Critical factor: Availability
Update more efficiently
Provide your QA, test and training systems with current production data at the push of a button. Including all preparatory and finishing work - Without interfering with or changing your SAP environment - Without time-consuming pre-planning - With minimum lead time - With consistent copy quality.
"The creation of SAP system copies used to represent an enormous effort," says Martin Schulz from SAP Basis Administration. Almost 4,000 employees worldwide access our SAP systems directly. If the SAP systems are down, then nothing works in many departments - and that certainly happened in the past. Although the actual copying process is completed in just a few hours, the manual post-processing - which includes, for example, adjusting parameters, users and rights, profiles, system settings and interfaces - can take up to a week. This keeps the entire seven-person SAP Basis team busy.
Automate SAP system copies
Such system copies, with their enormous manual effort and SAP checklists that are often hundreds of items long, must be performed before every refresh. Usually, three to four days have to be planned for this, during which the QA system - which in two-tier SAP environments is also the development system - is not available for the actual work. The delay is actually only caused by the meticulous matching of trivial things, such as directory names. Because such SAP system copies have to be created for each SAP application on the QA system and can thus quickly require dozens of system copies, they tie up a lot of resources and staff.
To build a target system that can be used for testing, development and training purposes, there are two different approaches: Users can reinstall an SAP system and import all transports and support packages that have also made it into the production system to date. However, when their number reaches the hundreds and thousands, the effort becomes disproportionately high. In addition, the data still has to be imported from the production system, for example via a client copy.
"Shortcut for SAP Systems" provides an automated solution for many of the tasks involved in copying SAP systems by enabling the backup and restore of any table.
For in-house developments and third-party software, check whether there are system-specific tables for the programs that should be backed up.
Depending on the structure and size of the systems, this process can take anywhere from hours to several days.