SAP System Refresh - Automation

SAP Basis. SAP System Refresh - Automation.

[Audio] S A P Basis Administrators often execute more than 200 manual or semi-automated steps to execute each refresh, and the process usually takes days, even for fairly SAP small landscapes. Multiplied with the number of SAP production systems, multiplied with each non-production system, and multiplied for each refresh - System Refreshes are costly, time-consuming and labor-intensive. Besides – manual processes are prone to error, and quality issues persist when things are done by hand. Automating this process improves application quality, reduces downtime and admins can spend less time waiting for long-running tasks to be completed. This team has been working on this idea since past few months and has already been executed on real business systems..

[Audio] These are the outcomes of our execution on small sub-set of real systems. Traditionally, A Refresh activity required 7 to 8 days of downtime due to long running processes, which is now completed in less than 12 hours, Increasing the application availability by 90%, Automated approach removed the wait times, reducing the total effort a Basis admin spend from 90+ hours to 2- 3 hours. As per data reported for Financial Year 2021, 90 System refreshes were requested by Business teams, and we have paid vendor for more than 3600 hours for this work. With reduced execution time and least amount of efforts, this cost can be reduced to 270 hours for the same number of refreshes. Estimated cost saving of 330,000$ per year. B D L S is the most critical and time-consuming activity during a refresh process and the runtime for which is reduced from 40 hours to just 4 hours or less. Fully automated process and well integrated with non-SAP tools and products, improved the quality of our delivery with zero defects reported in last cycle..

[Audio] What is SA P Refresh? S A P Refresh is the process of overwriting an existing target system with latest business data from Production system while maintaining the configurations and integrations. There are many steps involved and requires Basis, Database, storage and Operating system skills to complete a Refresh. This is a 3-step process Export existing configurations Database restore to bring business data from production environment. Bring back the old configuration in the system so that Test or Quality systems do not interact with production environment..

[Audio] Manual process is to export the existing configuration well in advance before the Refresh process starts, hence the configuration are not latest and might require teams to perform them again. Production system Backup is available over a weekend and Database administrator verifies the backup integrity. Next Business day, Basis team starts the Refresh activities which runs for 7- 8 days. A large backlog of changes is accumulated due to long execution time and unavailability of application. If manual mistake happens during pr after the process, only way of fixing the problem is to redo the entire activity again. Since this is manually performed, managing the integration of system with external tools is very complex and leads to problems..

[Audio] How are we automating this? LAMA is a tool from S A P which we have used to automate our process. This tool can connect to S A P and non-S A P applications and execute scripts and program to achieve desired results. Not only end to end Automation, but we did improve the process by executing multiple Pre steps in parallel, exporting the most recent configurations. As soon the configurations are exported there is no wait time and refresh activity gets executed. All the external tools and applications integrated with SAP application are part of the process, not just to control those applications, but utilizing these tools in the process to achieve the end goal. All these steps of a refresh activity can be monitored from a single view and has capability to send the failure notification when a manual intervention is needed. Scalability of the process has always been an important factor during the design of this workflow. This process can be easily adapted to different Business needs. Not only this can be used for Standard refresh activity but can easily be adapted for getting a new test system ready for development teams..

[Audio] A high-level flow diagram of the automated process is shown..

[Audio] Feedback from our customers on the new process. . . . - - - - - - -.

[Audio] Thank You for your valuable time. Please feel free to contact any of the team member for Question or doubts..