Case Study
Mercedes-Benz Takes a
Smooth Ride to ERP 6.0
Challenge
As the manager for SAP Regional Support for Mercedes-Benz USA, Sanjeev Sharma’s
team was at a crossroads. If they stayed on 4.6C, they would soon fall behind on SAP
maintenance. Their application environment had grown increasingly complex – something
they could simplify once they were on SAP’s ERP 6.0 NetWeaver architecture.
We wanted to be completely web-enabled instead of using the old ITS infrastructure,”
says Sharma. “With the 4.5/4.6C versions of SAP, we had so many applications around AP
that it made for a complex application environment.”
But unlike the previous upgrades that utilized outside service providers, there was a new
challenge this time: Sharma planned to handle this upgrade totally in-house. There was
no margin for error; he needed to ensure an efficient upgrade process to avoid overtaxing
either his development or functional team members.
Solution
When Sharma found out about Panaya, it looked like a perfect fit, perhaps too perfect:
Panaya seemed to address all the key pain points his team had grappled with during
previous upgrades. “When I saw the first demo of what Panaya had to offer, it was hard to
believe, I will tell you that for sure,” says Sharma. “It did seem too good to be true.“
During his evaluation of Panaya, Sharma was impressed by Panaya’s ability to streamline the
testing cycle by identifying application and interface problems - without having to manually
test all code. “In past upgrades, we were in the dark on what needed to be adjusted,”
recalls Sharma. “We had to ask the developers to go back and review everything. I could
see that using Panaya’s tool we could be very specific and tell the development team ‘you
only have to review ten or fifteen percent of our development work.’”
Panaya CloudQuality™ Suite
Benefits
Compared to past upgrades, Panaya’s solution saved
Sharma’s team fifty percent of their time during the Use Panaya's tool! It will tell
development and testing phases. you exactly where inside your
system you need to put your
Because of the success of the development phase, effort behind.
the testing phase went much more smoothly: unit
testing was reduced to just one iterative cycle, down By the time we got to
from as much as three testing cycles in previous unit testing, we had
upgrades. already addressed the high
level issues during the
“By the time we got to unit testing, we had already development phase
addressed the high level issues during the
development phase,” says Sharma. “Eighty to ninety Sanjeev Sharma
percent of our potential problems were already Manager for SAP Regional
taken care of with the help of Panaya’s tool.” Support Mercedes-Benz USA
About Mercedes-Benz | Mercedes-Benz USA, headquartered
in Montvale, New Jersey, is a subsidiary of Daimler AG. Globally,
Daimler AG runs more than 160 SAP applications worldwide. As
an automotive wholesaler that sold more than 225,000 vehicles in
2008, Mercedes-Benz USA relies on SAP to power its core financials
and logistics systems, as well as its financial services division.
With Panaya, organizations can accelerate
application change and continuous delivery
of innovation. Panaya provides cloud
based test management, test automation and application lifecycle
management solutions that ensure collaboration between Business
and IT. Enabling faster release velocity while ensuring quality,
Panaya delivers an optimized user experience with end-to-end
visibility of the application lifecycle. Since 2008, 1,600 companies in
62 countries, including a third of the Fortune 500, have been using
Panaya to deliver quick, quality change to enterprise applications.
www.panaya.com
