Project CORE is an enterprise grade application which combines the power of Machine Learning of Big Data and delivers to your enterprise capability to run on demand with Integration to ERP MRP (Material Resource Planning) Integration.
 
In the following week you will:
 

• Become an expert in Angular4 and you will be able to call yourself an experienced UI developer with it.

• Get hands-on experience behind the technical jargons of Machine Learning and put the concepts into practice in day to day life. Never before in a project, you might have utilized it and to be honest it is not an easy task to process such large data sets. It took us almost 2 days to run the entire training set on our own local system. And as wisely said… “If you want to rise, do the difficult”.

• Know the Integration of your Big Data solution which is running on Hadoop Spark, a powerful system to take care of scaling of data, its processing and all the wheels and whistles of Big Data you might have read in the newspaper, which hangs at your office’s entry gate. Ever wondered why they keep the tech journal in the newspaper and not in the Filmfare, it is because they want you to focus on work, not on the next movie which is being released. You see management just wants you to read what they want you to read. Ok, let’s stick to the issue in hand.

• Get to know insides of working of SAP ERP with MRP. MRP is one of the most crucial activities which a production company does to manage its future production and the difference between doing it right and not doing it right can cost millions of dollars.

 
Get to know about the SAPUI5 application building which is all about what goes where, you have pre built components in UI5, all you need to know to become a good UI5 developer is
 

• Know what all components you have
• How to Use it
• When to Use what

 
The last one is most important because most of the time you end up hating you customer because they want a sap.m.Table instead of sap.m.List because, list is list and tables are tables. Anyway if you don’t get that joke please go through our SAPUI5 Professional Development.
So these are top advantage what Project CORE is going to offer you!
Some people come into this world wondering why and other have the curiosity to ask why not!
Project CORE is designed to keep that curiosity alive in you that you might have lost and that might not be true in your case but is it worth asking.
 

 

 
Project CORE(Create your Own Recommendation Engine) is one of its kind to learn technologies End-to-End while building live enterprise grade project using the right tools from scratch. While having an experience in more than just one technology is essential, with Project CORE you will gain experience, in-depth and step-by-step understanding of how things are done in enterprise projects of present and future.
 
With focus on modularization in current Industry Standard, we have included all the technologies which are in demand and necessary to make a powerful and scalable enterprise grade application and put them in front of you, the way you will be working with these.
 
Project CORE is hands on course on End to End project development and run, which will give you all necessary insights on how to go from
 

• Ideation to Design
• Design to Development
• Development to Deployment
• And Deployment to Delivery.

 
You have experienced the on-demand content on our platform and many other platforms but for the first time, you will experience live project development with us on Project CORE.
 
Use case of Project CORE:

1.1 Functionality of the Use case
 
The use case is divided into two parts
 

• Sales and Commerce End
• Enterprise End of A FMCG Company

1.1.a Sales and Commerce end

Let’s discuss about Sales and Commerce first
 
In Sales and Commerce end, our user is marketing manager who wants to take a Smart decision with the help of Machine Learning to a huge product data set which comprises millions of products (a Big Data).
Functional Scenario
 
“A Big e-Commerce Platform decided to bundle items together based on the co-products. The main idea is to bundle (combining the items in one package) together. If Product A is sold frequently with product B then selling A and B together will increase the sales. Also if A is a top selling product then it will increase the sales of B as well. Marketing team will also run few advertisement campaigns on this bundling and the marketing manager who has to take this call, his whole promotions depends upon this.”
 
Now comes the first challenge, there are lot of products in an e-Commerce company and they can bundle lot of items together finding the most optimal item which need to be selected is a major challenging task.
 

 

 
For more important reasons, they will be spending a lot of marketing coverage and showcasing the bundle on the first page and if the selection is sub optimal then the return of the decision can be questioned.
 
So the process of decision making needs the help of Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning. Machine Learning algorithm will go to all product list one by one and find out what are co-products i.e. what are the products which sells together. Also in this case as the numbers of products are too much the processing might need big data tools.
 
Now let’s talk about the UI that we are going to create for marketing end in this project. The wireframe for the UI is as below which is created in Moqups which is here.
 

 
1.1.b Technicality of the UI
 
The UI is made with D3JS and Angular4. The UI is built with
 

• Web frame – Which holds the graph.
• Graph – Which shows the product node which is linked with other similar product nodes.
• Tables – Which shows the products which are linked to it.
• Slider – To Zoom in and Zoom Out
• Drop Down – To Select the View

 
We have used here Angular4 for the front end which is to be used by marketing manager and team to brainstorm the product.
 
Main technical reason to use Angular4 is:
 

• Angular4 is Open-Source and Made by Google®
• The App made with Angular4 are much more responsive
• It has huge list of components in its library
• Ability to integrate with third party Libraries is much better with Angular4
• It is lightweight which means the size of final application is smaller

• Initially when we fire up the App from marketing manager point, we will have bundle Items view. Here we have a D3JS Graph where the top selling elements will be shown initially
• If we click on any one of the node, it will show the item’s co-product these co product are the items which are most frequently sold with the current item and are found by machine learning
• We see in the table the average sales rank of the item and sub item.
• We select the item bundle which has a better sales rank.
• We send the new selected bundling information to the production end so they can take care of sudden peak of demand of the bundled item.

1.1.d Functionality for Machine Learning and Big Data
 
The marketing manager backend will have a huge amount of data to find out which items are co-products and this is both a big data and machine learning use case. For machine learning we are going to use Collaborative Filtering algorithm. It uses Hadoop Spark ML Library features which separates the complete data into smaller chunks and then processes it in the Cluster Mode. We will be using REST API to expose the data that will be consumed by Angular4 and D3JS to Visualize it.

1.1.e More about Data
 
For this use case, we have taken data from Stanford University. The data was collected by crawling Amazon® website and contains product metadata and review information about 548,552 different products (Books, music CDs, DVDs and VHS video tapes).
 
For each product the following information available:

• Title
• Salesrank
• List of similar products (that get co-purchased with the current product)
• Detailed product categorization
• Product reviews: time, customer, rating, number of votes, number of people that found the review helpful

Data format
Id: 15
ASIN: 1559362022
title: Wake Up and Smell the Coffee
group: Book
salesrank: 518927
similar: 5 1559360968 1559361247 1559360828 1559361018 0743214552
categories: 3
|Books[283155]|Subjects[1000]|Literature & Fiction[17]|Drama[2159]|United States[2160]
|Books[283155]|Subjects[1000]|Arts & Photography[1]|Performing Arts[521000]|Theater[2154]|General[2218]
|Books[283155]|Subjects[1000]|Literature & Fiction[17]|Authors, A-Z[70021]|( B )[70023]|Bogosian, Eric[70116]
reviews: total: 8 downloaded: 8 avg rating: 4
2002-5-13 cutomer: A2IGOA66Y6O8TQ rating: 5 votes: 3 helpful: 2
2002-6-17 cutomer: A2OIN4AUH84KNE rating: 5 votes: 2 helpful: 1
2003-1-2 cutomer: A2HN382JNT1CIU rating: 1 votes: 6 helpful: 1
2003-6-7 cutomer: A2FDJ79LDU4O18 rating: 4 votes: 1 helpful: 1
2003-6-27 cutomer: A39QMV9ZKRJXO5 rating: 4 votes: 1 helpful: 1
2004-2-17 cutomer: AUUVMSTQ1TXDI rating: 1 votes: 2 helpful: 0
2004-2-24 cutomer: A2C5K0QTLL9UAT rating: 5 votes: 2 helpful: 2
2004-10-13 cutomer: A5XYF0Z3UH4HB rating: 5 votes: 1 helpful: 1

Data format Summary:
 

• Id: Product id (number 0, …, 548551)
• ASIN: Amazon Standard Identification Number
• title: Name/title of the product
• group: Product group (Book, DVD, Video or Music)
• salesrank: Amazon Salesrank
• similar: ASINs of co-purchased products (people who buy X also buy Y)
• categories: Location in product category hierarchy to which the product belongs (separated by |, category id in [])
• reviews: Product review information: time, user id, rating, total number of votes on the review, total number of helpfulness votes (how many people found the review to be helpful)
• After parsing the data we will get these details

 
The first column shows the product id, the second column shows User ID and the third column shows the review given by the user.
 
All the operations will be performed on cloud running SPARK on Hadoop’s HDFS which will be hosted in AWS system and Python will be used to write the algorithms and logic here.
 

1.1.2 Enterprise End of a FMCG Company
 
Consider the previous use case, when the marketing manager locks a product and adds it to a bundle. Because, of this extra marketing effort the sales of the product will spike up. Depending on the analysis they might have a prediction of how much sales will spike for that particular selected product. To meet this new increased demand of the products, manufacturing needs to be done fast and in much larger quantity for coming 2 months (the duration until the campaign lasts) and it needs to be updated into the backend which runs the entire production and factory production to the item.
 
This factory can be a separate entity from the e-commerce platform or can also be entirely different company altogether. In this case if the internal company is running on SAP® ERP then the production management team on getting this update will be using MRP – Material Requirements Planning to increase the production. If they cannot meet the requirement upfront then they will update the marketing manager team of e-commerce end so they can select the second best option or save marketing budget. As the material might become out of stock if it is not produced to meet the spiked demand.

1.1.2.a A brief about MRP – Material Requirements Planning
 
Material Requirement Planning (SAP® MRP) is a tool which helps in planning the requirement quantities and schedules of a given material. It not only ensures availability of the material for which MRP is carried out, but also ensures availability of the components (of all the BOM levels) below in the BOM structure.

Now companies which are running on SAP® are using HANA®, a powerful in memory database and platform to manage high processing load of operation activity, planning and real time control.
 
So in SAP® HANA®, the MRP is done with MRP Live

Also in HANA® Live we have MD01N to do MRP. This will handle data in real-time and faster. The entire MRP planning sometimes are custom based on the internal processes of the company (FMCG Company that manufactures the product) and Project CORE will cover the detailed step of the entire MRP process too.

1.1.2.b Front end of MRP Cockpit
 
The front end of the application will be made using SAPUI5 a JavaScript framework which can render wonderful UX for Production Manager to visualize the raw material availability and take care of the planning part of it in detail.

The entire application will be made with custom application development utilizing XML views in UI5. The main front end is a tile view where the shortage of the items will be reflected once the API communication comes from the e-commerce end. And the details line item of which material is having shortage is also shown in front end UI once the user press on the tile of Material Shortage which can be result of increase in forecasted demands when the marketing team decides to go for bundling of items with best seller and start advertising campaign.

1.2 Project CORE Summary
 
Project CORE is kept realistic and the entire application will be made is enterprise grade quality. The main purpose of Project CORE is to expose learner on the tools and techniques and inner working of technologies, which are:
 
1. SAP® HANA®
2. SAPUI5
3. Angular4
4. D3JS
5. Python with Spark on top of Hadoop
6. Machine Leaning with Spark
7. Integration of the entire stack with REST API
 
While working through this app, you will face the same challenges which you will face on your job where you always have less time and by overcoming those challenges you will gain real project experience. After the review of the application which you make, UI5CN will also hand-off Project CORE experience certificate.
 

 

 
First Reason: You learn when you are working on any technology.
 
If you are reading about a technology and looking at learning videos then you are just getting a theoretical idea or knowledge about it. With Project Core, what we intend you to do is get a hands-on on the Platform and on the technology itself that involves all the stacks and how they link and merge together. When your mind is immersed in problem solving, the solutions will stick in your memory and they will be easily accessed when you need them, while working on the project.
 
For example, if you are only focusing on Angular4 or UI5 then, while learning the technologies, you will learn:
 

• The details involved in creating application
• How to integrate components
• What are those components

However, in a realistic project, the difficulty level is much higher and the kind of issues you will find are not straightforward. A normal case can be a customer who requires some of the changes in the API on the fly and they are changing the design every time, which leads to inconsistencies.
 
These kinds of problems are never covered in any training and that is what we intend to provide in Project CORE: a vast information on how you are going to work on enterprise project in reality.
Moreover, in an enterprise solution, we might have a number of solutions co-working together, each one with a different stack.
 
You can think this might be a planning issue but, if you look at it, you see that each solution is designed to solve its own set of problems with a particular framework.
 
For example, if you are using an ERP, the portal might be built with JAVA®, the front end might be built with JavaScript and the back end might be in HANA® or SAP® with some data in BI system for visualization. For Visualization only, higher and mid-level management might be using a separate tool like SAP Lumina or Business Objects. For vendor integration, there might be some PHP code running too in some server which sits in a remote location and again, it might be managed by a team which is sitting in your own building which you never knew existed.
 
Second Reason: True learning is experience
 

 
Definition of learning is change in behavior. After taking a video based training on SAPUI5 you don’t see how any web application can utilize the awesomeness of using a JavaScript library which has so many components in it and still the development is quite simple. Unless it is UI5CN’s awesome video content.
 
However, what you will get in return is information and more information. We already have Google where entire world’s information is available free at your disposal and one does not need to be another Google. So, what is it that one needs to do? From our experience, in any learning process, end result should be experience because if you are learning without examples it will just be theory. When you are implementing those concepts in projects to solve a real life problem, you will gain experience. While you implement your information into practice, you will not see the seamless blend of the inner working if you have never done it before. And these are the small things which will take a lot of time. According to 80-20 rule, 20% of the concept takes 80% of time and 80% of the concepts take 20% of the time.
 
The major part of the time should be spent on learning the implementation, how libraries work internally and where they don’t.
 
Also in the same terms, unexpected bugs that can take hours to solve, which you might never have heard of while acquiring the information, are common while you try to implement. These are mistakes that result into experience, so why not acquire the experience in first place.
 
For example, if you are going to install a third party plug-in to your visualization and later on you find that it cannot handle real time data streaming, the code will need to be updated and will suboptimal as it could have been done in a better way.
 
These mistakes can only be avoided if you are aware of the framework with a hands-on working on large projects that cover a vast scope, rather than just creating a to-do app or hello world app.
 
Third Reason: Real life problem solving involve working on multiple things
 

 
In real life projects, most of the systems we build are a combination of multiple tech stacks, solution interfaces and is more complex to integrate them than just to develop or build.
 
Imagine you are making a big building, the major work not only involves building the individual ceramic, glass, doors, elevator or balcony but how it fits together to form a solid building. Each part should be linked with other with solid linkage otherwise chances of mishap can come anytime.
 
In enterprise systems as well, the software is the central nerve. If it does not coordinate properly, then the business gets impacted. At the end, it is not the fault of the individual parts, which might have been built with quality, but the integration and connection of the parts that make the entire business RUN.
 
Imagine if you logon to your most favorite e-commerce store that always have your kind of products. The UI is awesome and you want to buy the yellow T-Shirt, which you saw last time in your nearby store, and now you are getting an 80% off on it. You cannot believe it is happening. You click on the prime for next day delivery and suddenly you realize that the payment gateway is down. The offer is ending in 2 hrs and you cannot believe that because of the payment gateway error you won’t finish your transaction, losing the opportunity of the week. Does it sound familiar? This is the reason why big companies hire experienced developers and pay them well so that they can make money by ensuring the business is always running.