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Each year SAP runs a global program of Quality Awards recognizing customer projects that have exemplified great quality management. This year UK company Hillarys Blinds, a custom designer of window dressings, and has been shortlisted in the “Fast Delivery” category for their exemplary completion of their SAP upgrade project.
Julian Bond, Head of ICT at Hillarys Blinds, decided last year to upgrade the core ERP from SAP ECC 5 to SAP ECC 6. He also decided the project would involve a wholesale refresh of the entire software stack, move its SAP implementation from the HPUX operating system to Suse Linux and migrate from the Oracle database to SAP HANA. According to Bond, one of the most important factors that made this project a success was using Panaya’s solution to ensure their business critical core ERP system would run smoothly at go-live, on time and within budget.
Panaya for ERP Changes
“I first came across Panaya a few years ago when I was trying to do some planning around a possible ERP upgrade.”, Bond explained. “We did a bit of work with the company, running a small analysis of our system and, just from that, I could see it could be valuable. But when we finally came to engage on this upgrade, I found that the company’s tool had been very much fleshed out to help users much more on testing. It was now a much bigger suite. But it’s real value was risk reduction – helping us to understand how big a deal our upgrade was going to be and where we needed to focus our resources.”
Using Panaya to focus on impact analysis and accelerated testing allowed Hillarys Blinds to create a change management plan, leveraging the millions of successful ERP changes that Panaya has already implemented, reducing the risk and effort associated with an EHP upgrade.
Panaya Ensures Quality Change Faster, Safer, Better
“For me, it was about crunching a huge challenge into something completely manageable. By providing us with a snapshot of our system as it stood and where it needed to get to in order to upgrade, Panaya allowed us to see where we should focus our testing time and resources, saying to us, ‘Here are the things that need changing and this is how we rate them in terms of importance, as high, medium or low priorities.’ We were never going to be in the position of being able to test left to right, top to bottom, every line of code, so being able to crunch through that was huge,” said Bond.
Panaya optimized scoping, accelerated testing and real-time reporting, all delivered as a cloud service, supported Hillarys Blinds journey of excellence to their ERP upgrade.
Panaya congratulates Hillarys Blinds on this honor, and we are proud of our contribution to their success.