Before implementing any changes in SAP landscapes for production use, these changes must first be tested in non-production environments. Many organizations make the mistake of creating a full copy of their entire production system to do this when in most cases, they only need to copy a small subset of the data for testing – such as a time slice or a specific data domain. Let’s delve deeper into the importance of carefully choosing and moving only the necessary and relevant data and how to manage the movement of production data to lower-level environments to support your testing and training efforts.
When embarking on a data migration project, you may be considering selective data transition (SDT). We discussed this approach in a recent blog, and how it presents a pragmatic pathway for SAP ECC customers migrating to S/4HANA. This approach can be particularly useful for several types of transformation events:
- Phased Go-Live: If your project is planned to go live in phases, such as by country or business unit, SDT allows you to tailor your data transfer to match these phases, reducing complexity and risk.
- Business Process Redesign: When your organization aims to retain certain application areas (e.g., logistics) while redesigning others (e.g., finance), an SDT approach helps ensure that only relevant data is migrated.
- Instance Split or Merge: In scenarios where you would need to split or merge existing instances, an SDT approach enables you to carve out specific application areas or companies and implement them separately.
To ensure that organizations can support transformation events like these, it’s important to be able to move small subsets of data and test it in non-production environments before pushing it to production. Being able to selectively move SAP production data back to quality and development environments to perform testing and validation can help you ensure your changes work correctly and won't disrupt actual operations. By testing with a copy of production data in controlled environments, potential issues can be identified and addressed, minimizing risks.
Organizations moving from ECC to S/4HANA may be familiar with SAP’s TDMS functionality, which allows users to transfer relevant business data from SAP production systems to their development, test, and QA or training systems. For enterprises that have moved to S/4HANA and are seeking this capability, Syniti’s tools and expertise can streamline your initiatives. With 25+ years of experience leading successful data projects, our team’s selective data transfer approach has been used to successfully carry out projects including:
- Moving all but only the data that is needed in a new environment
- Executing legal entity restructurings
- Accelerating carve outs by finding all the related data in a franchise that is being divested
Our teams are able to apply the same approach to create testing and training environments for use cases, including:
- Moving only a time slice (e.g.: transactions in December 2020 and related master data)
- Moving only a specific domain (e.g.: Plant Maintenance)
- Moving a specific list of items (e.g.: from the list of finished goods, and will also move the related BOMs and raw materials)
- Moving data to any SAP products (e.g.: S/4HANA, Ariba, Concur, etc.)
- Moving data to non-SAP systems that are also involved in the business process (e.g.: Planning applications)
As organizations transition to SAP S/4HANA, effective test data management is a key priority. Syniti’s approach and data expertise can support your organization in managing the complexities of data transfer and testing while safeguarding the production systems that drive your business operations.