ABAP_to_the_Future

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Foreword
When I first met Paul Hardy in 1997, he worked as an asset accountant in our UK
subsidiary. At the time, we were using a large consultancy to help us implement
SAP, and we required some important ABAP programs to be written, mostly custom
reports, to assist our business through the migration. They had the SAP
expertise, and we had the business knowledge.
Suffice to say, many years later we have both, and many of the ABAP programs
the consultancy firm wrote for us at the time were appalling, with little regard to
good programming techniques or system performance.
Paul’s hobby of dabbling in computer programming at home soon became evident
when he taught himself ABAP, and within months his ABAP programs were
of much higher quality than those pr eviously written for us. We managed to
entice Paul to transfer to Australia when we first implemented SAP there, back in
2000.
Over the ensuing years, Paul has demon strated time and again that impossible
tasks take a little longer to achieve. We continue periodically to run our own version
of custom program optimization sessions since the first CPO service was conducted
by SAP Australia on our site more than 10 years ago. Paul and his colleagues
have taken that process and repeat ed it no less often than annually to
ensure that our system continues to run optimally. It now only takes a day to analyze
our entire system, and generally results in only a handful of changes to be
performed.
Paul has a unique humor and a way of getting his message across. One of our
executive team called him “The Wild Thing” when he was quickly able to whip up
a sales-related report in a matter of days in response to a napkin specification.
I’ve read Paul’s book, and I must say that even though he has discussed many of
these topics with me in the kitchen, I still found all 15 chapters compelling reading.
What I came to appreciate is that this is not only a book for programmers (the
unsung heroes of many companies) but also really is a must-read for CIOs and
development managers to help them se t strategies around what programming
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