Over a period of time, SAP system continues to grow with very sensitive high volume of business data in production environment which leads to a very demanding and lengthy QA  testing exercises, powerful hardware resources and frequent system refresh from Production to QA for operational and testing purposes. A QA environment is crucial for testing new functionalities, system updates, and customizations before they are deployed to live production environment. An efficient QA refresh ensures that the environment is readily available for testing, minimizing delays in the development and release cycles.

A streamlined QA refresh process reduces the downtime required to refresh the QA system. This allows testers and developers to quickly resume their work, improving overall productivity and reducing time-to-market for new features and enhancements.

To conduct thorough testing, the QA environment needs to mirror the production environment as closely as possible. An efficient refresh process ensures that data is refreshed accurately and consistently, providing testers with a reliable representation of the production system.

QA refresh enables the creation of realistic testing scenarios that replicate real-world conditions. This is essential for testing the system’s performance, scalability, and compatibility with various configurations. An efficient QA refresh process allows testers to create and maintain up-to-date testing environments with relevant data sets.

Inefficient QA refresh processes can result in excessive resource utilization, increased downtime, and higher maintenance costs. By streamlining the process, organizations can reduce the time and effort required for refresh activities, optimizing resource allocation, and minimizing associated costs.

Any weaknesses left in the overall procedure followed for QA refresh can be a very costly and time-consuming exercise to reverse the cycle. Hence SAP customers are forced to micromanage the technical, functional, and testing tasks followed during refresh methodology.

City of Ottawa has a mandate to fine tune there QA refresh process for more accuracy every couple of years. HNIT was engaged for this task to analyze the gaps in existing refresh methodology, refine for accuracy and recommend best SAP practice guidelines to close critical gaps in existing system refresh procedures. Our key focus was to analyze the existing process and compare against best-in-class SAP guidelines, recommend the changes and help implementing them along the process to reengineer an efficient and more reliable SAP System Refresh Methodology.

We are glad, City or Ottawa successfully adopted the new standards system refresh methodology as a part of there continuous improvement guidelies.