The Role of Test Automation in Change and Transport Management during SAP S/4HANA Implementation

Quality Assurance in Change and Transport Management in SAP S/4HANA Transformation Projects

 

SAP S/4HANA implementations are more than conventional projects, regardless whether it is a greenfield or a brownfield approach. In fact, this implies rather a profound change in processes as well as in functionalities regarding the digital transformation of system landscapes. The impact on the staff here should not be forgotten: they experience the changes often in daily activities and tasks containing adjusted processes, unfamiliar user interfaces and complete new systems.

In order to be able to insure a structured and organized transition during the implementation of S/4HANA, a proper change and transport management is essential.

Digital Transformation: Change and Transport Management during SAP S/4HANA Transformation

Well-structured documentation and thorough supervision of the complete process, beginning with the ideas of a change or a new functionality through to the change transports in the productive systems, is crucial for such big changes in a company. Change management processes including transport management are set up for these tasks which are run and maintained software-assisted according to the latest standards.

These should absolutely start before the actual implementation project. Sustainable Change and Transport Management supports companies not only in the implementation of S/4 HANA systems but also during the whole lifetime of the systems in daily business.

The Role of Test Automation in SAP S/4HANA Transformations

The range, the number and also the extensive scope of these changes in such transformation projects make a precise quality assurance of all changes essential. Not only selective, affected changes of a certain object have to be accordingly examined and carefully quality assured, but also its possible side effect on other objects and functionalities.

Especially in transformation projects, it is vital for a company to gain the trust of its employees involved and their acceptance of the (partially) new systems.

Instable systems including constantly recurring errors jeopardize even in the implementation phase the acceptance of the project and its support by employees. That is why from the beginning the goal must be to uphold the quality of the project.

The number of changes for companies which will come up soon, makes quality assurance assisted by test automation indispensable. Companies are thus faced with great challenges and a good deal of project costs due to the number of changes as well as transports and the associated test workload.

Once test automation has been intelligently implemented and in change and transport management integrated, massive effort and cost savings within the SAP S/4HANA systems´ implementation project can be achieved and can further lead to quality guarantee during operation.

Fully-Automated Quality Assurance of Transports

Automated test runs that have been started previous to the transport and are dynamically compiled, including the test cases which test the modified and altered functionalities, make sure that no unwanted side effects and unforeseen errors occur in the systems.

Fully automated responses of these test runs act as quality gate prior to the actual transport, which will only be executed once the quality criteria of the quality gates are met.

Companies often face challenges while testing all changes and transports and their possible side effects merely manually, which then run into a partly highly-restricted quality assurance and therefore at the expense of the core systems of a company. A test concept based on sheer manual testing – in addition to the mere aspect of problems caused by insufficient quality assurance – have a negative effect on daily business, thus resources are tied down to the quality assurance of the systems.

Within the digital transformation, test automation plays a central role in implementation and operation of a modern change and transport management, since this cannot be executed with justifiable efforts without an objective quality assurance and an extensive test coverage for SAP S/4HANA projects.

 

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