Success Story: Warwick University optimises S/4HANA move with DSM

I'm Leighton Joskey, and I'm the head of SAP and Finance systems at Warwick University. We have about thirty thousand students, about seven thousand staff. About three years ago or so, we decided to upgrade our main SAP ECC installation to S/4. And one of the aspects of that was knowing that we needed tooling to help us do certain tasks that would both be integral to the upgrade project, but also things that we could use afterwards. So one of those toolings was the ability to move data about, cut and slice, that kind of thing. We ended up partnering with EPI-USE to use Data Sync Manager primarily to recreate instances of SAP as part of our upgrade project. Using Data Sync Manager lets us redo stuff a lot. If you're using a sandbox to practice a business partner's or a customer vendor integration, that's a one-way street. We wanted to be able to repeatedly do that, to keep retrying it until we got it right, until we ironed out all the kinks. And to be able to sort of recover the system back to a point which it lets us try again is incredibly useful. And also our teams use Object Sync. So when they've got a specific support query, for example, they will use that to pull information from our Productive environments into our Test environments, which means that you don't have to have such large Test environments permanently. It helps compact the size. It helps with security issues to sort of help us show compliance. The most day-to day benefit is it lets my Basis team refresh data in our environment more quickly. So if something took about a week previously, they could shave a couple of days off that using Data Sync Manager, which is not trivial if you're doing it a lot. By being able to have smaller data sets in your test environment, there are lots of different ways you can save. You don't perhaps have to provision as much resources to maintain those environments. That in itself just lets you be a little more agile, a little bit more quick to fail, and quick to learn what not to do the next time. It's hard to quantify, but incredibly useful. And the team do use it regularly.

Optimising the move from ECC to SAP S/4HANA

The structure of universities is complex, incorporating many different elements from training to facilities, so their SAP systems are also complex.

Warwick University runs S/4 1909 for Finance (FI/CO/MM/PS/SD/ SM) with 21 years of data, and an environment of around 300GB. They also run ECC 6 for payroll, connected to SAP SuccessFactors. When the University decided to move their ECC system to S/4HANA, they identified two primary needs: additional resources (project management and subject matter experts), and tools.

With limited resources and a tight budget, they needed software to automate the manual and time-consuming processes they knew would be necessary during the project, such as refreshing environments, scrambling sensitive information on the non-production environments, and time slicing the test data. They identified that ‘cut and slice’ technology would be critical for the project, and wanted to be able to speed up the creation and replication of environments. The chosen solution also needed to be cost efficient, quick to implement, and easy to use and reuse, with purpose after the end of the project.

DSM streamlines testing for S/4HANA and increases security

Warwick University chose EPI-USE Labs’ Data Sync Manager™ (DSM) suite to support them on their journey to S/4HANA. EPI-USE Labs’ DSM Readiness Assessment gave them instant insights into the peculiarities and needs of their system, and how DSM could solve their challenges.

To speed up the S/4HANA migration, DSM was used to populate and refresh the Sandbox. The Basis team took ownership of running the solution, enabling them to set up the entire system, or just refresh data as required. They also used DSM’s data scrambling functionality for GDPR compliance.

Warwick University now benefits from three components of the DSM suite:

Client Sync™ to populate and refresh their Sandbox system, gaining the ability to set up the entire system or just refresh data, as required, and as often as they want to.
Object Sync™ is used by their functional team for copying smaller subsets of data on demand, with immeasurable benefits. The HR team also uses it for troubleshooting and testing, and investigating Payroll issues.
Data Secure™ scrambles sensitive information to improve security and adhere to privacy regulations.

Multiple benefits for Warwick University from DSM

The IT team at Warwick University derives multiple benefits from DSM.
During their migration to S/4HANA, DSM was crucial to the agility of the project. It gave them the freedom to test business partner to customer-vendor integrations (CVIs) repeatedly, without much effort or technical resources, until they reached an appropriate level of project security

Not only did DSM make their S/4HANA migration easier, but the University’s SAP team continues to use DSM in their day-to-day work. They estimate a saving of two to three days per week by not having to do refreshes manually.

Optimised Sandbox process with a data migration tool
Faster client copies
Better GDPR compliance
Time and space savings
Efficiency gained for future projects
Accurate SAP test data to support S/4HANA project

About the University of Warwick

Founded in the 1960s, the University of Warwick is a public research university on the outskirts of Coventry between the West Midlands and Warwickshire, England.

Warwick University is ranked 67th in the world, and tenth in the UK. It has cemented its position as one of the UK’s academic powerhouses after 92% of its research was assessed as being ‘world leading or internationally excellent’ by a panel of global experts. The University currently has 30,000 students, 7,000 staff members and an SAP team comprised of 15 different roles, including Basis, ABAP, a Functional and Business Analyst, helpdesk, architecture and management functions.