Panelists
Michael Larsen (INTRO):
Hello, and welcome to The Testing Show.
Episode 149
SAP For Utilities 2024 Reflections
This show was recorded on Friday, September 13, 2024
Qualitiest recently participated in the SAP for Utilities conference in Florida and we have several key players who were part of the proceedings. Matt Heusser and Michael Larsen welcome Qualitest and Tricentis regulars Rick Lesley, Ryan Williams, Kevin Flynn, and Jeff Fillegar to talk about utilities moving their SAP systems to the cloud, major digital transformation efforts with aggressive deadlines, and the need to ensure quality and minimize disruption to users and providers alike.
And with that, on with the show.
Matthew Heusser (00:00):
Thanks Michael, and welcome back. If you are a software tester involved in testing in the past 10 years, one thing that we’ve seen is that the travel budgets have been cut. When the pandemic hit, a lot of the travel budgets didn’t come back. Even if you’re lucky enough to have budget to go to one conference a year, it’s probably either in your specific discipline or broad general testing. So there are all these other communities out there, specifically SAP testing and utilities that you might either be interested in or if you are active in, you might not get a lot of attention for, you might not have…. So both Qualitest and our leading partner Tricentis were at SAP for Utilities recent conference, Tricentis presented, and we’re going to tell you all about it. Get the inside scoop if you couldn’t make it. Speaking of which our first guest is Rick Leslie, who is the Executive Vice President at Qualitest. Welcome to the show, Rick.
Rick Lesley (00:57):
Thank you.
Matthew Heusser (00:58):
So tell us about the conference. Did you go to the keynotes? What did you learn? What are they saying?
Rick Lesley (01:03):
Yeah, it was a great conference, very well attended. A lot of similar themes this year as last year, a significant focus on energy needs and the future adoption that many utilities are starting to have with their SAP to the cloud migrations. Many conversations that I had were really focused on the fact that last year it was getting everybody thinking about moving to the cloud and getting their migration plans put in place. And now, many of the conversations were around people now beginning to execute on their plans. In my conversations, their projects are starting to kick off. They’re starting to think about how to move to the new SAP, if you will, in the very near term, and a lot of great questions about how you can incorporate quality engineering and automation into those plans in order to hit aggressive deadlines. So it was a great conference and look forward to the next one.
Matthew Heusser (02:01):
Yeah, those aggressive deadlines. I wish they were unique or rare. I wish someone would complain to be about having deadlines that were unrealistically broad. Doesn’t seem to happen much. So thanks, Rick. We also have on the show today Ryan Williams, Strategic SAP Director at Tricentis. Again, that’s our partner. They make a product called Tosca. I’m sure you’ve heard of it if you’ve listened to the show more than twice. Ryan, what did you see happening? Did Tricentis present?
Ryan Williams (02:30):
Yes, Tricentis is SAP’s official solution extension for quality engineering. We attend most SAP shows as an invited guest. We presented on de-risking digital transformation. As Rick was saying, these customers are all in a journey to go through some digital transformation over the next couple years. A lot of them moving their on-prem real estate to the cloud. The common theme is how do we get there faster? How do we de-risk these programs and projects and how do we ensure quality across the entire platform as they make these massive moves? I think the deadline of SAP asking people to get to the latest release is starting to encroach faster and faster. This is our third year presenting at the utility conference as an SAP partner and you can just hear the momentum of the customers out there trying to understand what they’re trying to figure out as they want to move faster getting to the cloud. We specifically presented on de-risking digital transformations and what can you do today to get started now, even before you pull that trigger to move forward. Being able to surround not just SAP but the full end-to-end business processes and to be able to enable all the integration points and to be able to test not just SAP applications, but everything that makes SAP run in the cloud. That was our common theme. As Rick said, it was an extremely well attended event. I think both Jeff and I have lost our voices a little bit here after being nonstop talking at our booth for eight hours every day. So yeah, it was a phenomenal event and I think there’s going to be a lot of momentum coming out of it, not just the rest of the year here, but setting us up and teeing us up for 2025.
Matthew Heusser (04:12):
So allow me to demonstrate my ignorance. I understand that SAP is a really big database combined with a front end that allows companies to get their business processes and their data picture all in one place to run their business and plan their resource. And you said that they are being pushed to upgrade to the current version, upgrade to the cloud. Is there a deadline? Do they have to get rid of their old client server systems? Is SAP going to stop support?
Ryan Williams (04:42):
Yeah, well, with every large software vendor, deadlines can be fluid. It was 2027, I believe it’s 2030 now, where they absolutely need to be off of the legacy systems or otherwise they’re going to be charged extended maintenance. So people are just trying to get in front of that. But more to that point, the innovation that SAP is putting into the cloud technologies is really pushing people to want to get there faster, to be able to adopt these technologies faster and to show quick wins to the business. The old days of buying ERP software or going through digital transformations and waiting 8, 9, 12, 15 months to show value to the business, those days are over. You need to buy, deploy and show value. And that was kind of the common theme that we were hearing.
Matthew Heusser (05:25):
Just one more follow-up. What are you going to do to de-risk? That’s great. De-risk. Sounds great. How do you do it?
Ryan Williams (05:32):
Yeah, for sure. The way that Tricentis approaches things is looking at things holistically from the business process, whether it be documenting the business process and establishing traceability and requirements of what you need to do as you take that path to the migration. Being able to orchestrate and simulate APIs and integrations that are being fed in. Most SAP customers have hundreds of applications that talk to SAP. Do you really want to have to stand up every single one of those in a new QA environment in the cloud? Being able to orchestrate, simulate and virtualize those APIs is dramatically helping customers move faster. In fact, one of our customers was on a five-year journey consolidating five legacy billing systems to a single S4 instance. And they said that the combination of being able to understand change, understand what’s being impacted and easily create automation, but probably more important easily maintain automation, allowed them to finish that project seven months ahead of schedule. But that’s an amazing stat. But I think what’s even more powerful to that stat is the fact that their next five releases went live with zero defects in production. That’s kind of what we do, is we basically help you understand what the impact of the change is going to be, help you understand what that traceability is, help you create automation at the right time, at the right place for the right purpose for not just SAP but the entire end-to-end business process.
Matthew Heusser (06:55):
Now our audience is a bunch of software testers, test managers, test executives, and they can be very critical. I want to make sure we put the claim in context. We’re talking about enterprise planning that runs companies internal business processes. So you can do things like lock down the browser, the business processes are well-defined and under those conditions it can be possible to have multiple releases where nobody notices a significant issue, which I think is what I heard you say.
Ryan Williams (07:26):
Yeah, absolutely. Specific to the utility conference, we’re talking about call centers and meters and billing and all those complex, I mean billing is always a challenge for utility customers and trying to figure out the records and the distribution and trying to understand different things such as carbon emission reporting and all the volume of data that goes into that. So you’re not just talking about an isolated application, you’re talking about multiple applications all working together to satisfy specific business requirements
Matthew Heusser (07:56):
And maybe even external kiosks. But some of our audience works for e-commerce companies where they have no control over the browsers that are continuously upgraded or Firefox tells ’em about it after they’ve done it. We’ll go, “Whoa! Zero defects, man!” But in this context I think it makes sense and still very impressive.
Michael Larsen (08:14):
So just stepping in here and also realizing and the fact that we also have another guest that we haven’t had a chance to introduce yet. We also have Kevin Flynn and Kevin, thanks so much for joining us and I would love to follow up on this from the perspective of a lot of people that hear about these conferences or hear about what goes on with them, many of the people on the ground floor, as I like to put it, never get a chance to go to these events. They just don’t for various reasons. I remembered going back years and years when I was working at Cisco Systems, I was actually in the trenches for years before I actually got a chance to go and attend our own big event, and that was Interop at the time and it was really cool to be able to do so finally because there was so much that I got to know about the broader industry that I was working in outside of just my own little bubble. And so many people may not get the chance to do that. So for those who didn’t get a chance to go or who aren’t even really clear about what this conference actually covers, what did they miss and how would you encourage them to say, “Hey, this is something you might really want to pay attention to?”
Kevin Flynn (09:19):
Yeah, no, it was a very interesting conference. We talked to a large number of utilities ranging from very small co-ops and municipalities up to the very large utilities. Many sent 15, 20 people on the large side, all learning different parts of the SAP digital transformation that pretty much every company is going through right now as SAP expires their old legacy software and people have to move this new platform. More secure, shorter times for implementation, better integration with other products, et cetera. So everyone’s saying the same thing. From the smallest muni with 150,000 customers to the largest utility with 10 million customers, everyone’s worried about getting off of phase zero in the SAP framework and moving into the upgrades and the digital transformation that SAP is promising. So they were tons of track sessions around each of the different components from moving your data correctly and providing good software testing and managing the deployment process.
(10:18):
And so probably close to a hundred tracks on that. Each of them is what you would think. Each organization is going to have their own specific challenges, but everyone’s currently going through this, so everyone’s going through doing upgrades or they just made it right across the finish line with it and now they’re trying to operate and run in that new environment. So that’s what people were saying. From the 30 or 40 utilities we talked to across the United States, all of them have similar challenges. So you’re not alone in that as you move with your upgrade, integrations are always a concern, too, as far as migrating those integrations and then having platforms like Tricentis and testing integrators like Qualitest can really help drive out that value and have the zero defects going into production that people won’t even notice. They’ll just go with a new working model and it’ll be a great experience for them.
Matthew Heusser (11:06):
And speaking of that zero defects, the other part of that that was, I think, more impressive was the seven months early. We recently did a, “Hey, we can’t test everything through the UI. In fact, what’s happening if people are not testing? So let’s do through APIs and let’s do a CI/CD project.” And in that project, it simply wasn’t designed to be done through the API. So we had to sort of reverse engineer the transaction order of the JavaScript to get you logged in to get the permissions and authentications and the test system wasn’t really designed to deal with fake synthetic users. It was four months before we had a test strategy that was really a legacy system, was really unfortunate, but it’s an impressive result. So that said, we also have Jeff Fillegar here who is the, going back to Tricentis, Senior Director of Solution Engineering at Tricentis. Did I get the title right?
Jeff Fillegar (12:03):
Right. Yes.
Matthew Heusser (12:03):
Thanks, Jeff. Got a lot of people on today. Great. So we’ve got a lot of different ideas. What can we do with all of this? How do people move forward?
Jeff Fillegar (12:12):
Sure. Thanks for having me on today. So I’ve worked the booth with Ryan and our other peers all this weekend. I would say that one of the more common themes voting upon everything that’s been mentioned so far, but the more common ask is, “Yes! Okay! We’re planning to go to C4C, SAPs Customer for Cloud or our traditional call center application. Now it’s going to be in the cloud. Our traditional on-prem SAP UI clients are now going to be in the cloud or in our private cloud. And now we’re going to be responsible for taking monthly patches from SAP. We’re not going to have full control over the environment. How do we maintain that and lower the risk so that our end users, our end users being our internal clients and then our external customers, people that go out and we’re all residential commercial utilities customers on here and people listening, right?
(13:01):
So you go out to your energy company.com and pay your bill, or if you call in and you want some information, that individual answering that call is going to be using SAP software. So how do you ensure that the applications under test, once they’re in production, it’ll work as expected? And really the only answer is: through automation. Tthrough test automation with the vast amount of business processes and permutations that you would have to, just in a simple regression test, have to do. There’s no way that some of our large utility customers could do this in a manual effort. Going to the point about the seven [*months] early. So I worked on that project extensively for three years and that was the only way that they were able to go into production earlier seven months than planned was through automation. Once they had their core set of scenarios like, “Hey, I want to move in, I want to move out, I want to pay my bill, I want to change my address.”
(13:53):
All the core scenarios that we would all use as a utility customer, once we had all of those foundational test cases automated, that allowed them to move at hyper speed because then now they’re only testing what’s being changed now. And they were able to understand that by using one of the solutions that we have called change impact analysis that says, “Hey, well this is the list of items that’s going to be changed and this is what’s going to be impacted on SAP and all the other downstream systems.” So then they could just focus on validating the new requirements are being implemented and then just run the regression test based on what was being affected with the change. So that’s how do we get there and how do we get there faster? It’s through test automation with a combination of change intelligence.
Michael Larsen (14:39):
So if I can have one kind of wrap up, we always like to look at this from the perspective of what’s the elevator pitch or what’s one thing that orgs who are trying to move from client server to the cloud and improve their testing. What could we tell them? And anybody who wants to answer, what’s that one fundamental thing from the conference or from your interactions that you could say, we could really do this?
Jeff Fillegar (15:01):
I’ll take a stab at it. Because it’s utilities focused, the common or core business processes are very similar, irrespective of whether it’s a super large publicly traded company or a co-op in Texas, as an example. Someone’s going to have to sign up for your utility service, they moved into a new house or an apartment, and then they’re going to pay their bill and then maybe a year later they change, they move to another apartment or buy a house and they change their address. So it’s common. So that means that everyone here is going to be dealing with the same business process and everyone can speak the same language. So that means that you’re not alone. And so if you’re having these challenges with going through planning and what should we implement first? What should we test first? What should we deploy first? The combination of Qualitest and Tricentis… we’ve done this before. We’re actively doing it now. And for those that did visit the booth and were interested in more information, we provided that… I’m sure you guys are going to provide how your listeners can get ahold of Qualitest and Tricentis, I would say, to summarize, you’re not alone. We’ve done this before and we’ve got solutions to help you get there faster and maintain your systems.
Matthew Heusser (16:05):
So I should probably close out. But the other thing that I heard, I also heard from Jeff, and we’ve been hearing it more lately, especially on the Qualitest side. We’ve always done, “What’s going to change impact analysis?” but we did it with spreadsheets, we did it by hand, we did it in meetings. What’s happening now is two things. One, the applications are becoming more distributed. So your change impact analysis, we really do think only this API was impacted. Only these five. This constellation. And the other thing is that the tools are starting to emerge towards to become automated where you can do analysis. Now, depending on your company, you might still want to have a human being look at that and say, “Ehhh! I don’t think so” or some companies do it all the way end-to-end and have the portion of regression checking that is automated can just run based on a predictive algorithm based on what changed and what it thinks was impacted. And I’m skeptical of that, but we’ve seen significant success. So I want to give it some credit. I think that’s the new idea that I was hearing here, but with that I think we’ll call it a day. I hope you like the new format. If you don’t, send us a note, we don’t have to do it again, but it felt a little faster and fun, so we wanted to give it a try. Thanks everybody for coming and we’ll be seeing you soon. Bye-Bye.
Michael Larsen (17:19):
Thanks everybody. Thanks for joining us.
Matthew Heusser (17:21):
Thank everybody.
Rick Lesley (17:21):
Thanks.
Kevin Flynn (17:21):
Thanks, everyone!
Jeff Fillegar (17:21):
Thanks.
Ryan Williams (17:22):
Appreciate you guys attending, listening in. Bye guys.
Michael Larsen (OUTRO):
That concludes this episode of the Testing Show.
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