The company’s IT is advanced in leveraging innovative technologies to improve operations. They have made LiveCompare a standard practice in its SAP ALM strategy. “Drilling into every object to find every process it touches would involve lots of manual analysis if we didn’t have LiveCompare,” said their SAP application development lead. “It’s just not cost effective to do that. Automation is critical.”
A key example of LiveCompare’s usage at the company is around support packs. In the past, IT would shut off the path to production so any maintenance was conducted in a separate “break-fix” environment, which was on the same release and SP level as production. As for development, IT would have to redo it on the development system and ensure the changes weren’t lost when the normal path to production was turned back on. That meant IT was doing double the maintenance work and exceeding budget, as well as human resource efforts.
“Managing SAP support packs was a major challenge for us and our risk adverse approach was to test all critical business processes,” explained their SAP application development lead. “IT had to find a new methodology for identifying and mitigating the impact of implementing support packs, as well as custom development in our SAP environments.”
With LiveCompare’s smart impact analysis capabilities, the company can identify standard and custom reports/transactions that will be affected by a support pack installation, dramatically reducing the testing effort while increasing test plan coverage. LiveCompare tells IT whether or not a specific change is safe to make and that insight has increased the business’ confidence in maintenance, as well as the overall release process. “The knowledge we gain from LiveCompare allows us to minimize the double work and test only what needs testing,” said their SAP application development lead. “That saves time, costs and risks, and also gives us more SAP system flexibility.”
