in trouble too.
That's where I would propose SAP to consider following list of tasks when thinking about Next Big Things for BI:
1) Improve internal development standards for error handling and error messages
This is a good example of SAP's error message which says almost nothing. The funny is the 'Long Text' button that does not introduce any new information, just repeats the error message
2) Improve meaningfulness of ST22 short dumps and SLG1 application logs.
Although short dumps usually contains a lot of information it is still difficult in many times to get to the point what happened and why.
3) Improve quality of SAP Notes
OSS Notes do not ensure completeness of particular issue overview and it seems that each note is written by particular author in his own way
4) Collect all support tools in one place
It would be excellent to have all support transactions and programs under one umbrella with meaningful interface. It should serve as one-stop-shop for all activities from manual activation of objects (vide program RS_TRANSTRU_ACTIVATE_ALL) to query elements consistency check and repair (vide program ANALYZE_RSZ_TABLES)
Net: I would really appreciate if SAP would choose Supportability as the Next Big Thing for BW and would allow us to increase productivity by reducing time we are wasting on identifying the root cause of each issue and finding the solution to it!!
PS. (added on 19.01.2007) As I just read in "SAP Info" SAP is going to implement SAP Sigma process, that is a SAP's version of Six Sigma. Let me put here some important statements from that article that is directly related to the main idea of my blog [bolds are mine]:
BWers! Hope is back 🙂
PPS. (added on 22.01.2007) Thanks to the hint from https://weblogs.sdn.sap.com/pub/u/21406 [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] [original link is broken] I found an answer to what the Caller means in the error message on the screenshot in pt.1. Here is SAP definition: "Definition: A so-called Caller is assigned to each log time for the monitor. A caller contains a number, that indicates as short information that which is logged. Using this number, you can determine from which processing step a message was transmitted."
Nr 09 means 'Info IDoc (RQSTATE)' (You can see RSCALLER domain definition in data dictionary for all possible values).
PPS. (added on 7.02.2007) Question: What does this error message really means, when you try to save the change in an existing workbook?
Answer: BEx Transport Request is not assigned to the Workbook's Development Class (Package). Bingo!
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