Siemens PLM Software sees Data Sync Manager as an ingenious solution

In brief: DSM gets attention throughout Siemens

Siemens PLM Software’s growth, including acquiring companies and expanding its product portfolio, meant tremendous growth in their SAP Data. System refreshes became a hugely time-consuming, manual process, in some cases taking as long as a month to complete, with sensitive data at risk.

Siemens PLM Software chose EPI-USE Labs Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) product suite to significantly reduce the time and effort involved in a system refresh by fully automating the process. The Siemens PLM Software team is able to deliver system refreshes faster and more consistently, rapidly create new non-production systems, reduce the data footprint when refreshing clients, copy selected data on-demand, and scramble data for compliance with strict data security policies.

Success story: DSM saves Siemens time and resources

The challenge

Company and data growth

As a growing company, Siemens PLM Software found that acquiring new companies and expanding its product portfolio was creating several data governance and management challenges. The tremendous growth in SAP data greatly increased the need for clean and fresh test data. Full system and client copies were no longer feasible because of the size of production systems and the cost of SAP® HANA® Appliances, and test data was outdated or insufficient. Also, sensitive data was increasingly at risk in the reduced security of non-production systems.

More time, more people

Getting the data needed for internal testing became a painful, time-consuming manual effort. Using traditional methods, this typically took at least a week to complete – and in some cases as long as a month.

Siemens PLM Software was using traditional refresh methods, which were increasingly slow and prone to error. These included:

• A full copy of the production environment (at terabyte scales)
• Many manual steps, increasing the opportunity for errors
• Table exports (such as RFCs, license data, SSO config, printers)
• Database renaming
• Adjustments (such as license keys, batch jobs, TMS, security changes, whitelists)

In addition, as BDLS can take a long time, this resulted in days of developer/tester downtime. As the company and complexities grew, so did the staffing resources and burden to IT, adding additional costs to each refresh on top of the extended times.

The solution: Data Sync Manager

Siemens PLM Software chose the Data Sync Manager (DSM) product suite to address their challenges.

Managing growth

DSM has delivered predictable, solid data. The increased size of production is no longer a problem for client copies and system copies, and test data is up-to-date and accurate. More importantly, the data is now secure, and has a reduced footprint, resulting directly in cost savings for HANA hardware.

Reduced time and resources

DSM allows Siemens PLM Software to fully automate and secure their data, reducing the amount of time and the number of resources required for a system refresh. Siemens is now able to:

• Rapidly create new non-production systems
• Reduce the data footprint when refreshing clients
• Copy selected data on-demand
• Scramble data for improved security

DSM guarantees that SAP users are getting access to up-to-date, relevant data for Production support, testing and training. Users have the data they need, when they need it.

The outcome

DSM has allowed Siemens PLM Software to improve their ability to support customers with problematic sales orders by being able to copy down objects on demand – in essence, providing self-service to test data. It’s changed the way things are done – refreshes have improved from manual intervention with a lot of activity, to minimal activity, freeing up time for the Basis team. Siemens PLM Software has moved from a reactive, manually-intensive data copy process to a planned and automated procedure with little need for human intervention.

Siemens PLM Software data is now secure; DSM has allowed the company to maintain and mask their data with consistency while retaining integrity.

The solution is garnering attention throughout Siemens as a critical success factor in their overall IT landscape.

Benefits to Siemens PLM Software

The many benefits to Siemens PLM Software from the DSM solution include:

• Smaller footprint
• Reduced person hours and effort
• Reduced downtime
• Cost-savings
• Security configurations largely left intact (DB and SAP)
• Reduction in manual steps/post-refresh adjustments
• Reduced potential for human error

About Siemens PLM Software

Siemens PLM Software, a business unit of the Siemens Digital Factory Division, is a leading global provider of product lifecycle management (PLM) and manufacturing operations management (MOM) software, systems and services. Headquartered in Plano, Texas, Siemens PLM Software works collaboratively with its customers to provide industry software solutions that help companies everywhere achieve a sustainable competitive advantage.