SAP Solution BriefSAP Services

Business applications are the central nervous system of your business. But as software environments become more complex and more heteroge-neous, even small defects can play havoc with software quality and bud-gets. As you deploy new or upgraded applications to meet market challenges, you need to control the potential de-fects and failures that can plague your applications and impair your ability to respond to change.

Comprehensive testing is one of the most effective ways to control software costs, improve efficiency, and reduce risk. With flexible, efficient, and replica-ble testing processes, your company gains greater confidence about the performance, security, and quality of your applications. Building high-quality test procedures, however, often proves difficult. For many companies, testing resources are scarce or nonexistent; manual processes are time-consuming, expensive, and error-prone; and there is limited provision for ongoing testing after implementation. SAP® Consulting, a part of the SAP Services organization, offers a broad range of testing services and solutions designed to minimize application failures and help your company achieve measur-able business results. With an extensive yet customizable portfolio of structured methodologies, deep expertise, and field-proven test tools, testing services from SAP Consulting can help your organization: • Improve software quality • Mitigate performance risks

• Reduce the costs associated with reworking business applications and maintaining test components, such

as test cases and test plans• Shorten time to market• React more quickly to business changes

Matching Service Offerings to Customer Requirements

Application testing is not a one-time event. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all testing approach that works for all com-panies and all IT environments. The ex-perts from SAP Consulting work closely with each client to determine the opti-mal blend of advice, guidance, proce-dures, and tools that may be needed to produce a given outcome. Your compa-ny may want help creating a center of excellence, an expert assessment of current testing methods, a blueprint for automating test processes, or a strate-gy for reducing performance risk. Depending on your specific goals, test resources, and IT landscape, the ex-perts at SAP Consulting work with your IT professionals and business leaders to create a package of services keyed to your needs.

Some companies, for example, prefer to begin by evaluating current resources and developing a game plan for future improvement. This road map then be-comes a how-to manual that governs future initiatives efficiently and cost- effectively. Other companies, discour-aged by the inefficiency of manual testing processes and long testing cycles, want to learn how to reuse test-ing methodologies instead of recreating them time after time.

Early and ongoing testing helps ensure the quality and stability of business applica-tions, yet few companies build testing into project planning or operation. SAP offers an extensive portfolio of testing methodologies, tools, and expertise to help your company lower risk, reduce cost, and boost efficiency.

TESTING SERVICES FROM SAPIMPROVING THE RELIABILITY AND PERFORMANCE OF SAP® SOFTWARE

the conclusion of the performance test-ing engagement, your company gains a more precise understanding and appre-ciation of software capacity, resource utilization, transaction response times, and overall performance. Armed with precise testing metrics and methodolo-gies, your company can proactively ad-dress performance issues throughout an application’s development, imple-mentation, and maintenance.

Performance testing services can help your company:• Lower migration risks• Improve application performance

by identifying, isolating, and resolving bottlenecks

• Accelerate deployment cycles by fixing problems early

• Boost operational efficiency by reducing support costs, increasing user capacity, improving application response time, and reducing applica-tion failure rate

And, with little tolerance for applications that do not perform as anticipated, virtually all companies want to be sure their business software meets the highest standards for workloads, capa c-ity, and endurance. For these and other testing objectives, SAP Consulting offers a targeted combination of services, product expertise, and best-practice support to help your company optimize testing activities and realize a favorable return on investment.

Strategy and Assessment Advisory Services

Many companies use ad hoc testing procedures and tools on an as-needed basis. Built around manual processes, inconsistent disciplines, and incomplete skill sets, testing is invariably expensive and unreliable. The best antidote for this dilemma is to evaluate current strengths and weaknesses, and then draw up a blueprint for improvement. SAP Consulting delivers strategy and assessment services that help you make better decisions about your over-all testing philosophy, practices, staff-ing, and budget. An experienced as-sessment team works closely with your IT and business leaders to develop both a long- and short-term road map. Activities may include the use of gap analysis to identify which testing tools to deploy, advice on how to build an effective testing organization, and shar-ing of best practices gained through numerous customer engagements. As a critically important first step toward building efficient and effective testing practices, an assessment from SAP Consulting yields unbiased analysis and guidelines for improvement that can ultimately help your organization reduce

or eliminate the application failures that hamper market competitiveness.

Advisory services from SAP Consulting can help your company:• Reduce the costs of developing and

maintaining testing activities• Define test accelerators to speed

testing processes• Maintain quality throughout the entire

life cycle• Safeguard solution quality throughout

the entire software life cycle• Develop a plan for building a center

of excellence• Make informed judgments about

selecting test tools

Performance Testing

Very few companies are willing to toler-ate underperformance of their business applications. Fewer still can accept outright failure. To help you validate the performance of your SAP applications prior to implementation, SAP Consult-ing offers a targeted package of perfor-mance testing services. The services span key performance testing activities such as defining test requirements, identifying key performance indicators, developing test scripts, running the tests, and then analyzing results and preparing a final report.

Performance testing is offered at a number of different levels depending on your requirements and goals. Offer-ings range from relatively short en-gagements covering basic scripts and test cycles to more comprehensive offerings covering multiple scripts and cycles. Installation, configuration, and setup of the SAP LoadRunner applica-tion by HP is included at all levels. At

SAP Consulting offers scalable, needs-driven testing services and solutions through an integrated service delivery model sup-ported by local, regional, and global consulting resources.

Functional Automation Testing

As you move from one-off tests and manual processes to automated testing procedures, your company gains the potential to make substantial improve-ments in ROI, efficiency, and time to benefit. But mastering functional auto-mation is not just a matter of purchas-ing an automation testing tool and plug-ging it in. Moving to automated testing involves a number of complex deci-sions about which functions and busi-ness processes to automate, how to retrain test personnel, and whether test scripts can be designed using inter-changeable, modular steps.

SAP Consulting delivers testing ser-vices designed to help you develop an effective automation methodology and leverage the tools that support it. Test automation tools may include the SAP Test Acceleration and Optimization ap-plication, SAP LoadRunner, and the SAP Quality Center application by HP. With a deep knowledge base of meth-ods, products, tools, and best practic-es, experts from SAP Consulting work with your testing personnel to develop component-based testing scripts and libraries that can be reused whenever your SAP applications are implement-ed, maintained, or upgraded.

Functional automation testing services can help your company:• Shorten test cycles• Choose and master automation

software• Develop automated scripts that can

be reused regularly to ensure appli-cation quality

• Boost efficiency, while reducing cost, by moving from a manual to automat-ed test environment

A Full Portfolio of Testing Services

SAP Consulting offers scalable, needs-driven testing services and solutions on-site with full customer ownership or supplied via remote locations. Compa-nies that prefer not to maintain testing capabilities in-house can choose from a number of outsourcing options. In addi-tion to assessment, strategy, perfor-mance testing, and functional automa-tion services, SAP Consulting delivers a number of service programs that sup-port many other activities in the appli-cation testing life cycle.

Testing Project Management Services You can support organizations that want to maintain a special focus on software quality assurance. The ser-vices help your company develop a comprehensive testing approach that encompasses technological, organi-zational, and operational issues.

Test Analysis and Proof-of-Concept Services With these services, you get an overview of the methodologies and tools needed to test business processes and applica-tions in a heterogeneous IT landscape.

Environment Management Services These services help you plan, imple-ment, and operate test centers. A key focus is to create an efficient test envi-ronment – sometimes called a test house or test lab – that sustains high-quality testing processes while minimiz-ing infrastructure costs.

Training, Education, and Enablement Offerings The SAP Education organization offers a curriculum that includes courses on testing tools from SAP.

Delivering Quality, Performance, and Reliability

Application testing should not be an isolated event that occurs once during implementation. To create business value, your company needs a holistic approach that includes designing a co-hesive strategy, building reusable test components, leveraging automation functionality, and providing ongoing maintenance of enhancements and upgrades. SAP Consulting offers com-prehensive testing solutions and servic-es that help you: • Enhance application performance

with faster transaction processing and decreased downtime

• Increase testing efficiency by creat-ing reusable test scripts for ongoing testing and upgrades, and starting tests earlier in the software develop-ment life cycle

• Improve customer satisfaction thanks to software testing that results in reliable applications and responsive business processes

• Control costs with leaner, more-efficient, and more-transparent test-ing activities that reduce or eliminate bottlenecks and breakdowns

Find Out More

If you’d like more information on how testing services from SAP Consulting can help make your company more productive, efficient, and agile, please call your SAP representative or visit us online at www.sap.com/services/testing.

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Summary The SAP® Consulting organization provides comprehensive testing solutions and services designed to help companies reduce test cycles, leverage scarce resources, and improve the reliability and performance of their SAP applications. With a portfolio of customer- focused services, methodologies, and tool and project expertise, SAP Consulting can help you lower IT costs, improve the quality of your SAP software, and build a sustainable competitive advantage.

Business Challenges • Replace costly, time-consuming manual testing processes with automated tools• Develop a systematic testing approach to detect, prevent, and control application perfor-

mance risk• Create a framework of replicable test processes so that iterative test cycles do not drain

IT resources• Build better and faster application testing processes so that IT investments support ever-

changing business needs

Services Off ered• Strategy and assessment advisory services – Identify the organizational approaches and

testing structures needed to reduce costs, improve quality, and accelerate test cycles• Performance testing – Build a realistic test environment that verifies system performance

and mitigates performance risks • Functional automation testing – Develop a comprehensive approach for managing, plan-

ning, and automating test projects

Business Benefi ts • Increased ability to react quickly to business changes with reliable software that is test-

ed at all phases of the application life cycle • Reduced performance risk through ongoing testing that begins early in the implementa-

tion cycle• Increased efficiency of SAP applications with faster transaction processing and

decreased downtime• Faster time to benefit and lower costs thanks to reusable scripts, a cohesive test frame-

work, and automated test processes

For More InformationCall your SAP representative or visit us online at www.sap.com/services/testing.