SAP announced this week a new CEI project for the PLM and Project Systems area.
The announcement is here:Â INVITATION: Kick-off webinar ERP PLM 2021
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Background
What is the Customer Engagement Initiative? We’ve already written about it in detail in the following blog: SAP’s CEI Program and New Developments for Project Systems (PS).
Basically, CEI is SAP’s way to interact with customers and partners on new development initiatives. They don’t do it for every topic area, solution, or module but there is almost ‘something here for everyone’ in my opinion. SAP uses PLM as an umbrella for their development of 3 separate topic areas: Product Lifecycle Data Management, Recipe Development and Quality Management, and most importantly, Portfolio & Project Management and Project System. The CEI page for each of these topic areas is listed below:
ERP PLM 2021 – Portfolio & Project Management and Project System
ERP PLM 2021 – Product Lifecycle Data Management
ERP PLM 2021 – Recipe Development and Quality Management
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Important Items
First, the kickoff call was yesterday on October 8, 2020. You can view the replay and download the slides from the following blog:
ERP PLM 2021 kicked-off – presentation and recording available now!
Below is the timeline for the project. The next important date to mention is January 14th, 2021. That’s when SAP will stop accepting new improvement requests so that they can focus on analyzing them and figuring out which ones to proceed with.
Why Should I Care?
As briefly covered in our earlier blog, the CEI program is a way for customers to influence and directly communicate with the SAP Development teams. New development requests (now called Improvements) can be submitted, voted on, and then rolled out. The majority of these can be done on the current SAP releases too, so there is no expensive upgrade to worry about. You can view more information on this over at the Influence and Adopt page on SAP.com. It gives an overview of the program, why it’s important, the benefits and has some videos as well.
This is, at least, the 5th CEI program that SAP Development has done for the PS area. It’s a very active program that is a true partnership between the development team in Walldorf and the SAP customer base. It’s been very successful in rolling out incremental improvements that customers have asked for.
Here is a quick overview of how the program works. As usual, they’ve broken the PLM area into three tracks (as mentioned above):
For the PS Area, you’ll have to be on ECC 6.0 EhP7.
I’d highly recommend that you head over to the blog and get yourself registered! Then you can start submitted improvement requests.
Once you’re registered, you can submit requests but you can also vote on other requests as well. The more active you/we are, the higher the chance that more developments will come out.
By my count, there are already 59 requests submitted for the PS project… that’s exceptional engagement!
