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® TI N T E L L I C O R P ' S D A T A W O R K S : D A T A W O R K S
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> > S A P D A T A E X T R A C T I O N S M A D E E A S Y
Introduction >> 2 Why is Representative Data Important? >> 3 TIntelliCorp's Solution: DataWorks for SAP >> 5 DataWorks: The Data Lifecycle Manger >> 9 Technical Architecture >> 10 System Requirements >> 11 For More Information >> 11 ® TI N T E L L I C O R P ' S D A T A W O R K S
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IntroductionCompanies using SAP are focused on how to derive value from their investment in the solution,while supporting constantly changing business requirements. This manifests itself in many forms, from seeking to reduce the costs of supporting the landscape, through upgrading for new functionality, to extending the usage of SAP throughout the business. Pressure on SAP development and support resources is relentless, and this often leads to key activities beingsqueezed in terms of time, resources and expertise. Business needs drive implementation timescales. Most companies ?nd that Meskimen's Lawapplies to them: "There's never time to do it right, but always time to do it over." In the deliverylifecycle, this means the emphasis is on quickly building and deploying functionality, with limitedtime available for testing and training. The effect is to defer, but increase costs as issues are discovered and corrected post-implementation.A strong quality assurance (QA) cycle, from initial requirements through to support is essential. A key part of the QA process is ensuring that the business requirements have been met.Testers face many challenges within a limited timescale. They need clear requirements to testagainst and representative data with which to test. The obvious solution to providing test data isto periodically make a copy of the production system to create a QA environment. This soundseasy, however SAP testers face a tremendous challenge when attempting to reuse representativehigh-quality production data to support development, testing and training activities. Why? The key issue is the size of the production database. It is not uncommon to ?nd terabyte-sized databases supporting many of today's worldwide SAP systems.The volume of data leads to the following problems:. Replicating the database requires production level hardware in development, testing and training. This can be cost prohibitive for many companies.. Existing data copying technologies require the production system to be taken offline, sometimesfor several days. This is unacceptable to most businesses.For larger companies, the hardware costs for replicating the production system will normally be inthe range of $600,000 - $965,000 and companies with smaller SAP systems can expect the cost tobe in the hundreds of thousands of dollars range.For those companies that use test automation tools, experience has shown that it is impossible todevelop repeatable automated tests without a known, stable dataset. Ask any tester what theyspend most of their time on, and the answer will be creating test data. Even where manual testingis undertaken, 75% of the time spent testing is taken up with creating the data, and only 25% ofthe time is spent on the actual test itself. Test automation can only bring value when suitable datais available to run the test, and accelerates the time spent running the test. Only the combinationof test data availability and test automation enables the use of repeatable tests.Repeated client copies are time and resource consuming and the alternative of manually migratingdata is fraught with dif?culty (the R/3 data model is complex) and risk (inaccuracies in the migrateddata lead to deterioration in the quality of the test and development systems). In addition, takingthe production system offline, even for a short period of time, may not be an option.
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Problems include:. Data dependencies: Data items such as Sales Orders do not live in isolation inside the SAP database. There exist many relationships between data and to maintain integrity, the dependencies must be transported with the primary data item.. Data structure customization: The de?nition of data items is different between releases of R/3.Industry Solutions of R/3 also include modi?cations to the data structures. Customers can alsoenhance their SAP systems by customizing the data structures.For a sol... [download for more]
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