Most companies with SAP are either considering HANA or implementing it. When this leading North American food company – No. 1 in most of its segments – looked to HANA, they had high performance expectations.
The company became a multi-billion dollar enterprise because of its focus on food product quality – and the quality of business execution. As the company moved to SAP HANA, the new software had to work right, and it had to work fast enough to deliver on the promise of big data with a high quality user experience. Business functions could not be disrupted because of poor performance as it moved to a new platform.
The Challenge
In addition to BI (business intelligence) functions, the company decided to implement HANA for their production planning and scheduling processes, which are critically important to the business. These processes control movement of inventory and animal products, by-products and waste products between plants in their food business. In all, there are over 1,000 inventory transfers per day between facilities – hundreds of thousands annually.
At the start, the company experienced significant performance issues with their HANA implementation. The issues were major enough for them to be escalated to upper-level management at SAP and the company. During this implementation, SAP worked diligently to provide the company with a working and high performance version of HANA.
Validating the Speed of HANA
The company turned to performance and load testing services from Worksoft to validate HANA performance. Rather than taking a “script-based” approach, Worksoft focused on the business process first and looked at those parts of the process that were most critical and likely to impose the most load during peak business times. For this company, the inventory transfer processes were the most crucial.
In an effort to get a version of HANA that met performance requirements, SAP provided four different versions of the HANA software. Each of these needed to be tested in four different environments (that’s 16 different environments) and each environment required five to six performance test sessions. That’s a total of 80 to 100 performance test runs, where each run was from two to six hours in duration and simulated more than 1,000 daily inventory transfers. That’s a lot of performance testing!
The company’s challenges with SAP HANA required a performance testing approach that was both quick and iterative. During the project, the frequency and lead time for performance tests was highly unpredictable. After all, when SAP sent over the next version of HANA, it had to be checked right away!
Achieving High Performance
Worksoft’s performance and load testing software and services provided a “turnkey performance test” capability that the company needed. For companies that don’t have the staff or the software in-house, this turnkey approach makes a lot of sense.
(One other note: All of the applications and modules tested were accessed via a web portal and the UI5 interface – which Worksoft can handle, but other systems like Loadrunner can’t handle nearly as well.)
Worksoft was able to run the performance test processes at night and on the weekends as needed to help validate each version of SAP HANA quickly. The bottom line is that it worked! Today, SAP HANA is delivering on its promise for this industry leading company.
So, if you are embarking upon a HANA implementation, Worksoft can help with performance and load testing, as well as functional testing and automated business process validation.
