Reduce TCO of SAP Deployments and Upgrades by an integrated approach

Reduce TCO of SAP Deployments and Upgrades by an integrated approach

Throughout the course of any SAP implementation or upgrade, enterprises should use a business technology optimization (BTO) method to achieve reduce total cost of ownership (TCO) and higher-quality applications. Mercury for SAP Solutions: a pre-packaged solution comprised of integrated software, services, and best practices.

In the current scenario, IT organizations are under growing pressure to cut costs and surge revenue — while diminishing risk and implementing new applications to meet business initiatives. Increasing the challenge is the growth in highly complex and visible Web-based applications, which can possibly upset a previously steady technology infrastructure. Integrated offerings like Mercury for SAP Solutions demonstrate cost savings by helping customers prevent downtime, drive cost out of their existing SAP and improve quality. With over 1400 customers have efficaciously used Mercury for SAP Solutions to deploy, upgrade, and maintain their SAP systems — and successfully reduce total cost of ownership (TCO).

Mercury for SAP Solutions includes several integrated offerings called Mercury Optimization Centers — pre-packaged business technology optimization (BTO) solutions that maximize IT strategy, application readiness, system performance, business availability, and problem resolution. These Centers enable an organization to apply integrated models across its IT organization and to optimize critical IT activities. They include: Resolution Center, Business Availability Center, IT Governance Center, Quality Center and Performance Center. The products encompassing the Centers are also available individually. For example, organizations can use Mercury products to solve a specific departmental issue or improve a particular process or project.

Automating tests and quality assurance
Quality Center improves application superiority by automating and managing the entire testing and quality assurance process, including functional testing of the business process workflow. It empowers testing SAP applications the same way end users interact with them in real life. This Center decreases time to test by an average of 60 percent. The QuickTest Professional 6.5 tool, part of the Quality Center, has been certified by SAP for integration with the SAP extended Computer Aided Test Tool. Using the SAP NetWeaver integration and application platform and QuickTest Professional, customers can run quality tests in environments that span beyond Windows and SAP solution-based environments, including advanced, multi-platform, highly-integrated composite, legacy, and proprietary enterprise applications.

Two core Quality Center products are tools Quality Management (formerly TestDirector) and WinRunner. WinRunner captures and reruns user exchanges automatically to identify flaws and certifies that business processes in SAP applications work impeccably the first time. To create a test, WinRunner simply records a typical business process by emulating user actions, such as ordering an item or opening a vendor account. Next, testers can add checkpoints, which compare expected and actual outcomes from the test run. WinRunner offers a variety of checkpoints, including test, GUI, bitmap, and web links. It can also verify database values to ensure transaction accuracy and database integrity, highlighting records that have been updated, modified, deleted, and inserted. With WinRunner, organizations gain several advantages, including reduced testing time by automating repetitive tasks. Support for diverse environments enables organizations to test any component mix or industry solution.

By conjoining requirements, planning, execution, and defect tracking, the Quality Management tool shapes and controls the testing process to regulate whether SAP applications are ready for deployment. Quality Management quickly translates a business process analysis into a comprehensive framework of tests that includes manual and automated functional and regression tests, as well as load test scenarios. Through its open architecture, Quality Management also seamlessly integrates with leading application lifecycle tools — from configuration management to helpdesk.