BT Success Story: Data Sync Manager improves their SAP test data management

BT is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London, and one of the world’s leading communications services companies. Operating in around 180 countries, BT is the largest provider of fixed-line, broadband and mobile services in the UK, along with subscription television and IT services.

Brands in the BT Group include BT, EE, Plusnet and Openreach.
They have around 100,000 employees and a revenue of over £20 billion.

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Large data footprint puts pressure on test data strategy

The BT Group is responsible for the EE SAP estate that runs core business functions including Finance, Retail, HR, Commissions and Payroll. The estate includes 145 systems, and the main Production system runs ECC 6 on HANA, with 8TB of data, of which 4TB is active.

Because of the size of the database, doing system copies was not a viable option. BT faced project delays with test data mismatches between applications. Internally, different teams were accountable for data setup between Test and Production systems, which caused defects in Production. SAP is required in many end-to-end processes, with up to 60 integration projects and many internal SAP changes being tested in parallel.

The SAP Test system hadn’t been refreshed since they went live over 10 years previously. This was because the system size meant refreshes took much too long; high costs would be incurred due to the additional storage required; and refreshes couldn’t be repeated easily.

BT needed to be able to perform partial refreshes of the system, time slicing the data and reducing the footprint, using the help of add-on software that would require the smallest number of resources and the minimum downtime possible. Their three main objectives in finding a solution to support their procedures were:

reducing their SAP database and platform size
introducing faster, agile, and cost-effective refresh processes
being GDPR compliant and securing their PII (Personally Identifiable Information).

EPI-USE Labs’ Data Sync Manager (DSM) Suite allowed BT to solve all their business challenges. By implementing the entire suite – Object Sync, Client Sync, System Builder and Data Secure – they could achieve all their goals. DSM is optimised to work with large databases, and gives the BT team the flexibility to refresh the data when they need to.

BT has been able to carry out refreshes of their Production system, choosing only the necessary data, and scrambling the sensitive information, gaining agility and security in what they were delivering.

What was previously impossible because of the time required is now feasible within 72 hours, or a weekend window.

Quality SAP test data

Data Sync Manager helped BT achieve their SAP test data management goals that had been pending for over 10 years. After working hand-in-hand with the technical team at EPI-USE Labs, BT has managed to address all their project goals.

On-demand data refreshes 10 times faster	Successful data scrambling based on agreed rules and policies	Reduced disk space required by copying a time slice of data	End-to-end testing in an integrated environment with no errors reported
Improved quality of project testing phases by ensuring SAP test data is live reflective (system testing, integration testing, E2E test, regression test, User Acceptance test)	Ensuring that reference data (Price Plan, Handsets and Pricing data) matches live data, reducing defects post go live	Removing the need for double entry of reference data between Live and Test	Scrambling data for GDPR Compliance