Time Machine® Helps Large U.K. Energy Customer Achieve On-Time Delivery and Cost Savings for all Major SAP Expansion
Friday, November 18, 2024 at 12:00 PM EDT
Challenge:
The customer runs a very large, three-tiered SAP environment that is constantly being extended to include new features, and has over the years been migrated to newer operating systems to allow for better performance. Due to the scale and complexity of their SAP system, this company has set a strict goal of creating and maintaining the highest quality assurance level possible to cover the complete breadth of integration and modernization changes to their constantly enhanced implementation of SAP.
The Time Machine Solution:
The customer, a long-term Solution-Soft customer, uses Time Machine on all their HP Itanium systems to verify that any changes made to their SAP environment will function accurately.
Implementation:
Some years ago when Time Machine was first implemented, it was to validate the business logic within their SAP IS-U (Industry Specific Solution for Utilities) development environment, which at the time consisted of HP-UX 11.11 and SUN Solaris systems. Using the Solution-Soft utility they were able to confirm that all IS-U transactions behaved correctly as the date was changed dynamically and iteratively, rolling forward in virtual time. This ability gave their quality assurance group and SAP Basis team the ability to perform the necessary tests to implement their R3 enhancements.
According to their on-site consultant, James Fish, "Our client, one of the largest gas trading companies, is very happy with Time Machine. Without it, it would have been extremely cumbersome, resource intensive, and costly to do the same type of SAP application testing and certification."
Later the customer expanded their use of Time Machine onto HP-UX 11.23, combined with a purchase of a number of Itanium-based servers to upgrade their SAP suite. This change included moving to SAP ISV ERP 6 version on SAP R3. This application migration was successfully completed through the use of Time Machine running on HP-UX in a transitional combination of HP-UX v11.11 on PA RISC and HP-UX v11.23 on Itanium processors.
After finishing this migration, they then saw they could continue to use Time Machine’s simulated date features to provide end-users of the new and enhanced SAP system with date and time expiry-based event training. Using Time Machine, they can effectively simulate an entire transaction life cycle within a matter of minutes, making training curriculum far more efficient and effective.
Using Time Machine, they are able to effectively test all pre- and post-production changes to the SAP system, and in addition leverage virtual dates to provide condensed time-based training to their end users. The use of Time Machine has given them the means to achieve a timely implementation of changes to their multiple SAP modules by significantly speeding up the usually lengthy test-fix-test cycle typical to deployments of SAP.
Using Time Machine to condense test cycles combined with HP Itanium servers to achieve consolidation and scalability, they have achieved a huge increase of ROI.
Time Machine has become a standard for implementation and ongoing modernization of SAP IS-U in numerous large utility companies across the world. With Time Machine, testers can easily simulate future dates as required for their rollout & periodic application update testing.
About The Customer:
One of the largest utility companies in the U.K. supplying gas and electricity to millions of residential and business customers, providing central heating and gas appliance installation and maintenance, and low carbon and energy-efficient products and services.
About Time Machine:
Time Machine saves ten-fold or more on resources and costs associated with temporal testing of applications. It enables you to finish your large scale software projects on time and under budget. Some other usage scenarios of Time Machine include Cloud migration, time zone adjustment, data aging, Big Data analysis and online training. Time Machine is the original date and time simulation software for Unix and Windows since 1997 and it is Cloud ready. Thousands of customers worldwide utilize Time Machine successfully across all industries on a daily basis; including 47 of the Fortune 100 companies.
About Solution-Soft:
Solution-Soft is the leader in virtual clock, time shift testing software solutions for the ever-changing digital world. Our flagship and market proven product, Time Machine, opened up brand new possibilities in the application testing landscape upon its release in 1997. Today, thousands of applications have been tested with Time Machine, and IT professionals recognize that using a virtual clock is the ideal and safest way to conduct date and time testing. As pioneer in our field, we've created the Time Machine Product Suite and Time Machine for Container, a collection of cutting-edge testing software that augment Time Machine to further streamline enterprise cloud initiatives, containerization, micro services, and IT modernization for end-to-end integration testing, cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOPs, Continuous Operation, and Test Data Management.
We proudly provide our 2000+ domestic and international customers, including 47 of Fortune 100 companies, with our advanced solutions to optimize their testing and help deliver projects on-time. Solution-Soft's customers are across all market sectors including 3M, AMEX, AIG, Australia Tax Office, BBC, Boeing, British Gas, Covered California, Dept of Works & Pension, Deutsche Bank, Discover, FedEx, Federal Reserve Bank, Orange, National Australia Bank, SNCF, and Zurich Insurance. We bolster our market presence through robust partnerships with companies including Accenture, Capgemini, DXC, HPE, IBM, Infosys, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, and RedMane.
Founded in 1993, Solution-Soft is privately held and based in Santa Clara, CA.
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