Global dairy processing company
Yogurt company ensures optimal performance in greenfield SAP S/4HANA migration
faster performance tests cycles
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improvement in RFID application page load time
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automated NeoLoad scripts for various workflows across multiple stores to simulate 480 concurrent virtual users
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Company overview
With revenues exceeding $1 billion, and >2000 employees, this leading yogurt manufacturing company had experienced explosive growth in just a few short years. It had outgrown its Microsoft Dynamics environment, which had become a tangle of highly customized bolt-on systems that were not well integrated with one another. Everything required time-consuming extensive customization, and data was not uniform across the platforms. The company was concerned that its technology would not be able to support future growth, new market opportunities, new supply chain models, etc.
Consequently, they made the decision to shift from Microsoft Dynamics to SAP S/4HANA, running on Azure. As the CIO explains, “We wanted one unified platform, a one-stop shop for all of our current and future business processes. We needed a platform that could provide us with unified data. And we wanted technology that could help us keep the landscape simple but scalable.”
The company selected Infosys as the partner to help roll out the SAP S/4HANA installation. This would be the yogurt company’s first deployment of SAP, and they relied on Infosys to implement the solution, establish best practices, build out the internal team, and select the best tools. “One of the things we decided was that it isn’t going to be a technology transformation, it’s going to be a business transformation,” says the CIO.
- Industry: Food and Beverage
- Location: Global
- Products:
Challenges
A main focus was the RFID application within the Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) solution. The app uses scannable tags to give the company real-time visibility into the inbound/outbound processing and inventory tracking at its warehouses. Validating the performance of this app at scale posed particular challenges:
- The high level of customization required for the RFID app introduced S/4HANA EWM–specific configuration bugs and functional stability issues.
- Provisioning EWM test data for load tests was highly complex: reusability of production data was “basically zero,” according to the project manager, so Infosys needed a solution that could accommodate synthetically generated data easily and quickly.
- The performance testing timelines were inflexible, and became even tighter as multiple vendors and teams competed for shared infrastructure resources (e.g., SAP deployment teams, internal teams stabilizing functionality).
- A stringent SLA required that response time for RFID scanners in the warehouse be at 0.5 seconds for all scanned/RFID activity.
Infosys needed a way to give its client the confidence that performance was never compromised in the shift from MS Dynamics to SAP S/4HANA. And they needed a solution that was faster, easier to use, and more automated than the legacy performance products. The windows for performance testing were going to be very tight, and older script-based tools that required a lot of manual, labor-intensive effort would be problematic.
- Performance testing both SAP GUI and web protocols in greenfield installation, for Fiori and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM)
- Testing extensive, complex EWM customer-specific customizations to pinpoint issues with configuration bugs and stability problems
- Stringent timelines and shared infrastructure with multi-vendor dependencies meant less time to script, generate data for, and execute performance tests
- Generating highly complex synthetic EWM load test data
“NeoLoad simplified debugging,” continues the project manager. “Even though the [SAP] solution was really robust and scalable, when we did face issues, NeoLoad helped us figure out where the problems actually were. Its flagging features pinpointed where we were stuck. NeoLoad handled data with ease in real-time (including dynamic values) rather than using a .csv as part of the test data activity. Load generator selection based on business flow was flexible and easy. Script re-usage and frameworks each offered time and effort savings.
“NeoLoad support was highly responsive and collaborative round the clock — we have teams in both the US and India — to get us help promptly and on time. We were able to spend less time testing and more time making engineering improvements. The people in the warehouse doing the scanning have seen page response times become more than 50% faster. And that’s the kind of performance improvement that really excites business leaders.”
