Looking at the usage of different databases, it becomes clear that SAP HANA is one step ahead of the others. According to a recent Forrester survey, SAP HANA is the most widely used and the best performing database. However, many companies hesitate to actually upgrade to HANA – either because they are afraid of possible risks or because they do not perceive any return on investment.
To illustrate, Panaya recently supported the COOP Group with the upgrade from SAP EHP5 to EHP7 to guarantee a seamless migration to SAP HANA. COOP is one of the biggest Suisse retail trade and wholesale companies with 5,000 SAP users that were affected by the upgrade. Using Panaya, COOP reduced the total project time of the upgrade by 53%. COOP also cut their overall testing effort by 40% and had a 30% reduction in software maintenance (such as bug fixes and patches).
Upgrade to EHP7 planned within six months
The COOP Group planned an upgrade from EHP5 to EHP7 in the central ERP SAP systems CRS (Coop Retail System) and CTS (Coop Trading System) in November 2014. At the same time the two smaller systems, CPS (Coop Production System) and CWR (Coop Web-Shop Retail) were upgraded. On the basis of the system upgrades to EHP7, COOP planned the migration to SAP HANA. Simultaneously, the hardware was upgraded to meet the additional 20 percent performance requirement.
The company had already been through an upgrade to EHP5. Here the testing had been realized manually, which was a very time consuming process. That is why COOP decided to implement the upgrade using Panaya’s cloud-based solution that supports User Acceptance Testing. Without a solution that supports User Acceptance Testing there would have been the risk for errors while upgrading. This would have meant an additional expense of ten man-years and extra 500,000 Euros for the NZDT (Near Zero Downtime Service) process of SAP. With Panaya, it was demonstrated to COOP that they could improve the testing quality as well as reducing time to the eventual go-live. Furthermore, the project managers found that Panaya would allow them to better estimate the testing expense.
31,011 recommended references imported into the system
From November 2014 to May 2015 the COOP Group used Panaya for the upgrade from EHP5 to EHP7. The go-live for EHP7 took place on schedule in May 2015 and was within the projected timeframe and budget. As a result, COOP was able to achieve a sustainable and better testing quality, even with three times more support packs patched to the system than with the previous upgrade. Of 181,407 references in the SAP system in total, Panaya’s impact analysis recommended to implement just 31,011 indications. This way the corrections could be more targeted, saving COOP time and money. So altogether, the upgrade project of COOP and Panaya was a big success, and COOP will be ready for their eventual HANA migration.