Zausner Foods

Zausner Foods Beats EHP7 Upgrade Deadline
with Zero Critical Issues

“The bottom line – we went live with zero critical issues.”

Cathy Kenlin | Applications Manager, Zausner Foods

The Challenge

Cathy Kenlin is the Applications Manager of Zausner Foods. Her team of five is responsible for a SAP system that comprises 406 users and 40 key users, spread across six plants and four other smaller locations.

Since 2009, Zausner Food has been running SAP ECC 6.0. Cathy knew she needed to upgrade Zausner Foods’s SAP to EHP7. “We realized we needed EHP7 for the many new functionalities. There was a strong risk aversion case for upgrading to EHP7. We were so far out of date in support packs that we were starting to encounter issues implementing or supporting new functionality. For example, we had a problem with a BW extractor that SAP was unable to help us resolve because we were too far behind.”

The Solution

Cathy first saw Panaya at a conference a few years ago. Since then, she has met colleagues at other companies who have worked with Panaya. “This was the perfect challenge for a small team like ours. We decided to go with Panaya in order to identify risk and changes. This was a step forward for us – at that point, we’d never even had reusable test scripts.”

“Due to the large number of activities and projects, it was tough to get the business to commit to such a big upgrade – IT had put the project on the plan for several years and it kept being delayed. No wonder – EHP7 is a large project for any company. I started planning the EHP7 upgrade in 2014, expecting it to take 6-12 months,” recalled Cathy.

The Challenge

Zausner Foods leveraged Panaya Change Analytics and Test Accelerators for their EHP7 upgrade. The upgrade took four months and was on budget and on time. “We focused on the medium and high risk issues for the scoping – especially our custom RF transactions. The business created test scenarios and I was able to monitor the testing like never before.”

“We standardized our testing on Panaya. I wish we would have been working with Panaya when we did our SAP ECC6.0 implementation. Panaya enabled a small team like ours to identify risks and focus our testing on what really needed to be tested.”