1. HomeArrow Icon
  2. Case StudiesArrow Icon
  3. Yogurt company ensures optimal performance in greenfield SAP S/4HANA migrationArrow Icon

Global dairy processing company

Yogurt company ensures optimal performance in greenfield SAP S/4HANA migration

%

faster performance tests cycles

default

%

improvement in RFID application page load time

default

%

automated NeoLoad scripts for various workflows across multiple stores to simulate 480 concurrent virtual users

default

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.

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.

  • Arrow IconPerformance testing both SAP GUI and web protocols in greenfield installation, for Fiori and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM)
  • Arrow IconTesting extensive, complex EWM customer-specific customizations to pinpoint issues with configuration bugs and stability problems
  • Arrow IconStringent timelines and shared infrastructure with multi-vendor dependencies meant less time to script, generate data for, and execute performance tests
  • Arrow IconGenerating highly complex synthetic EWM load test data

Solution

The greenfield migration to SAP S/4HANA covered about 65-70% of the yogurt company’s critical business processes. The scope of performance testing involved workload modeling, scripting, test execution, monitoring, and reporting for both Fiori and Extended Warehouse Management (EWM) applications. Infosys developed 40 automated NeoLoad scripts for various workflows across multiple stores to simulate 480 concurrent virtual users (300 for EWM, 180 for Fiori), using four cloud load generators.

Tricentis NeoLoad’s ease of use and high degree of automation enabled Infosys to accelerate testing cycles by 30%. Its drag-and-drop design and automated update maintenance don’t require any specialized expertise — even testing “newbies” can get up and running quickly. “That was a real game-changer for us,” explains the Infosys delivery manager in charge of the project. “In the performance testing world, we have a combination of experts and non-experts [doing the testing]. That’s the reality. And NeoLoad lets the [non-experts] do the scripting and execute the scenarios with ease.”

Under these challenging circumstances, the ability of NeoLoad’s automation to test faster was crucial. “Performance testing was getting sandwiched from both ends: functional instability delayed performance testing, which still needed to be done on schedule,” says the project manager. NeoLoad’s automated script update meant that performance tests were automatically updated. Whenever the app changed — as it did frequently to address the stability and configuration issues — testers did not have to re-create the test from scratch like with other enterprise testing solutions.

“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.”

Results

  • Exhaustive performance testing of greenfield SAP S/4HANA migration on schedule under tight deadline
  • 30% faster performance tests cycles
  • 50% improvement in RFID application page load time
  • Implemented SAP Extended Warehouse Management with zero performance issues observed in production