2 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 Dependencies 3

Challenges Organizations invest considerable resources in testing (team-members, time, effort, processes, hardware and tools) Surprises keep coming with/without/despite testing 4

SOS 5 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 6 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 7

Impact on Team-morale Blame-games, fire-fighting and sleepless nights Testing effort in vain Sub-conscious resistance to changes 8

Challenges in Configuration Management Level of synchronization of the software Trial-and-error code that was aborted mid-way Low-priority changes where delays in testing are natural Risky and sensitive developments Level of abstraction 9

Industry Practices Configuration Management processes/Software Additional hardware Forced-synchronization 10

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 11

Collaberas solution Best - practices Proprietary tools (developed in ABAP) Salient steps: Periodic landscape consistency verification Compliance Check before and after every change Isolate objects that do not have version-comparison options in SAP Request consistency verification 12

Collaberas solution Identify out-of-sync objects 13 Navigate to version-comparison

Collaberas solution Verification of Transport-Requests Identify dependencies/pre-requisites beforehand 14

Benefits Minimize the surprises Help teams work more efficiently, reliably and cost- effectively Unearthed at least 5 potentially disastrous transports, in the initial 3 months, before the damage was done. Early-alert highlighting the potential risk Successfully used in multiple upgrades & rollouts Using the tool for Application Maintenance support covering 300+ SAP customers 15

A leader in food processing and distribution$1.5 Billion revenue Live in SAP Enterprise (4.7) 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 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 Collaberas 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 As part of SAP technical Upgrade, Collabera did an Upgrade Assessment Collaberas 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. 17

18 Thank you !