Time Machine® Helps Large U.K. Energy Customer Achieve On-Time Delivery and Cost Savings for all Major SAP Expansion

Monday, 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.

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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

Software Virtual Clocks for Time Travel Testing. Simulate past and future dates effortlessly with Time Machine®, enabling comprehensive testing of your date- and time-sensitive applications. Ideal for validating critical business processes like quarter-end and year-end processing, billing cycles, regulatory compliance (including Year 2038), and policy lifecycles during integration, upgrades, virtualization, cloud migration, and containerization. Eliminate the risks and downtime associated with system clock resets in complex environments like Active Directory and Kerberos.

About Solution-Soft

The Leader in Virtual Clock and Time Travel Testing Solutions

Since 1997, Solution-Soft has been at the forefront of virtual clock software and time travel testing solutions, empowering organizations in the ever-evolving digital world. Our flagship product, Time Machine, has revolutionized application testing, enabling thousands of companies, including 47 of the Fortune 100 US companies, to reduce costs and accelerate project delivery by an average of 3 – 10 times across traditional systems and containerized applications.

The Time Machine Product Suite extends these capabilities, optimizing cloud migration, test automation, Agile/DevOps, and containerization testing. Our latest innovation, Time Machine for Containers, supports standalone Docker containers and large-scale Kubernetes and OpenShift clusters (including a 16,000+ CPU core, 1,300+ namespace deployments).

Trusted by over 2,000 customers worldwide across diverse industries (including 3M, AMEX, BBC, Boeing, and more) and partnered with industry leaders like Accenture, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat, Solution-Soft, founded in 1993 and headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, provides cutting-edge solutions for your time-sensitive testing needs. Learn more at www.solution-soft.com or call +1.408.346.1400.

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