As organizations are pushed to move toward SAP S/4HANA, there are several questions to consider. For instance, is my organization ready for this large transformation? Is the business community convinced with the simplicity of their business processes? Will they lose their competitive advantage escorted by the current system? Is Digital really the future? And so on.

While these are all mission-critical debates, what would it look like if organizations can remove another big hassle of ‘Testing’?

To make it uncomplicated and derive business value from the technology advancement associated with SAP S/4HANA, customers should consider the following fundamentals:

Planning well in advance: As they say, good planning is half the job done. SAP makes it easier to plan in advance and with conviction. With their collection of best practices which can be used with or without implementation of Solution Manager, nearly 40% of the planning cost can be reduced and also the coverage can be well defined during the blueprinting stage itself. ‘Reuse’ is a mantra that needs a well-defined framework for it to work.

Ready for the Cloud: As corporates decide whether to have SAP S/4HANA on premise or on Cloud, they, in all likelihood, will have SAP S/4HANA as their core ERP product with all interfacing applications well defined on Cloud. While sketching this kind of a setup, ensure there is minimum dependency on each other during integration. A well-defined approach on API testing and its automation will advance the integration testing between the applications much before any application is ready to be deployed.

Focused testing by Impact Analysis: To bring an equilibrium between volume/scale of testing to ensure risk-free movement to SAP S/4HANA and controlled testing cost & timeline, it needs a paradigm shift in the overall testing approach. Impact-based testing plays a vital role to deliver the desired outcomes. It involves assessing the impact of this movement, pertaining to various dimensions, such as business process complexity, criticality, usage frequency & historic defect trend analysis. This approach helps in spotting ‘Most at Risk’ business processes & has focused testing to de-risk the overall implementation.

Jump Start with Smart Automation: With SAP best practices in place, start the automation journey during the planning phase itself with a unique nomenclature and component-based automation framework. This works well when customizations are in control as advised by SAP. Most often, organizations are flummoxed by multifarious automation tools in the market. While doing so, adhere to maintaining the homogeneity between the third-party tools. The best way is to use inbuilt solutions to integrate freeware tools to maximize benefits without added cost. Another perspective can be using pre-built code, ascertaining it is coped well.

Ensure the performance of your Digital World: Though SAP S/4HANA provides real-time processing of the entire company’s data, it does not guarantee performance of the whole ecosystem. Thus, identify the most executed and business-critical transactions from the current production legacy systems and execute different performance tests (load, stress and endurance) on the new SAP S/4HANA to weed out any performance issues and set the new benchmark. The performance of most impacted tasks, like data intensive batch jobs, should also be tested with adequate test data.

Conclusion:

Testing of SAP S/4HANA (whether in a scenario of a greenfield implementation or a migration) and integration testing of SAP S/4HANA with Cloud-based applications may not be as intimidating as it is presumed, if anticipated in the right manner. A strategic amalgamation of third-party toolsets and Wipro’s inherited frameworks will bring some sense of archetype to the approach. Wipro follows the AAA model, which includes Adopt SAP best practices, Adapt templates for custom development and Add new products in the landscape to bring automation as a process, upfront in the lifecycle.