Remove the Need for Hypercare Through Continuous Testing of SAP Applications
Published: 2021-02-02 12:09:06


During this global health crisis, there is a special need for speed and business applications to be ready for the challenges ahead. To achieve the desired result, it’s critical to align business goals with both testing methods and quality ambitions. SAP continues to evolve to a highly configurable and extensible business process platform. Using sophisticated onboard innovations and prediction engines, in-memory platforms such as SAP S/4HANA are changing how we process, analyze, and act on the ever-increasing volume of data we create every day.  

This blog explains how traditional SAP testing strategies that comprise of manual approaches and the post-release “hyper care” periods are not expansible for massive SAP projects and how the challenges are addressed by <a href="https://www.opkey.com">OpKey</a> Surge, an AI-based impact analysis tool that improves the test efficiency while eliminating the need for hyper care.

</B>How do Enterprises Test their SAP Changes Currently?<B> 

The manual testing approach for SAP fails to match the speed of the delivery times as requested by business users. The pace at which manual testing is being conducted is not what it takes to drive a project at a fast pace. Due to the tedious and lengthy process involved, usually testing is the last thing in mind for key users. Due to this approach, there is tremendous negligence for testing to be performed.

</B>Is the “Hypercare Phase” post SAP Update Really Adopted by Enterprises?<B>

Hypercare is a period during which the organization’s most expensive resources (typically developers and key users) are put on standby to fix emergency issues as they pop up in production. Typically, the majority of SAP enterprises go for this strategy which is not only expensive but lengthy. The Hypercare strategy lasts for 2-3 months or more as this phase makes the user aware of the defects which are large in number. The timeline for hypercare phase slows down the delivery innovations and significantly reduces an organization’s pace for the release. 

<B>How the Need for Hypercare can be Removed?</B>

<B>AI-driven Change Impact Analysis</B>

Change Impact Analysis identifies the right things to test before a release. This will be critical in removing the need for hypercare after every go live.

Options which organizations will have to focus on for testing SAP updates:

Test Everything Approach
Test Right Before Release + Hypercare

<B>Efficient and Sufficient Testing</B>

This feature automates risk analysis thereby improving the speed at which the team releases SAP updates. Test automation makes the release even faster. 

OpKey’s Change Impact Analysis detects which SAP objects are most affected and needs testing. It picks only the right things to be tested. After every SAP update, there is an analysis to identify the objects which are most impacted. The AI feature measures how it is used in the system. The change which actually pose risk to the business is selected to test as they are the source of potential defects. This is effective in cutting down the average test scope for a release by 80%. To put it simply, it does the job with only 20% effort while giving up to 100% risk reduction. 

<B>Continuous End to End Enterprise Test Automation</B>

For business processes to continue unhindered post SAP updates, end to end testing is a must as most enterprise business processes extend beyond SAP to 3rd party applications. OpKey Surge supports100+ Integrations with web services SAP, ESBs, APIs web UIs, BI, ERPs like Oracle, Salesforce or Workday. While reducing 85% of test execution time for the end to end tests.

<B>Change Management</B>

To keep pace with the transformation, adopting to change management is paramount in order to deliver fast, high-quality SAP application change without hindering any day to day businesses. It is insightful in getting real-time insights and gain multidimensional views into impact and testing risk for decision making ensuring production-ready release.

OpKey Surge offers an all-new approach to handle <a href="
https://www.opkey.com/sap/
"> SAP testing </a>
. Users can accelerate their SAP applications with automated, completely codeless, and predictive analytics that is driven by AI. OpKey’s Change Impact Analysis offers risk-based testing for SAP applications, continuous test automation for an end to end enterprise testing with change management maturity. OpKey Surge detects “most-risk” tests that are critical for businesses. So instead of wasting time testing all the things that aren’t impacted by an update, key users can test only the “Efficient Tests”, shortening release cycles and finishing change-to-test cycles in less than 2-3 weeks reducing significant time and cost of business users and ending the need for Hypercare.

Having the right planning and approach to SAP transformation, along with the right post go-live foundation, can smooth the pathway, drive success, and maintain the momentum to execute your strategic vision. To explore much more about the SAP hypercare solution read our whitepaper “Remove the Need for Hypercare Through Continuous Testing of SAP Applications”. Download this whitepaper to rethink your SAP Testing with AI and Automation.