Yuksel Akcinar – SCN Member of the Month April 2016

He is thoughtful and diligent, and I found his personal motto to be so inspirational in today’s fast paced world of constant change;

“Every problem is an opportunity. Prepare yourselves for the opportunities.”

Tell us a bit about yourself, where you live, what kind of work you do, and other things you would like to share with the community (hobbies, fun facts)?

My name is Yuksel AKCINAR. I am from Turkey and live in the biggest city of our country in Istanbul. Let’s say at Bosphorus. I am a technology consultant and work for a technology company currently. I worked for Ulker and Turkish Airlines before that as Leader of the Basis Groups. I have been working in Basis for more than 10 years and involved in many SAP projects including many SAP products on any platforms.

I am also a trainer of technical courses like TADM10 and TADM12, HA200, TADM70, ADM506 etc. I have trained BASIS consultants not only in our country, but also in Hungary, Romania and Morocco. I have certifications on SAP BASIS, OS/DB migration and SAP HANA.

   Beyza & Emre, Camlica Hill, Istanbul

If I come to other side of the life, I am married with a lovely, humble, respectful and patient nurse and have 16 year old daughter and 9 year old son. I love them very much. I like reading and strongly encourage my children to read. We go swimming once a week with my son. Go to cinema or watch films at home together. Of course sharing on SCN is also one of my nice hobbies nowadays.

When did you become a member of SCN and which areas are you most active in?

Actually I started SAP in 2006 as a customer and become a member of SCN (sdn at that time) for search purposes only. When I started working in my current technology company I became active on SCN. When I was abroad for a training purpose, I decided to write about the topic that I taught and started being active on SCN. I can say that real membership starts with this decision at the end of 2014. I am mostly active in technical areas like NetWeaver Administrator, Databases and Solution Manager.

   With work colleagues, over breakfast

What motivates you to keep coming back to SCN and help members get answers to their questions?

I always prepare documents for my work, even if it is a small. (I sometimes complain about this documentation addiction. But cannot stop myself. ) And I help my colleagues at work, by sharing my documents with them. As I mentioned I am a trainer also, I like training.

   Yuksel at training

So, SCN is the right place for me and for my job to share knowledge, experiences, help colleagues, increase your knowledge while you are sharing. SCN is the first place to look at when you have a problem or when you want to configure, install something. There is a saying in our language that “By sharing information increases.” I also like following discussions of great members on SCN. These motivate me when I write in SCN.

I see you recently started a blog series about Solution Manager. Tell us about the origins of the series and what you’re planning next?

I work for a technology company that has more than 50 customers. Most of our customers have SAP landscapes and we are monitoring their SAP systems. SAP Solution manager helps us keep the systems up and running. So Solution Manager work is also part of our duty to customers. We install a Solution Manager for all customers, connect all, especially production, systems to SM performing managed system Configurations.

New versions of SAP products always bring excitement with themselves. They make us feel enthusiasm for installing them and seeing the changes. When I heard about the Solution Manager 7.2 is at Ramp Up and saw the cheerful team, I decided that I must install it first in our company and share the documentation before it is generally available to all. And that was the start of the blog series. I have completed 5 of them and am planning to write at least 5 more. I want to have guided services for ITSM, test management, process management, cocument management parts of Solution Manager and share my experiences also for these functionalities.

For other colleagues who might be considering a similar switch, tell us about the journey from developer to system administration. What were some of the hardest things you had to get used to in the new role?

I started my career as a developer. Indeed I like writing code also very much. Designing, organizing, integrating processes make me feel happy and successful. In 2006 my company decided to change the ERP and had a contract with SAP. Those days I was also thinking to be a system administrator. I was thinking that when you are a developer, you should have deep knowledge about the development tool and language and also the functional processes that you are doing development for. Otherwise you always need a functional consultant guiding you. When these were in my mind, my manager asked me whether I want to be a BASIS guy. Chance came to my door so I said why not? And that decision started my System Admin history.

I like being a System Administrator. Of course it has some difficulties but when you enjoy when you are working that’s not a problem. One of the difficulties is you must work at night or at weekends or on holidays when you are working on production systems especially. Planning is very important in this type of work. If you have enough colleagues in your company this becomes not a big problem.

The other one is technology and products are changing fast. You must keep yourself up to date. You must like reading documents.  As I said if you enjoy while you are working you are lucky and you will succeed what you do.

Which course did you earn your openSAP badge for? What do you think about the learning experience on openSAP?

I studied Rapid Deployment of SAP Solutions (Update Q1/2015)  for HANA RDS package and SAP Netweaver Upgrades in a Nutshell courses. On openSAP you have a chance to listen on the related topic from experts on openSAP. There are assignments for exercises, FAQ pages, Q&A pages. At the end you can get record of achievement free of charge.

As an SAP consultant working with SAP’s products, you must have seen a lot. What’s the most important thing SAP needs to do to keep customers enthusiastic about its products in the future?

Customers are aware of the power of SAP. But this is not the only reason why customers choose SAP. As technical guys I can say that performance is important for customers. Customers want to reach data as fast as possible. Especially managers do not want to use laptops, PCs and they want to control their companies using their mobile devices. Reports, confirmations, dashboards etc. So feature products must provide customers mobility, fast access to big data and cost effectiveness.

Do you feel l like your experiences on the SCN community have helped advance your career and/or professional network?

Yes, I think so. I had new friends in SCN and will have more in the future in my opinion. I will meet them whenever I have chance to go to TechEd and SAP forums. And I believe that after this “SCN Member of the Month” award, this will be more obvious.

Is there an SCN member you admire (OK… you can name a few)? And for what reason?

I like the way SAP Mentors write to each other and understand each other. I try to follow their conversations on SCN. Matt Fraser, Jelena Perfiljeva, Steve Rumsby, Jürgen L, Tammy Powlas  are the names that I admire.

Are you on Twitter?

Yes. @yakcnar is my account.

* * * * * * * * * *

Every month, a member of the SAP Community Network is recognized for exemplary behavior: sharing knowledge with peers, being helpful and taking on additional tasks to support community engagement. See the list of previous members recognized on the SCN Member of The Month Hall of Fame.