City of Ottawa revitalized business efficiency by reengineering SAP system refresh methodology.
City of Ottawa is the key decision-making body responsible for the administration of the City of Ottawa and for turning community needs into municipal services including policing, water, transit, garbage and recycling, sewers, fire, and paramedics. To operate their business model, they heavily use SAP system which produces large amount of data. HNIT played a role of subject matter experts to assist with our SAP consulting services to help City reengineer their SAP system refresh methodology for closing critical gaps and improving overall business efferences.
Over time, as the SAP system accumulates a substantial volume of sensitive business data in the production environment which is frequently needed in QA environment to support rigorous QA testing becomes increasingly paramount. This entails demanding and protracted testing exercises, necessitating powerful hardware resources and frequent system refreshes from Production to QA for operational and testing purposes.
CLIENT
City of Ottawa
CATEGORY
Consulting and Advisory
DATE
For SAP customers, QA environment serves as a critical platform for testing new functionalities, system updates, and customizations before deployment of any SAP configuration or functionality related changes to the live production environment. A well-executed QA refresh is pivotal in ensuring the environment is readily available for testing, minimizing delays in development and release cycles.
Efficiency in the QA refresh process translates to reduced downtime required for system refreshes. This expedites the resumption of work for testers and developers, enhancing overall productivity and shortening the time-to-market for new features and enhancements.
Our Involvement:
HNIT’s consulting team were heavily involved in analyzing current QA refresh procedures for ECC, BW and Portal systems, closing gaps, recommending changes for improvement to maintain consistency between the QA and production environments. This required detailed examination of existing backup and restore methods, network overloads, SAP data export/import and transport request processing. It also demanded ABAP code refinement and re-designing of SAP security roles to some extent to increase refresh efficiencies and reduce complexities. With years of experience in SAP consulting, we’ve developed customer specific methodologies to deliver an efficient SAP refresh process that guaranties customer data accuracy, its visibility and availability to testing team with a reliable representation of the production system scenarios.
Inefficient SAP QA refresh procedures can lead to excessive resource utilization, prolonged downtime, and increased maintenance costs. By optimizing this process, organizations can mitigate the time and effort required for SAP QA refresh activities, optimizing resource allocation, and reducing associated costs.
Addressing any shortcomings in the QA refresh is crucial to avoiding costly and time-consuming endeavors to rectify the cycle. Therefore, SAP customers must meticulously manage the technical, functional, and testing tasks involved in the refresh methodology.
The City of Ottawa, in line with its mandate for continuous improvement, sought to refine its QA refresh process for enhanced accuracy. As an independent SAP consulting service provider, HNIT was engaged to walk with our client at every step of the way to analyze their existing methodologies, identify gaps, compare it against SAP best practice guidelines and recommend improvement by closing critical deficiencies. Our focus was to assess the current process and benchmark it with industry-leading SAP guidelines to contribute towards reengineering goal of City’s SAP system refresh methodology.
We are pleased to note that our client succussed in embracing the new standards of SAP system refresh methodology as part of their ongoing commitment to excellence and improvement.
