Fortune 100 food and beverage company refreshes SAP ALM with LiveCompare

SAP is at the heart of the company’s functional operations, so the quality of releases gets very high internal visibility. “It’s a top priority with the CDO and CIO,” remarked their SAP application development lead. “There is strong emphasis on quality management and stable releases.” The company had to improve SAP ALM. Tricentis LiveCompare software was the answer. “LiveCompare ensures we’re testing the right things and spending resources in the right places,” said their SAP application development lead. “When developing a regression test plan, the data received from LiveCompare allows us to more accurately tailor each plan to an individual release. Instead of testing everything we test only what’s impacted. That has translated into a direct resource savings of 30-40%.”

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.”

Unicode remediation

The company also spoke of an ad hoc Unicode remediation that had to be tackled for a system conversion. There were three transports IT wanted to evaluate to get a sense for the scope of all included objects and the effort to test them. LiveCompare was used to quickly assess the situation and more quickly identify the impact of changes to thousands of objects than could be done if analysis was manually conducted.

“LiveCompare is great for simple ‘bread and butter’ operational usage, as well as for strategic SAP ALM,” said their SAP application development lead. “LiveCompare helped us see the impact of those objects and run them against the usage statistics in the production system, and then call out what would have been affected. It reduced both our remediation workload as well as testing.”