SAP Testing Challenges: Addressing a Critical Bottleneck to Quality Testing

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With thirty eight regional chapters, you and your teams can connect and meet with other SAP professionals and take advantage of dozens of speaking and leadership opportunities throughout the year where you can share your ideas. Become a leader in the ASUG community by leading a local chapter, joining our executive exchange, and participating in one of our thirteen and growing ASUG alliance groups or make connections and learn at ASUG events. Keep learning, connecting, and growing with ASUG. Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today and welcome to SAP Testing Challenges, addressing a critical bottleneck to quality testing. I'm Heather Lima, and I'm a content producer here at ASEG. Today's webcast will be recorded and you will receive the post event email tomorrow morning with a link to the on demand recording. Please go ahead and share this with your colleagues or friends if you find this webcast useful. And please take a moment to take our two question survey that's going to pop up on your screen when the webcast is over. If you have any questions, please go ahead and enter them in that Q and A box. It's over to your left. Questions that we don't get to on the webcast today, we'll answer offline. Now I'll hand the webcast off to our speakers, Phil Best and Paul Hammersley with Epiuse. Phil, please take it away. Thanks Heather. Appreciate it. Good afternoon to everybody. My name is Phil Best. I am the Head of Sales for Epiuse Labs here in North America. Joining me is Paul Hammersley, who is our senior vice president of our ALM product portfolio, which we will be speaking to the solution set and the greater technical challenges faced by companies running SAP, not just here in North America, but globally. Paul is based in Manchester, UK, so thanks for joining us in the afternoon your time, Paul, but I will jump right into it. Quickly on the agenda, a little bit about who we are. If you're not familiar with Epiuse Labs, the Epiuse brand name, or the larger group elephant organization that we fall under, we'll give you some context of, obviously where organizations are struggling with SAP testing and what our historical background is supporting companies with test data provisioning, data management, refreshes, managed services, all the things that go into the operational side of the house traditionally with test data. And then obviously how we can benefit from reliable test data. Paul will walk you through a live demo. And then we'll talk a little bit more about our relationship with Work Soft, as far as data provisioning and integration into test automation solutions goes. And then we'll finish up with some closing questions that you might have. So I'll be brief. If you're not familiar with Epiuse Labs, we are the product development side of the Epiuse brand. Our core focus has always been supporting our customers, which is, actually over eighteen hundred globally now, really on the ability to, provision, copy, you know, manage the test data management activities for refreshes or client copies, as well as, you know, configuring, you know, test data for training or any rollouts such as S4HANA or larger projects in which HR, payroll, finance, and traditional teams need access to data quickly to do their testing initiatives. We are, again, part of a larger organization, which falls under the Group Elephant umbrella, and we always encourage people to look at that. Most of our background is as a development partner with SAP in which we started over thirty years ago, developing out the payroll code schemas for SAP, or I should say on behalf of SAP in South Africa, and at last count we've done, close to fifty other, smaller African European nation countries to support that. We are a global organization, so we do have resources and staff and development centers globally. We're also proud to, you know, note that we are the first SAP AppHouse partner in Africa. We have several products that are BTP certified, and we're one of the largest BTP certified organizations globally. And, yeah, I'll leave it at that. If you're not familiar with us, again, I'll speak to the labs designation, but the Epiuse brand name does cover a wide swath with wide and deep expertise across all areas of SAP and now expanding into other non SAP technologies as well. So from a labs perspective, there's really two primary things that we look at internally, our clients and our technology, specifically our IP that we've been developing and supporting over twenty five years with our product solutions. The strength of our organization is that we have become SAP domain experts by essentially building out the object definitions and mapping SAP within our solutions. So I'll start at the very left, which we'll be covering quite a bit today, which is optimizing SAP data and environments, but we also have core practices in data privacy and security, that originally kind of started and centered around GDPR regulations, but have now expanded globally to support any regulatory audit, privacy, security concerns that organizations are facing. Certainly our background in HR and payroll, we have a very strong practice to support reporting, any sort of comparison of legacy data to SAP as you might be moving to ECP or modern HR and payroll projects in your organizations. We have products and services that are geared to help accelerate, augment your teams, or simply just improve operational efficiency. We do have what we call a, you know, client specific innovation center, which is really custom development for any things that you might have that are nuanced, where you're looking for the expertise that we carry by our in house direct development staff that ranges well over eighty people now globally. And then also we have the ability to help move clients into the cloud. We have a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS. We have our own managed service and private hosting cloud as well. And then we also have the ability to utilize specialized versions of the products that we'll be speaking to, to help with any landscape transformation, logical system splits, any M and A work that you might be doing to carve out company codes or be able to sell off entities within your organizations, we will come in and actually do that technical work utilizing the products that we'll be speaking largely to today, just with specialized versions. So as we drill into those core areas, as mentioned, today's primary focus on testing and optimizing your environments and, working, more efficiently with the data itself as part of an Sfour migration or a RISE project or any sort of major transformation work that you're doing. We really look at the core suite of solutions that we call Data Sync Manager. Within that suite of solutions, we have, generally speaking, four disparate solutions and a new one now that really relates to the ability to extract certain data to feed AI or data legs or things like Certify, from Worksoft. But the core solution set is, from a marketing perspective, the name Data Sync Manager is the suite of products. And within that suite, we have something called System Builder, if you're on ECC, shell sync if you're on Sfour, and these are the ability to essentially create the repositories, the mirror images of your production repository or system shells to not have to do full system copies or be able to reclaim disk space. It really gives you the ability to start small and grow and maintain, especially as you're looking to be more efficient about, you know, cleaning up development systems in preparation for an Sfour transformation project. And then we have the client sync solution, which is a lean, thin client for refreshes. So again, rather than doing full system copies, we can do multiple lean client copies that can be refreshed independently. It's much more less taxing on the basis and technical teams gives you more, you know, efficiency around how we look at client copies and refreshes in the context of multiple projects that are ongoing. And then we have something called object sync, which is the ability to append those preexisting lean clients with just the specific data you need to do your testing. We also have the ability to scramble, obfuscate, change the values of any sensitive data in your non production systems. That is our data secure solution. And then Object Extractor again is the ability to, be more efficient at how we look at external feeding of SAP data. We do have an archiving solution we call Archive Central. If you're looking to sub sunset or potentially, look for more cost efficient archiving methods that are offline, this is an AWS hosted certified solution that we can offer to really give you some, food for thought in terms of how you look at archiving. And then we do have a reseller relationship with WorkSoft and we'll be again speaking, to that as today as well. But, from there, I will go ahead and turn it over to Paul to take it from here. Okay. Thank you very much, Phil. And also thank you to everyone for joining us today. We do appreciate your time. SAP is, typically at the heart of an organization's, IT landscape and is incredibly connected both internally and externally. So when data changes in the warehouse, it automatically updates finance. If something changes in sales and distribution, it affects what happens in the warehouse. This interconnection internally has been key to the success of SAP for a very long time now. But of course, over the last decade or so, it's become the digital center for related systems to also integrate into as well. So we have processes starting in a cloud solution and then coming into SAP or peripheral SAP systems moving around. And what this means is when you start to try and set up testing, we start to look at the examples that you need for testing. It's often taking you into lots of different areas of SAP itself, but also then on to other areas as well. So trying to prepare those examples during a testing activity and have the setup correct to begin with and then overlay the comfort of changes that the project itself is making the actual things that you want to be testing and even data changes that are related to the project is incredibly complex as an activity. When you start testing, when you're looking at specific business processes, you sometimes have challenges because part of the process does leave SAP. There's an external interface. There's a web call that needs a specific response in order for that process to continue. And so the knowledge of how to test within the systems and also the knowledge of what to test is typically in quite short supply. There are often, lots of competing demands for those, skill sets, particularly if you're going through a major change like an S4HANA project. Phil started to touch on the refresh process that people might use and typically people will look at how to prepare an environment for a large scale testing requirement. They will say, well, the only way we can do this because of the data complexities, the only way we can do this is to take a copy typically from production, and then we will look to reapply conflict changes from the project, run-in any data changes that are related to the project, and then we can actually start the testing process. But that system copy, although there are a number of ways that it can be done, each of those ways has the challenge that you're actually bringing a lot more than you want to. You need to update the data and potentially the customizing, but you're actually bringing often the entire system. Sometimes the file system comes as well, depending on how the backup is done. And so you've got all of the related information about the system, its interfaces is potentially wrong and then needs to be corrected. The sorts of challenges that you see here, this is what we've been looking at with organizations all across the globe for a number of years now. What it means when it comes to big testing projects is organizations will look at can we do a refresh before the project starts? Can we fit it in if we've got time? And often they will, take the easy decision at the time, which is no, we're going to have to muddle through with what we've got. The system is maybe six months old. Got some data we can work with. Then that puts pressure onto the project themselves in terms of how they can then actually test. So the testing is only as good as the data. And if you start projects with insufficient and inaccurate data it can often throw up more questions for the project than actually providing answers. There was an example a few years ago for one of our clients in the UK where we helped them with very specific copying of individual data sets to match what was going to be tested in a particular project. And it was a really interesting project understanding what parts of the data were affected and which parts we really mustn't touch because they were being used by other projects. But towards the end of that engagement, I remember talking to one of the testers. So somebody that worked supporting the business day to day. And she said that this was a real revelation for her because typically she would be allocated five days to test in a project like this one that we were working with her on. And she'd spend the first two days just manually creating the test data. She'd look at where she's expected to test, realize condition records around her day or missing, other master data needs to be fixed up. Sometimes customizing needs to be fixed up. And so she'd only actually test for three days when she was expected to test for five. But because of the urgency of the project moving on at the end of that five days, the pressure was on her to say yes or no. Can we go live? So she was really delighted that for the first time she'd hit the ground running on day one of the project, she was testing there and then that morning because we prepared the data that she needed in order to be able to test. Okay. I think at that point we are going to ask you to take part in our poll. Heather, are you going to run the poll for us? Hey Paul, sorry, I was unable to unmute. Yes, so go ahead and please click on your screen. What answer is for this poll? It's in any recent major projects, has test data or testing been identified as a potential risk? Okay, gave someone, sorry, gave people a bit of time there. And we see both has come out quite heavily. For the people who haven't had either, raised, I think keep a lookout. I have talked with project managers who actually have learned over the years that they need to flag it very early because in their experience, people don't actually think about the testing phases. They start looking at the project plans, seeing when people are going to be engaged, doing the conflict changes and so on. And they don't start to think about which environments will be used for testing until it's on them. It's there and then. And so the projects often end up delayed or the costs of the project suddenly shoot up because at the last minute, someone's saying, we've gotta do something here. We need to get a better environment to do our testing. Okay. So we are here to help. The testing and the test data are, indelibly connected. And this is where, as Phil, started to explain, Data Sync Manager is a suite of products essentially that can cover all of your test data management needs. And as we look at the components, we'll focus on Data Sync Manager. I'll show you some examples and then we'll start to look at how it can be leveraged with automation as well. We'll talk about why that's important. So I'm going to bring us back to the different components. So this is actually quite important. Phil went through this, but I just want to reiterate it. And then I'm going to show you via a diagram what it means in terms of the makeup of the system and what these things do. So starting at the top, slide it to the left, system builder in shell seek. That's the component that can help reset the repository in a particular testing environment. So we want to have an exact match with the table definitions, the Z programs, and so on before we put in any code changes and structure changes that are happening for our project. Client sync is then the part that will do the high performance client copy. So there is a SAP client copy, which is essentially copy everything or copy just customizing, but that's too much. For most organizations, it's just too much data to effectively use. So client sync is leveraging our knowledge of SAP data model to give you many more options around what to include, That allows you to make a much leaner client for the test and project. We'll be looking at client sync first of all in a moment. We then have object sync. Object sync is often referred to as data on demand and it is the oldest component of the DSM suite. So this is the ability to go and pick specific data sets and bring them from a source, which is typically production, into the test environment, and the data will behave as if it were created there. So we'll look at exactly which types of data that might be useful for, and we'll look at a demo example of that. The new kid on the block then at the bottom is the object extractor. And this is similar to object sync in terms of allowing you to make very specific selections and to filter the data. We could filter material masters on only specific sales orgs, only specific plants if we wanted to. But rather than sending that data to another SAP system, it actually writes it out into the file format. So we have a standard XML format, we have a JSON format, but we can also create specific formats that we want to use for that. So it can be a good way to get data out into a format that AI can leverage. It can be useful for feeding data as part of a Greenfield migration to S4HANA. And we'll talk about it today in the context of feeding test automation sheets. Then on the left hand side, Data Secure. So this is an engine that allows you to intelligently anonymize the data in your testing system to make sure that you don't have any personally identifiable information, any sensitive data being used for testing that could easily fall into the wrong hands. And this can be used as a standalone. So if you have already copied a system to start your testing and you just need to anonymize the beta, DataSecure can run-in place, but it's also embedded in with client sync, object sync, and object extractor. So as the data is being read in the source system and being sent to wherever it may be going, it will then call the data secure policy, and that will apply the rules to go through and randomly change names to something that looks fitting for the region and gender, address information, again regionally specific bank account numbers, government ID numbers etc. Comes with lots of pre delivered content, but you can also take our content and adapt that content for your own specific needs. Then I want to just introduce this concept of the topography of an SAP system. So with these diagrams, you'll see we use these quite a lot. We use them in videos. The base, the gray part, is representing the repository, so the system shell, essentially. The red part is the client dependent customizing. The light blue is then your master data. It's that layer of data that's referenced by all of the transactions. And then the darker blue is your transactional data, which is typically the largest volume in a in an SAP system. So when we start to look at the individual engines with ObjectSync, it's picking the master data and the transactional data and allowing you to copy that data on demand from one system to another. And that could be an s four system, could be an ERP system, CRM, SRM, etcetera. Then the variation on that theme is the object extractor. So it's reading the data in the same way. It can also read customizing data as well. In some cases, you might want to have the customizing information extracted too. But it's then allowing you a very specific file format to be able to bring that data out. And you can bring it with the meaning to the data as well. So we can actually provide descriptions on what columns are used for, or we could embed it with related config values. So if there's a code inside a particular table, we can also pass out the description of that particular code, which could be the sales org or a company code or whatever it may be. Then there is the client sync component. So this is where we're saying compared to a full system copy, we actually think we can bring you a much leaner testing environment. So if you think about that system copy process, everything comes down from production and people start using that system. But how far back in the transactional data do they go? Are they running reports that go back two years or more? Probably not. Are they changing transactions that happened back then? Probably not. So with client sync, we have a system that is representative of production. But if you go further than a particular slice date back, the transactions just simply aren't there. And that means it's much leaner, and can takes less time to refresh. And also if your tests are actually creating new transactions. So if it was a project for, let's say a new distribution center is being built, You're talking about new enterprise areas, so probably a new plant, maybe in an existing company code. So the transactions that are in your production system are actually not particularly relevant for your testing. You're going to have the master data extended, you're have the customizing changes, and then testing by creating new transactions. So actually having a test environment with just master data and customizing can make it a very, very lean test client. That also makes it easy to reset that testing client very quickly. Then the data secure components. So typically, you would be anonymizing the labels on data. So the names, the addresses, so on. But it's an incredibly powerful engine. Where the use case is to do something more complex, we can. And it has the ability to not repeat patterns in the data. You can have a particular name will not be repeated. Not every John becomes Tom. You would find the first John becomes Tom, the second John becomes Mark. So there's lots of capability for it to add real depth to anonymization, but it will make sure it maintains the relationships. So if data spans two systems, a business partner, for example, in CRM and ERP or S4HANA and CRM, it will make sure that if the business partner is actually linked, but it's the same business partner, it will get the same new values. And then finally, the system builder and shell sync. So system builder is for systems up to S4HANA seventeen oh nine and uses a particular process to install a new system. And then with shell sync, is for seventeen oh nine S4HANA onwards. And it actually aligns the repository between two systems. Okay. At this point, I'm going to share my screen. I want to just quickly show a video that again uses, those blocks. And then we are going to look at, some examples of a live demo. So just bear with me a moment. I might bring this up. And we're focusing on the use case for client sync in the S4HANA world. So if we run this video, we can see we've got a source production system in a one terabyte appliance. And that would dictate that your test system needs a one terabyte appliance because when you do that copy back, it's got to be the same size or the data won't fit in. When the production system grows and actually needs a bigger appliance or bigger T shirt size and a hyperscaler, that means the costs for the QA appliance go up as well. Otherwise, you won't be able to copy it back. That's the power that we bring with ClientSync because by slicing the transactional data, we can actually remain on a much smaller appliance in the QA environment. So between this year and the previous year, the time slice that we're doing might not be much bigger than it was, a year ago. Unless the business is creating a lot more master data or there have been more transactions in the last year than it was in the previous year, it could be very similar data volumes. So this growth of that QA system will be much, much smaller. And even when it does start to reach the limits of what the HANA database can cope with, you would be able to adjust your slice if you needed to. If you wanted to defer an IT spend decision another year, you could go from a twelve month slice to a ten month slice in order to keep the volume that little bit smaller. It gives you a lot of capability to be flexible, and you may also be able to benefit from having multiple clients in that QA environment and even having specific clients for specific projects or a dedicated client for automated testing might be something that you can benefit from because of the space that's created by not having those four copies. So I'm gonna jump into a demo system here. So this is where a client sync user would access a DSM and they would come to this landscape functions launchpad. From here, they would choose to create a sync. This now gives them a roadmap to show them the process that they're going to follow. And we start by choosing from the available client sync profiles. So we can copy just customizing like the SAP customizing client copy can. We can do a full copy like the SAP option can provide, but then we have these extra options. So we could decide we want just master data in customizing. And as we make these selections and some of the other selections we'll come to, we'll see that the preview updates to show the user if there is an existing test system this client sync is going to go to, this is what's going to happen to the data on that system. So if I choose to include the users and authorizations, we'll see that part come up, on the right hand side there. As I said before, the master data only option is a very good option, It comes with the customising because of the links between the two. It wouldn't be safe to copy one without the other. But then with transactional data, there is that ability to have a little bit more data there if people do want to go look at some recent orders or whatever it may be. Can still have a very small slice. You'll see here we've got the options to choose a particular date or we can say today minus the number of days or we can just say the previous year previous month whatever it may be. Even if you choose the previous week, the product will go through a process to actually evaluate all of the transactions that are within the slice, and it will look to see are there any predecessor transactions that there's a dependency on, and it will make those parts of the copy as well. So even if you just took a slice of one week, it would be a perfectly consistent and working client. We also have the ability to do the enterprise slice. So if we wanted to prepare a client for a particular project and we knew that project was only impacting data in a particular company code, we can limit it on the company code or we can have a list of company codes and DSM will go and derive from the company code all the different enterprise keys, the purchase orgs, sales orgs, plants, and so on, and make sure that the data includes only the ones that are relevant for the company code. It's applying that enterprise slice to both transactional data and also the master data. We can then apply the anonymization. So with the masking options, see the policies that are available from DataSecure. So we have the same policies used all across DSM. And then on the execution options, we can decide whether we want to do estimation run just to see how big would a six month slice be or how big would an eight month slice be just to be able to do some planning. Or we can send data directly by an RFC sync from source to target. But most of the time we would be doing a file export and then we'll import the file onto the target system. So that's the mechanism that the Technicas users would use in order to essentially pre prepare the testing environment using client sync. What I want to do now is jump across to the object sync use case. So client sync would be very much technical user who might otherwise be responsible for system copies. I'm gonna come out of that system and I'm gonna come into different system where I've prepared the type of issue that can occur in, a testing environment. So I've started to create a purchase order in here. We can see the sold to party, the ship to party, and, we've got our material and order quantity. And if I try to process this, I get an error at the bottom that's telling me the material is not defined with sales. This could be a project where we have created that sales organization that's part of the project. Customizing has gone into my testing environment, but the master data actually hasn't been extended. So I could bring that master data from somewhere else. We might extend the master data in another one that was in our landscape, or maybe this is a follow on to that project when the master data was updated in production and it's just not been updated in process. I'm gonna do now is just cancel the folder. I'm gonna come out. And here we can see I went to the old Kite nine hundred, the output of the system. I'm gonna go into Kite nine eight hundred on the same system. So perhaps we're using multiple systems in our project. And I'm now going to fix the data by using the object feed engine. I'm going to run the launch pad up here. It takes me into the object feed functions. And I'm gonna say, I want to create a feed. So I've now been more of a expert user, could be a support person, someone's on the project. And I've got a slightly longer roadmap than to provide. So in here, I'm going start with my object selection, which is what is the data that I want to begin and then on from, and I'm going see where it's going go. In here, I've got things I've moved up into my favorites, I've done some back to them, and I can also create custom fonts. We have applications built using Z tables and can actually find those inside BSN and then we can then plot the production thing, anonymize, it's the full capability. If I look at standard options through the menu, this is a standard NIM. So I can go and look at the materials management, this is all past data, look at transaction data in there. We see the sales and distribution area. And we've got definitions of over three thousand objects across ERP, SPAM, CRM, etcetera, etcetera. So in this example, I'm interested in the material. I'm going to come and find all material. And I'm now going to set the material number. So in our order, it was the R1000 material. And I can now be very specific. So I can say, I just want to update the data for this form of plant I perhaps don't need the variant configuration or maybe I really do need batch configuration, I can restrict sales area, warehouse and so on. And then I can say, should this update completely or should we just update with the data? Now I'm gonna say I want to put post complete object. So this will read all the information from the Spheromaster and the source, bring that across, remove the data from the scleral master on the target, and then bring the data from the source. Why? We also have the ability to recover native objects. So see there's a few things on by default. There may be other things that on a particular physical model is one on by default. And that's why we can also save on the box. So I can click save and I can come back to, I've made specific selections in here, and I can share that template with the user group. You can also lock down options within the template and make it available to basically use the templates. There's a lot of power, and you can go on. If I go to preview, you can see in here the material. If I expand, you can see it has picked up some related characteristics, classification data. I can deselect each where I wish to, but those also haven't been set to over. By default, they will only copy the appropriate existing target, and that might be by ninety release track. If I go onto the enterprise keys, you can see in here, this is telling me what it's picked up. So the material was configured for these web evasion areas and plants. And then interesting here, that's the phase of the new release in our testing plant. The painter has been expended and that phase of the interior is good. So these that would fix the problem. We can jump over the masking options, but it's not particularly relevant for us. If we wanted to be able to mask Paul? Is it again. Yes. Hey. I'm sorry. Your audio is getting a bit mute garbled. Would you be able to maybe talk us through the demo without doing the demo? I think it's a bandwidth issue on your screen share. Okay. Yes. It's gonna be hard to talk through a demo. I can talk through the process of what would happen from here. Just doesn't quite convey the same message as I understand. As we go to see it in action. It's funny because now that you and I are talking, it actually sounds better. I'll just share it and see if it's Yes, try sharing again. So anybody who wants a demo, you'll notice in the right corner, there is Paul's information. You'll be able to grab his email from there if you'd like to have a personalized demo for your system and he can show you after this webcast. We can also, send some links to videos that we have for different parts if it hasn't been clear. And how's the audio now, Heather? I can hear you perfectly now. Okay. Hopefully, was it Again, when we come to the execution options similar to the client seeing user, I can send the data directly to a target system. I'm going to send it to our testing client, the other client on the system. But we could also send the data to the file And that can be quite useful if you want to test a particular activity on the data and then reset the data from the file. We can run-in the foreground or the background. If we go in the background, we can use parallel processing. So if we did want to send tens of thousands of materials, we would do so, but use maybe three or four background processes just to speed things up. I'm going to kick this off and it will ask me to log on to the target system to make sure that I have access to the target system. It checked my SAP standard authorizations during the preview. If I can't display it in the normal SAP transaction, I can't copy it with object sync. We can see that's now run. The material is copied, took four seconds to do. And so I'm going to go back to my other client and then I'm going to run the VA01 transaction enter in my sold to party ship to party and the material, and we'll put a quantity of one in there. And now it will process. So I've gone past that error. It's looking at the planned requirements, and I can then save my order. So by bringing that data across using object sync, we were able to actually resolve a problem that happened with the testing otherwise. So quite a manual activity there. What I'm going to do now, though, is just quickly show you how this can be integrated into Worksoft. So I'm gonna come out of my, newly created order. I'm gonna leave just that session open. I'm just gonna reset so we have the same problem. So I've got a little transaction that will delete the data. So we've got the same issue. We can't create the sales order now. And what I'm gonna now do is pull up WorksOffCertify. So I've got a script within WorksOffCertify. And when I run this script, one of the first steps is it will actually call the API for object sync and bring across the same data. So if I tell this to run now, we'll see at this point, this isn't calling the API. It's able to put in the same selection options that I put in, and then it's picking up my screens and it's automating the creation of the order. So it would have had exactly the same problem I'd had manually because I run multiple utility that reset my, demo example, but it doesn't because it's automated exactly what we'd done. And as you can see, it's a little bit quicker and then it gives me a nice, result afterwards. So it's told me what it's done. So that's an example of how we can actually integrate the process of making sure that some of the data is up to date before we run automated testing. And it could be, depending on the business process, maybe several different types of master data that you'd want to prepare beforehand. So that's the object sync use case. I'm gonna move on to the object extractor, and this is very similar to what we've seen with object sync. I go into create an export. I've got the menu to choose from again that looks like this house banded menu. I've got my custom content and my favorites. This time I'm going to go into a transactional object like a sales order and I might pick orders from a particular document date. I can also choose to pick up proceeding and subsequent documents, so it's going look up and down the flow for me. And if I preview that data, we could see in here we've got those orders, look at subsequent documents, they've gone all the way through to billing. And I can carry out transformation options. So in the same way we might scramble data when we're sending it to a test system, I can transform the values. So I could take the sales org, for example, and actually change the value. So what comes out is, a different value, different sales org for us to then, leverage. But in this case, I'm gonna go straight past that. And what we see on the execution screens, the object extractor is it's a slightly different set of options. We're using a file export and we can send it out as a JSON format or an XML format, or we might have a specific format that we've used. So this example here is one that I've used in order to feed test automation. So it's saying, take the actual values from the sales orders that happened, it was in December, get the values out and actually write them into the record sets that we need in order to run the same orders in our test system. And so that would allow you to essentially have lights out testing. Things that are happening in production the same day or the next day, we actually have the data, the input information coming down and going into your automation system, going into the record sets that are used for the automation, and then scripts are running. And you only need to hear from your test automation if something fails. And that's a very powerful use case. And of course, we can put the two things together. So, going back to, animations, I've got another of our videos that actually shows how we can integrate ObjectSync, first of all, and Object Extractor into automation, using WorkSoft Certified to do that automation. So we can see here, we've got a production system, a QA system, Worksoft Certified Connects. It calls object sync to update the relevant master data in our test environment. And then it's going go and ask for the transactional data information. So the orders from yesterday or whatever it may be, gets the exact values, puts it into the record sets, then goes and runs the automated testing based on the data as it's happening in the production system. Okay. So I'm gonna jump back into our, ON24 system and just talk a little bit more about the partnership with Worksoft. This is a partnership that was formalized towards the end of last year. We have been looking at these sorts of examples of how organizations that leverage Worksoft are struggling with data and how we can integrate the provisioning of data into those processes. Also where our DSM users can actually benefit from the automation of using the data that DSM has been able to provision for them. The reason that this is important at the moment is because there is a real push for organizations that are on the journey to S4HANA to look at what have they done up until now in terms of testing and how much of that testing has been automated. What can they do during the project? As they go through the various phases, however they're going to S4HANA, be it brownfield or greenfield, it's a significant project or even a selective data transfer. It's a significant project. It needs significant and reliable testing. So there is a real push from the business to ask how do we test at the moment? How can we automate that and how can we use it now in the project for S four and how can we then start our, existence on S four from day one having that automated testing already in place. And then just a couple of examples of the benefits here. So, Worksoft has been around a long time, automating test processes in SAP, and the combination of our two capabilities brings significant reduction in the manual testing efforts, stopping people from having to prepare their test environment with data before they can run their test, scripts, brings of course cost savings on management of the tests and overall financial savings to these types of projects. And then coming back to where we started with, with DSM, it is a product suite. It has different capabilities around test data management. They are licensed individually. So some organizations use one or two, some organizations use all of the different components of DSM, but it gives you a lot more agility with your data, a lot more flexibility. Increasingly, as we see S4HANA systems being that spine of the organization's IT landscape, integrating to multiple different cloud solutions, The agility is important because not all of your, test systems will have a corresponding, cloud test environment. You might have a four tier landscape on S4HANA, but you might have a cloud solution that only provides one test instance. So to be able to effectively test, you can't wait for the project or the data to get to that part. You want to be able to move it forward earlier to be able to say, let's specifically test the things that are relevant for the interface. Let's get just the data that we need to run that interface into the right test client in our S4HANA landscape. We do also have an assessment, it comes as a small transport. You can run it in a pre prod or a system that was copied from production if you wish to, just something representative, and we can then present that back to you. You can access it yourselves and look at your data footprint, look at some of other things we pick up within that assessment, and it can really help with looking at future projects and what the data requirements might be for those projects. At that point, we're going to stop for questions. I'm just working my way back. So the first question is a very technical question about WBS elements. And is there an issue because of the internal number? There is a challenge for both projects and WBS elements because the naming convention for your projects might be a code. So you might have a code that starts a dash one, and then the next node would be a dash two. And then you might go on and start your next project, and it'd b b dash one. When you come to then add another node or another WBS to your first project, you want to add a dash through because obviously that makes sense. So what it means is the data has a key, the object, the project or the WBS element has a key. And that key isn't what the external user sees because what the external user sees is that code and needs to follow a certain format. And you might want to delete the second WBS element later on and decide to reuse the number or not. So there is an internal ID number behind it. What ObjectSync will do is actually look at whether the same project exists on the target, what is the internal code, and it will make sure that it gets a new internal code where it needs to. To the user, the project looks the same, the WBS looks the same and so on, But in the background underneath, it's actually generated a different internal number to make sure that it doesn't damage something that is already there on the target. Very good question though. Anything else coming through? So there's a question here. Does ObjectSync replicate data for transaction needs to be used for other automation products? Yes, so we have been working specifically with Worksoft. We're looking at ways to integrate the data, but anything that needs data, any automation of testing or any mechanisms that you might use to automate activities. So you might have something like Symphony that orchestrates your refresh process that can actually integrate into ClientSync and make ClientSync part of that automated process as well. There's a full API. Anything that wants to call BSM to get data where data needs to be can do so through the API. When it comes to the transactional data, have a couple of ways of copying it, but the default way is to say, we will recreate the transaction. With master data, we can replace it because we can say this is the exact set of what is there. We remove that on the target. We bring that data from the source. When it comes to transactional data, we can't undo what's happened. If we were trying to copy a particular sales order number and replace that exact number on the target, we would have to know all of the impacts of that order. We'd have to undo the impact on profitability analysis. We'd have to undo the impact on control on the rest of controlling. We'd have to put the stock back on the shelves in the warehouse. We'd have to, give the customer the credit limit back, and so on. So we can't do that. If you attempt to, you'll end up creating inconsistencies in your test environment. So we actually copy the master data and we recreate the transactions. So we take the information of what happened on the source and we feed the application layer. We go into BAPI's and we use some of our own functions to actually create the transaction if it meets the requirements of the environment. So if there is stock available, if the posting periods are open, etcetera, etcetera. But we have some utilities as well. So you can copy stock levels from production into a testing environment. But because we go through that approach, it means you can also clone transactions. So you could take one sales order and actually have objects sync, make ten copies of it. And then you could use a test automation, product like Worksoft to actually go and take each of those orders and deliver them. But you could have it deliver and go through good Zishu and so on, but actually have it do them differently. So potentially you could take something that's just happened in production, bring it into the test system and make ten copies of it, and then have your automation run every possible way that order could process and alert if one of those approaches fails. So we could basically say to the business, this order hit the system yesterday. If it goes down this route, we think there could be an issue because in our automated testing, this happened. Now maybe the business says, oh, it can't go down that route. That'll never happen. Maybe we adjust our test script. We don't test that option, but it's a great way to be very proactive in terms testing and providing solutions to problems before they even occur. How could these tools assist in having test digital manufacturing cloud solution? So I'm not particularly familiar with that cloud solution. We can take a look, but I would say where it integrates with S4HANA, where there is links to materials or whatever it may be, having the latest versions or having the versions from a different test environment in a particular test client that has the right interface or has the right connection to that cloud solution makes sense because you generally don't see cloud solutions with a four tier environment. They tend to have two test systems at best, sometimes just one. So being able to understand what is the interface, how does it work and then bring the right data across makes a big difference. But also if there's transactions that come from an external system and hit SMP, you may struggle to test those from the outside. But if we've got an order, for example, maybe a production order that's been created from that interface in production, we may be able to recreate that transaction just by plugging the valleys into the BAPI. So we've seen it a lot actually in ERP and CRM integrated systems. The process did start in CRM and then came across to ERP and the sales order continued. But you can actually start the order just on ERP with the information that you've got in that sales order. So that can drop the requirement to actually have the external system that may not be there in the past landscape. Is, I think there's lots more information that we can share this information on our website. We don't tend to share our internal documentation guides and so on until organizations have bought licenses for the software. Then we have lots of KB articles and detailed documentation, But we will also be actively involved in implementing the software, helping set up all the systems that are in the landscape, which ones should be allowed to send data for object sync, which ones should be asked to send data for object extractor, and so on and so forth. So it's very much something that we would assist with in the setup and implementation. Some organisations then run it themselves and just log a ticket if they have a support issue. Some organizations look for our assistance when they've got very complex data needs, and we can bring expertise to assist. I don't see any other questions in q and a. So last chance if anyone wants to fire another question in, but otherwise, our contact details are here at the bottom. You can email seoslabs. Epiuse dot com. And, just wanted to thank everyone for their time. Oh, we've got a question about HR. Yes, there is an integration between employees and WPS data because you can have cross application time sheets linking in so we can bring those across. Where we've had to renumber internal values, it's done consistently across. So yes, that's a use case. Copying HR data for employees with cats and copying WBS, it will keep the integration correct. Even more technical than previous questions. Heather, back over to you. Thanks, Paul. And thank you both you and Phil for such a great webcast today. I saw some really positive comments come in the Q and A as well. So tomorrow you all will receive a post event email with a link to the on demand recording of this. You can go back to that link. You'll find a PDF of the slides as well. And thank you so much for tuning in. Have a great rest of your day.