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Manoj P

Managing Changes without a Crystal-ball

ERP Testing

Being time-tested products, why do ERP products still need extensive-testing?

Implementation / Roll-out phase

Post go-live maintenance  phase

Configurable

Varying Business Processes

Custom-developments/enhancements

Dependencies3

Challenges

Organizations invest considerable resources in testing (team-members, time, effort, processes, hardware and tools)

Surprises keep coming with/without/despite testing

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SOS

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“It worked fine in Testing Server…!!Why the heck it is not working in Production?

Worse still, my business-critical functions have come to a stand-still.

Is it possible to revert to the last-working status without having to restore a backup?”

“For a business critical change, an object needs to be changed but that object already has some untested code of a previous enhancement.

How should the team deal with this?”

SOS

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“Prior to an upgrade, a few untested developments were pending.

Should the team forego the pending developments and restore a Production backup?”

“We are rolling out a business-application to our new plant.

However, we are not sure if the customizations for the new Plant will have a clash with existing plants.

How do we ensure a smooth rollout and still meet the go-live deadline?”

Reason for surprises

Presence of untested code from an earlier change

Moving a change to Production without moving the pre-requisite objects

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Impact on Team-morale

Blame-games, fire-fighting and sleepless nights

Testing effort in vain

Sub-conscious resistance to changes

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Challenges in Configuration Management

Level of synchronization of the software

Trial-and-error code that was aborted mid-wayLow-priority changes where delays in testing are

naturalRisky and sensitive developments

Level of abstraction 

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Industry Practices

Configuration Management processes/Software

Additional hardware

Forced-synchronization

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Tools available in SAP

Solution Manager

SAP has an in-built tool for version management of individual objects:

between 2 different versions within the same Development system

between the Development system version and the target system version

Limitations with the existing tools:

The comparison has to be done individually

Version-comparison option is not available for some types of Objects

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Collabera’s solution

Best - practices Proprietary tools (developed in ABAP)

Salient steps:Periodic landscape consistency verificationCompliance Check before and after every changeIsolate objects that do not have version-comparison

options in SAP Request consistency verification

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Collabera’s solutionIdentify “out-of-sync” objects

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Navigate to “version-comparison”

Collabera’s solutionVerification of Transport-RequestsIdentify dependencies/pre-requisites beforehand

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Benefits

Minimize the surprises Help teams work more efficiently, reliably and cost-

effectivelyUnearthed at least 5 potentially disastrous transports, in

the initial 3 months, before the damage was done. “Early-alert” highlighting the potential riskSuccessfully used in multiple upgrades & rolloutsUsing the tool for Application Maintenance support

covering 300+ SAP customers

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A leader in food processing and

distribution$1.5 Billion revenue

Live in SAP Enterprise (4.7)

Client Overview

Business Scenario The client wanted to

upgrade to the latest version of SAP (ECC 6.0)

Wanted to leverage latest features in SAP

Wanted to examine existing custom-developments before taking a call on whether to discard them or to migrate to new system

Client had 1200+ custom-programs besides custom-tables and other related objects

Collabera took up the SAP Upgrade project

Solution As part of SAP technical Upgrade, Collabera did an Upgrade

Assessment

Collabera’s best-practices and in-house tools were used in the Assessment Phase to identify

The list of Custom objects in the current system to help system clean up before the SAP Upgrade

List of Custom objects that will have impact on the new SAP version

List of programs with obsolete statements and function modules that need to be replaced in the new version

List of custom-programs (100+) with a synchronization issue between DEV and PRD versions

List of workbench-requests (20+) with potential transport-errors

SAP Technical upgrade completed on time and well within cost

With Collabera best practices and tools, upgrade effort could be reduced by 25%

Enabled focussed testing ensuring faster turnaround time by 40%

Could deploy consultants with the right experience for the project, did not have to involve very senior resources for Version-comparisons and approvals

Could utilize a very high offshore resource mix, up to 90% on total effort

Case Study

Benefits

Epilogue

Transporting a hard-core development on an existing application to Production no longer gives sleepless nights to Collabera Consultants or their customers.

And nor is the services of a crystal-ball gazer needed to predict the outcome of a proposed change.

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Thank you !