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- About
Warwick University optimises S/4HANA move – with ongoing benefits from DSM
Quick sandboxes for
S/4HANA project
Improved GDPR
compliance
Refresh time cut by
two
days a week
Future-proofed
test data
About the University of Warwick
Founded in the 1960s, the University of Warwick is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England.
Warwick University is ranked 67th in the world, and tenth in the UK. It has cemented its position as one of the UK’s academic powerhouses after 92% of its research was assessed as being ‘world leading or internationally excellent’ by a panel of global experts. The University currently has 30,000 students, 7,000 staff members and an SAP team comprised of 15 different roles, including Basis, ABAP, a Functional and Business Analyst, helpdesk, architecture and management functions.
We needed tools that were cost efficient, quick to implement, and easy to use and reuse, with purpose after the end of the project; and we wanted to get things moving quickly. That is when EPI-USE Labs entered our radar.
Optimising the move from ECC to SAP S/4HANA
The structure of universities is complex, incorporating many different elements from training to facilities, so their SAP systems are also complex.
Warwick University runs S/4 1909 for Finance (FI/CO/MM/PS/SD/ SM) with 21 years of data, and an environment of around 300GB. They also run ECC 6 for payroll, connected to SAP SuccessFactors. When the University decided to move their ECC system to S/4HANA, they identified two primary needs: additional resources (project management and subject matter experts), and tools.
With limited resources and a tight budget, they needed software to automate the manual and time-consuming processes they knew would be necessary during the project, such as refreshing environments, scrambling sensitive information on the non-production environments, and time slicing the test data. They identified that ‘cut and slice’ technology would be critical for the project, and wanted to be able to speed up the creation and replication of environments. The chosen solution also needed to be cost efficient, quick to implement, and easy to use and reuse, with purpose after the end of the project.
The biggest day-to-day benefit is my Basis team can refresh data in our SAP environments more quickly. If something took about a week previously, we shave at least a couple of days off that using DSM, which is not trivial if you’re doing it a lot.
DSM streamlines testing for S/4HANA and increases security
Warwick University chose EPI-USE Labs’ Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) suite to support them on their journey to S/4HANA. EPIUSE Labs’ DSM Readiness Assessment gave them instant insights into the peculiarities and needs of their system, and how DSM could solve their challenges.
To speed up the S/4HANA migration, DSM was used to populate and refresh the Sandbox. The Basis team took ownership of running the solution, enabling them to set up the entire system, or just refresh data as required. They also used DSM’s data scrambling functionality for GDPR compliance.
Warwick University now benefits from three components of the DSM suite:
- Client Sync™ to populate and refresh their Sandbox system, gaining the ability to set up the entire system or just refresh data, as required, and as often as they want to.
- Object Sync™ is used by their functional team for copying smaller subsets of data on demand, with immeasurable benefits. The HR team also uses it for troubleshooting and testing, and investigating Payroll issues.
- Data Secure™ scrambles sensitive information to improve security and adhere to privacy regulations.
We use DSM functionality to obfuscate information in our nonproductive environment. It’s more complicated than I think people realise make it all work together and still have integrity. Data Secure gives us a lot of flexibility, and helps us show compliance.
Multiple benefits for Warwick University from DSM
The IT team at Warwick University derives multiple benefits from DSM.
During their migration to S/4HANA, DSM was crucial to the agility of the project. It gave them the freedom to test business partner to customer-vendor integrations (CVIs) repeatedly, without much effort or technical resources, until they reached an appropriate level of project security
Not only did DSM make their S/4HANA migration easier, but the University’s SAP team continues to use DSM in their day-to-day work. They estimate a saving of two to three days per week by not having to do refreshes manually.
 Optimised Sandbox process with a data migration tool |
 Faster client copies |
 Better GDPR compliance |
 Time and space savings |
 Efficiency gained for future projects |
 Accurate SAP test data to support S/4HANA project |
DSM was so good we bought it twice! We also needed the functionality to support our payroll team, since our payroll was on a separate ECC instance.
