The Basis Technologies Journey: Bringing DevOps & Automation to SAP

Recently, I was asked to present at an industry event where I shared a story about one of our most successful, longtime customers. It reminded me of the journey we have been on as a company and how satisfying it is for me personally that we are innovating to help our customers achieve their strategic goals. Today, I thought I’d share this story on our blog.

The customer I mentioned is a major global oil and gas company who, like many large enterprises today, faces the challenge of transitioning their legacy SAP infrastructure to the cloud and to SAP S/4HANA. They need to accomplish this while maintaining 100% production system integrity – no small task. Their culture was very risk averse and leadership was looking for ways to dramatically simplify and reduce their SAP landscape and total cost of ownership (TCO).

They were already using our ActiveControl product to automate SAP development and delivery – the flagship automation technology we developed more than 15 years ago. Because of our long and trusted relationship with this customer, we agreed to help them solve their SAP landscape consolidation challenges.

The goal was to reduce their volume of production instances by over 50% in order to lower TCO and landscape complexity; all in preparation for transitioning to the AWS cloud and eventually to S/4HANA. They attempted to work with their system integrator to identify a solution but far too much manual effort would be required from off-shore resources which would severely delay transition plans. Delaying these important projects was not an option.

We worked with the customer to develop our Consolidator technology, which enables the consolidation of multiple SAP ECC instances with automation for analysis, decision making, execution and finally the merge itself. Typically, this effort would be extremely time consuming and expensive using traditional methods. With Consolidator, the company was able to reduce the merge process from 3 months to 3 weeks! Imagine what a company can do with all that time saved – focusing on true value-add projects instead of manual activities.

The oil and gas company was very pleased with these results but next needed to find a way to test the consolidated systems. Regression testing is one of the least automated functions in SAP environments – and yet one of the most important. Their SI estimated it would take 7 to 9 months of regression testing for each newly consolidated system!

We realized that this wasn’t unique to this particular company – it’s a major issue for all SAP users.

With the growing demand for technical and functional upgrades, constant security patches, and the need to continuously innovate to remain competitive, we decided to develop a solution that would solve the regression testing problem. From there, Testimony was born.

Testimony utilizes what we call Robotic Test Automation (RTA). It’s a revolutionary new way to approach regression testing that reduces the time, effort, and cost of testing and at the same time lowers the risk of business disruption. How? We replace test scripts with RTA which “learns” how your SAP system is being used and automatically creates a comprehensive regression testing library. We eliminated the aspects of testing that require time and a huge amount of manual effort: scripting, maintenance, and test data management. The oil and gas company implemented this automation to test its systems and saw the value right away. They quickly had a much more efficient way to deliver complex SAP changes and ensure successful projects.

Through collaboration with our customers and a commitment to listening to their needs and helping them manage evolving IT and business challenges, we have developed the first complete automated DevOps and testing platform for companies who rely on SAP. On-demand testing and delivery of continuous innovation is changing the way companies run SAP.

Success in today’s business demands change at a faster pace, lower cost, and with less risk. When it comes to SAP, this can be especially challenging. I am proud to say that our SAP automation platform is helping some of the world’s most successful companies massively reduce the time and effort required to deliver critical change to the business.

Get in touch with us today to book a demo of our automation platform.