Cloud Migration

SAP Quality and Business Assurance

The step into the SAP cloud is worthwhile, but also requires highly efficient QA/BA processes. To introduce a suitable solution, it is advisable to work with a specialized service provider. There is more to it than just technology, knows Viktoria Praschl, VP Sales Central Europe at Tricentis: "Companies need a new quality assurance strategy and must transform themselves. This includes, for example, promoting an appropriate mindset, establishing processes and qualifying employees. For a successful cloud transformation, test automation should be thought of from the very beginning."

"For a successful cloud transformation, test automation should be considered from the outset."

Viktoria Praschl, VP Sales Central Europe, Tricentis

Existing SAP customers are currently facing two major challenges in the S/4 transformation: By 2027 at the latest, when mainstream support for SAP ERP/ECC 6.0 expires, they will have to switch to S/4 Hana. The opportunity presents itself to migrate the new ERP to the cloud. SAP is now pursuing a cloud-first strategy and will be relying on a cloud-based architecture in the future, with S/4 at its core. Companies can not only save management effort and hardware costs by migrating, they also gain agility and benefit earlier from new features.

Conversion and risks

But the conversion of the ERP system to the cloud also brings risks. Companies must ensure that their applications and processes still function smoothly in the new world. Careful QA and BA is especially important in the business-critical SAP environment. Viktoria Praschl from Tricentis explains why companies should rely on test automation for this:

Manual testing can no longer cope with the high level of complexity. Business processes often span a complex network of SAP and non-SAP applications. Countless components are intertwined. This makes quality assurance very time-consuming. To check whether a process still works after a change, it is not enough to test a function in isolation. You have to look at the entire process chain across all links. First of all, this requires precise knowledge of all dependencies.

According to a study by Sogeti, Capgemini and Tricentis, almost 50 percent of companies find the heterogeneous environment a challenge when testing, and just as many find it particularly difficult to understand the data flow between applications. The testing effort is particularly high before migration. It often accounts for more than 60 percent of the total migration effort, according to the study. Short update and release cycles require continuous testing. Even after migration, QA/BA teams remain under pressure. That's because cloud services change very dynamically. SAP is continuously developing its offering and providing updates in much shorter release cycles. On the one hand, this means that customers can enjoy new features and innovations more quickly. On the other hand, they also have to test each change carefully across the entire process chain.

As a result, the QA/BA effort explodes. Conventional, manual test processes with a subsequent hypercare phase reach their limits here. They are far too slow, too personnel-intensive and too expensive for the update speeds in the cloud. Companies therefore need a new strategy to integrate tests efficiently and automatically into release processes.

QA and BA processes

In the cloud, companies can no longer afford slow, manual QA and BA processes. The risk of errors slipping through and critical business processes being affected is too high. This would negatively impact both external and internal users. If an application no longer works as usual or a website loads too slowly, customers are quickly annoyed and switch to the competition. Not to mention the damage that incorrect data could do to invoices or incoming goods. Minimizing errors in SAP business processes is also important for productivity and employee satisfaction. After all, program crashes, poor application performance or other problems cost valuable working time and demotivate users.