Automation Gives SAP Users A Good Image
Alan Smith, 25/11/2009, posted in "Analysis"
Alan Smith joined UC4 Software in 2008. Smith worked ten years at software provider BMC Software, where he was Managing Director and VP UKMEA, and also held senior roles ...more info
Alan Smith joined UC4 Software in 2008. Smith worked ten years at software provider BMC Software, where he was Managing Director and VP UKMEA, and also held senior roles at Informix and Siemens. Immediately before joining UC4 he was UK & Ireland Sales Director at Verint Systems, specialists in actionable intelligence for voice and video data solutions. ...less info
Organisations where SAP is used can be placed at risk whenever functional updates or patch fixes are deployed. The challenges associated with extracting an image copy of business transaction data from their live environment means that many users are unable to perform thorough system and quality assurance testing.
Getting a clear picture of an SAP system can be likened to taking a photo of a fast moving image prior to advent of the digital camera. Speed and aperture settings would be preset to optimise camera performance while exposure of the captured negative combined with print development would determine the quality of the final product. Making a system copy of an SAP instance can present an SAP administrator with a similar set of issues.
A production SAP instance is a living ERP organism in which business transactions are continually being created, executed and completing. A wide range of tools, such as storage management and database backup utilities, might allow an instantaneous snapshot to be taken. However, this raw input has little transactional context and significant additional work will be required to ensure that the data captured can be used for system and quality assurance (QA) testing.
Best practice indicates that SAP system copies should be made regularly, but the tools provided to undertake the exercise are cumbersome and inefficient. Preparation and conditioning of data can involve a large number of manual tasks with the entire process tying up significant internal resources―a manufacturing company recently reporting that just the final activities processing stage of a system copy took 52 hours.
It is not unusual for a complete SAP system copy, including any post-editing, to take several days. Of course, this overhead is compounded if multiple copies or images of multiple SAP systems need to be produced.
SAP users are waking up to the idea that much of this tedious workload can be overcome using automation. Instead of manually creating definitions, individually setting parameters and submitting their jobs to run each system copy, SAP administrators are building templates that can be repeatedly used to control pre- and post processing steps. Technology is also helping by allowing processes that would have previously run sequentially to run in parallel, reducing overall elapsed times for system copy workload.
This can be good news all around. Software development and QA staff get to work with images of their SAP landscape that more accurately reflects their production landscape. Less time spent manually creating test data increases staff productivity. End users benefit from using a service that is more responsive, reliant and resilient, working with applications that were thoroughly tested before going live.
With automation, it is becoming a great deal easier to generate a series of SAP images at the click of a button. Complex data structures extracted from a production SAP environment can be rapidly unravelled and brought into focus. Automation is digitising the SAP system copy camera.
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