Many large enterprises rely on SAP to run their critical business processes, but delivering today’s business priorities is difficult with traditional systems and drawn-out, waterfall-driven innovation cycles.
Enterprises need to overhaul their business models to respond faster to market fluctuations and keep pace with the break-neck pace of change in today’s digital marketplace. This means that businesses need speed – they need to innovate faster. But how? Traditional regression testing for SAP systems is far from speedy, and it’s only becoming more complicated, time-consuming and labour-intensive.
Overcoming the insurmountable
SAP’s answer to the challenges faced by enterprises in their quest for speed, agility and responsiveness is SAP ECC’s successor, SAP S/4HANA. Intended to solve business problems faster by handling more data, S/4HANA is also meant to offer an improved user experience through streamlined transactions, real-time data, table simplification, flexible APIs, as well as all new functionalities.
However, to unlock those benefits, enterprises will need to set up their systems afresh in SAP S/4HANA, which could be problematic due to the time it will take, and the risk involved in disrupting critical business processes. The migration to S/4HANA is inevitable – SAP has announced that they will cease support and maintenance for ECC after 2027. Although this deadline was initially extended from 2025, this isn’t much extra time at all, which means that businesses should already be considering how they’re going to make the transition before SAP stops providing support for SAP ECC.
Testing, testing…and more testing.
In SAP environments, companies rely on testing to verify changes in critical business processes and guarantee that critical risks will be exposed.
To derive business value from the technology businesses must build, test and deploy the solution upon migration/adoption—and on every SAP update.
Testing ensures that business-critical processes work. Every time a new process is set up, it requires testing. Every time a process is tweaked, it requires testing, and every time SAP updates their system, you guessed it, more testing. All this testing takes time, money and resources, and lots of it.
This work is largely manual – mapping out business processes, coding test scripts, building test data and updating the scripts, data and documentation to reflect process changes. With a simple business app this might not be too demanding, but with large organisations the SAP landscape tends to be vast, complex, highly-customised and constantly changing.
Thankfully, iOCO’s purpose-built SAP automation testing scripts can fill this gap. Scripts created at a component level, promote a high degree of reusability across different SAP instances, versions and industries. These test scripts can be easily and efficiently customised to cater for each client’s specific demands. Reducing project setup costs compared to standard automation testing projects as well as ongoing maintenance.
Use cases of testing automation include smoke testing, regression testing, end-to-end testing and data-driven testing – all of which will be essential in ensuring a secure migration to SAP 4/HANA that allows businesses to use the move as an opportunity to leave their problems in the past, and finally achieve a truly modern ERP system that’s fast, flexible and simple.
Businesses should start by putting a testing plan in place to secure a safe transition to S/4HANA and give themselves more time as a risk buffer. It’s also important to get this migration right the first time, and here, an automated and intelligent approach to testing is going to be key in expediting project timelines and reducing risk.
Don’t make a costly mistake. Cutting corners in the SAP testing process will almost certainly lead to SAP implementation failure
Why choose iOCO as your testing automation partner?
- Largest systems integrator in Africa – over 4 000 technical staff
- Design-led, customer-centric approach to solving business problems
- Cloud-ready, micro-services oriented architectures
- Delivery experience in all industry verticals – Banking, Education, Energy, Health, Insurance, Mining, Public Sector, Retail, Telco (over 2 000 clients)
- Partnerships with key OEMs across many disciplines
- Presence in the UK, Europe and Middle East
Of course, seeing is believing – so book your demo today and learn how we can accelerate your SAP testing so your enterprise can go live faster and without defects.
* Source: https://resulting-it.com/should-we-migrate-to-S4-HANA-sap-roadmap
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