Futureproof with SAP Retrofit
Boost your upgrade project with a perfectly fitted test automation strategy
November 18, 2022 | Read time: 6 min
SAP Retrofit in combination with automated testing significantly boosts the upgrading of your ERP system
An important factor of success for all companies, especially in challenging times like ours, is the ability to rapidly react to changes in the market. To do so, an essential tool for any business is a state-of-the-art ERP system. If your company is still using an outdated ERP system, as, for example, nearly 70 percent of all SAP customers do, the adaptability of your business is minimal. It’s about time to upgrade!
Whether you noticed it or not, the race with your competitors has already begun: SAP has announced that it is only going to provide mainstream maintenance for core applications of SAP Business Suite 7* software until the end of 2027. So more than 50 percent of enterprises that are using these outdated systems, are planning on upgrading to SAP S4/Hana in the next years. The fastest ones are going to take advantage.
What is SAP Retrofit?
SAP Retrofit is also referred to as Dual Landscape Synchronization and Dual Maintenance.** It helps you during project periods simultaneously maintain, develop, and change two SAP landscapes at the same time. This is a very common use case for most of the SAP customers if they want to
- Have no downtime in their productive system
- Find out if the changes made to their SAP system are compatible with the live system.
To do so, two different tracks are used: the existing SAP system is the “maintenance track”. The second one, which could be your new SAP 4/HANA landscape for example, is called the “project track”.
Every change done in the maintenance track is evaluated in order to check whether it is applicable to the project track. Also relevant modifications or a check if the implementation is possible at all in the project landscape, can be done with the support of SAP Retrofit.
This gives you a huge advantage
When you make changes, you can first check if they are compatible to your live system before really implementing them. In doing so, you have no downtime in your productive system. Also, you get live indication about the status of the migration capabilities.
If the project track is your new S/4 HANA system you can use this approach to prepare your maintenance track for the upcoming migration. You can make sure beforehand if the customized functionalities in your maintenance track are transportable to S/4 HANA.
Easily bypass the obstacles with Quality Assurance
Very often customizations cannot be directly transported and must be overthought. One route a lot of SAP customers take, is to retrofit their custom implementations. This means building the custom elements back to a standard SAP element or whole standard transactions. As a consequence you will be able to transport your code to the S/4 HANA system.
But one question remains: The lines of code can be migrated with the help of the Retrofit functionality – but does that mean the business processes are going to work? Smart quality assurance will help you to understand, how you can safely manage the changing of the maintenance track, the quality check and after that, do the same for the project track.
We recommend to rely on automated testing for your quality assurance. If you start to implement automated testing parallel to the retrofit of your custom functionalities, you can make sure that your S/4 HANA migration will run like a bell.
Stay tuned and read more about automated testing in combination with a risk-based testing approach in our next blog post!
SAP Retrofit in combination with a perfectly fitted test automation strategy is going to give your upgrade project a major boost. Also, it guarantees the most secure and reliable approach there is.
Qualysoft provides you with a Quality Check: a detailed implementation plan, an estimate of resources and efforts, and when to expect your ROI. Get in touch with our experts.
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