Inadequate Testing Threatens SAP Organizations with Costly Mistakes

Running the latest versions of SAP applications can strengthen an enterprise's competitive advantage in the marketplace. Companies running SAP in complex, global environments can't afford to fall behind in significant upgrades. Yet this is exactly what is happening. A recent study revealed that the complexity of the average deployment is causing greater than 70 percent of SAP's installed customer base to delay or cancel migration to the latest version.¹

The reasons are understandable. Mission-critical financial, supply chain, and regulatory compliant business processes are dependent on SAP's accurate and efficient operation. Downtime for a major upgrade – even for important patches and smaller releases – is simply not an option. What's the result of avoided upgrades and deferred maintenance? Much of the annual investment made by these enterprises in SAP maintenance fees is squandered with little return. For example, a company with $10M invested in SAP and paying 20% per year in maintenance fees is hit with $2M per year of wasted expense.

IT's optimal management of the SAP Application Lifecycle demands that the organization continue to change and adapt. Yet many SAP customers have simply lost control of their cross-platform deployments, unable to track accurately all the touch points of application logic and data across their portfolio. How can any company validate and certify complex, global business processes without adequate visibility into how all the pieces fit together? For a larger Fortune 1000 enterprise, SAP application upgrade projects require tens of millions of dollars in extra investment in software and services – often running over budget. How can these risks be controlled and mitigated during the implementation, upgrade or migration process – to ensure the new version goes live without a hitch?

Automated Functional Testing for the SAP Application Lifecycle

SAP organizations must perform business process validation during the software testing process. Yet fully 95 percent of enterprises running SAP still rely on manual testing technologies – which have proven expensive and place undue burden on business users. Custom code is costly and time-consuming to develop and maintain. A software change that can be developed within hours or days can take weeks or even months to test. Script-based software testing solutions that rely on “record/playback” to map business processes have proven unstable, difficult to maintain, and dependent on programming expertise. Many are limited to accelerating tests of a single software platform, denying the patchwork of applications running with SAP in the majority of enterprises.

Bottom line: these approaches waste precious time and valuable resources. They have failed to keep pace with the speed and complexity of SAP applications and the reality of cross-platform software environments. Functional subject matter experts are not script programmers. It is clear that an automated functional testing solution that requires no code to operate can ease the angst of SAP Application Lifecycle management for key software testing constituencies and help justify any upgrade project:

IT/Operations Management can regain control over their SAP license, take advantage of new SAP application features to evolve the business, ensure critical business processes remain intact, yet not negatively impact user productivity during implementation.

Business Analysts can eliminate manual testing labor in the SAP upgrade process, automate wherever possible, smooth communication with IT, and return easily understandable, auditable results.

QA/Test Personnel can maintain control over the testing process, increase reuse, eliminate burdens on developers for test execution, and meet deadlines with confidence.

Worksoft Certify's unique “scriptless” approach to creating and maintaining test cases speeds the rollout of SAP applications by up to 60 percent; shortens time-to-value by improving the reliability of key business processes; and meets compliance, training and reporting requirements by capturing reusable business process knowledge.

We invite you to explore the capabilities of Worksoft Certify on the following pages and discover how our solutions help reduce the risk of SAP upgrades with sustainable value over the entire SAP Application Lifecycle.

1 Source: Milestone Group Customer Research, March/April 2007