SAP IS-U Solution: Data Sync Manager for Utilities

The challenge for SAP IS-U companies

Companies running SAP’s Utilities Industry Solutions (IS-U) have a particularly difficult challenge in getting good test data.

Both IS-U and CRM environments tend to increase quickly, with a large amount of data relating to business partners, installations, premises, point of deliveries and other technical master data. Production data also changes quickly in the Utilities industry, both because of new transactions taking place, and new functionality coming through in releases, as companies try to stay competitive in a mature market and keep up-to-date with industry compliance requirements.

The data model for IS-U is very different from standard ERP. With Production systems containing millions of customers, it is impossible to keep several full copies of Production in the non-production landscape. This provides a massive challenge around enabling functional analysts, testers, trainers and consultants to access the data they need to support the Production system.

High costs, and risks to sensitive data

Doing full system copies for testing and training environments is costly – both in storage space, and time to create copies. Also, the sensitive nature of the customer information stored means the environment needs to be scrambled or masked.

Some companies have extended standard tables with additional fields to cover potentially sensitive customer data, including information on customer vulnerabilities to be considered when staff visit premises. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and other recent data privacy laws, this problem becomes much more serious. Companies often don’t have capacity to refresh their non-production data as frequently as they should. This results in inefficient testing, and detection of defects too late in the testing cycle, or even during Production, with time-consuming correction and reworking.

So, what’s the solution?

Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) for Utilities offers an effective and efficient solution, and provides the flexibility and power that all IS-U customers require. It allows you to create a lean testing environment with a subset of business partners and all their related data, so a full history of the accounts. You can then add additional data on demand by copying data for specific accounts, as and when needed. Typically, less than 10% of the size of the Production system is needed.

The bigger benefit is having the real data available when you need it. So the testing mimics what would happen in Production, even in development and early testing systems.

What about DevOps?

For companies striving to embrace DevOps, the agility of the testing landscape for SAP IS-U becomes a frustrating barrier. For Production support, having outdated data makes it difficult to replicate scenarios with standard SAP functionalities, resulting in

Testing in Production with elevated permissions
Production open for changes due to the urgency of fixing the issue before the business is adversely affected.

Using Client Sync, part of the DSM Suite, we will analyse your system and identify which data relates to the IS-U data model, and which doesn't. The IS-U data will be copied according to a functional slice; you can select a specific group of Business Partners, Contract Accounts, Installations, Connection Objects or Points of delivery, and the software will find all related Business and Technical master data, along with the relevant transactions. Non-IS-U data will be copied according to time; for example, you can select the last six months of FICO data to be included. All selections are predefined for you; all you have to choose is which IS-U data you want, and how much time should be included.

Support: "Unable to replicate the problem"

Does this sound familiar? Many of our clients have heard this when requesting support on Production issues, and the support team will close a defect for this reason.

Wouldn't it help if you could replicate an issue for a specific contract in minutes, with no need to copy the other customers from the Production system? No system downtime, no large space requirements, and no effect on other users of the test client.

Object Sync, part of the DSM Suite, allows just this. With the scenario copy functionality you can select a single Business Partner, Contract Account or Installation, and the scenario will find all of the related data for a consistent record and copy. Performing a direct insert on target, you get an exact replication of the issue from Production. Also used between System Refreshes, Object Sync allows your testing team to independently self-provision the data they need if it is not already available in the testing system.

Data privacy for Utilities

Production privacy in an IS-U environment presents even harder challenges. Because of the shared Technical Master Data between customers, a full deletion of old non- contracted Business Partners isn't possible as it would leave the Installation inconsistent. We recommend redaction of the sensitive data, while leaving the referential integrity intact. Using Data Redact, part of our Data Privacy Suite for SAP, and our deep understanding of the integrated IS-U (and linked CRM) data model, we safely remove the sensitive information.

My name is Ronan Menou, and I'm working for ENGIE Retail France. It's a French utility company. ENGIE France Retail is really focusing on delivering supply of energy for electricity and gas and services towards their ten million customers and plus, we are having something like around seven thousand end-users in our system. So it's one of the biggest CRM and IS-U systems in Europe. We started the journey something 2019, if I remember correctly by implementing the Data Retain and Data Redact solutions; because the thing that, as you know, privacy is one of the key topics that needs to be addressed from the different companies to really keeping the data inside your company, completely closed and really forgetting the data from the past. It's really important for ENGIE. In Production, so it anonymized completely the data from all customers like prospects or customers that are no longer with us. So that's a huge number of data because the market is moving fast. As part of the regulation, we need to get rid of this information, personal information. And for the non-production of data, we need to randomize them in order to make sure that if there are leaks, that we are not spreading out the information of real customers throughout the world. So that's why the complexity of the implementation of GDPR is not only about anonymizing the system, but also archiving a lot of data that is present in the system because we have a huge system of 80TB, with 60TB on the SAP IS-U system and 20TB on the SAP CRM system. Our system is fifteen years old, so that means that a lot of things happened during those fifteen years, so you need to go back and look at your data. And secondly, in terms of performance, we had a lot of discussion with EPI-USE. And of course, it was implemented correctly at the right moment at the right time according to what the regulator was asking us.