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Kellogg’s gets it all with Managed SAP Data Refresh Services
Ramesh Kollepara, IT Director, Architecture & Application Delivery, Kellogg’s
Rapid data copying to QA –
no business disruption
Test scripts completed quickly
and efficiently
No data-related issues
during testing
SAP experts who understood
data structure
About Kellogg’s
Kellogg’s is a name everyone grows up with. It’s part of the breakfast ritual for millions worldwide. The company has a long history starting with WK Kellogg who, in 1906, opened the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company and, with great care, hired his first 44 employees. Together, they created the initial batch of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes® and brought to life WK’s vision for great-tasting, better-for-you breakfast foods.
Today, the company still upholds the values WK Kellogg instilled more than 100 years ago — but now they’re doing it in 180 countries across the world. It is a fast-paced segment of consumer business and Kellogg’s is very successful.
EPI-USE Labs always exceeded our expectations. I would definitely recommend them!
Kellogg’s SAP environment
The Kellogg’s portfolio includes a variety of products and brands. All of these consumer goods have special requirements and move very quickly in the marketplace. Because of the fast-moving nature of their business, Kellogg’s run multiple projects in their SAP® landscape at any given time. Each project brings its own complexity and timeline which, in turn, demands innovative solutions to cope with a challenging landscape.
Kellogg’s needed good quality, reliable test data on their SAP ECC Quality Assurance (QA) system, but it was crucial not to affect any current projects running across their environment. Testing is critical to the success of a project, but historically Kellogg’s found that the lack of good quality data in the QA system affected the success of testing. The start of testing often identified missing customers, or that materials were not extended to the correct sales organisation and plant. Similar issues occurred for stock, pricing, cost of goods sold (COGS) and VAT. During User Acceptance Testing (UAT), users always preferred to test with familiar data (similar to production). If it didn’t exist, testing was complicated and users lost confidence. Thus the lack of good quality test data would often frustrate users, waste time and reduce the quality and number of tests completed. These delays, plus the manual entry of master data, led to a shorter testing cycle (and a reduced scope), which reduced the users’ confidence in the quality of the final tests.
Kellogg’s SAP test data requirements
Kelloggs’s test data requirements were very specific: refresh selected SAP business objects from the production system without affecting other objects being used by separate projects. It was of paramount importance that the SAP data copied was consistent and functional on the QA system.
This was one of the best project testing phases that I have witnessed in terms of no data issues.
The solution: RaaS using Data Sync Manager
Kellogg’s chose EPI-USE Labs’ Refresh as a Service (RaaS) using Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) to refresh their QA system. Kellogg’s own resources were already fully involved in other ongoing projects and they did not have the bandwidth to work on test data provisioning. It was vital to use experts who understand how data is structured in SAP and who could deliver the data quickly to the business.
EPI-USE Labs was able to supply the required service with specific ‘bespoke’ data-on-demand requirements,such as:
- Don’t overwrite existing data – it might already be in use for testing.
- Refresh COGS for all Stock Keeping Units, not just those being refreshed from production, without updating other data.
- Follow specific rules regarding the overlapping of pricing and other conditional records.
The big advantage to Kellogg’s was that the whole process was managed by EPI-USE Labs, and data issues were resolved quickly and on the fly. An additional bonus to the business has been that subsequent refreshes have been much faster as all configuration and copy routines already exist.
The EPI-USE Labs team kept strictly to the project time lines so that the required data was available when it was needed at the start of the project. Having the data on time gave the users the opportunity to test the scope they defined.
When repeating this process for a second project run, it took only three days for EPI-USE Labs to define where different data were needed and to copy the appropriate data into the QA system.
Using Data Sync Manager‘s Object Sync technology, with the expertise from the EPI-USE Labs team to identify which objects needed to be refreshed and how data is connected in SAP, proved to be invaluable.
Benefits of Data Sync Manager and RaaS:
- Rapid data copying to the QA system meant no disruption to business.
- The granularity of the data to copy back for testing meant more control.
- No time was lost due to data-related issues.
- Test scripts were completed quickly and efficiently.
- A major advantage was that users were able to test with current (familiar) production data.
- No data-related issues were raised during the full month of testing.
- System Integration Testing (SIT) and UAT could be done as planned and there was consequently a very positive attitude to the project.
- The team could agree on ‘different’ data records for SIT, UAT and training, so a test in one project phase did not affect testing or training in another area.
- EPI-USE Labs experts integrated seamlessly with the Kellogg’s team and were available throughout the process.
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