Founded in 1946 and headquartered in Swedesboro, NJ, Powell Electronics is a privately-held, family-owned business. With approximately $100 million in annual sales, the company is one of the largest in its niche. “We’re a specialized distributor for electronic connectors, and we supply all industries, — aerospace, military, transportation, telecom, medical instrumentation,” notes Ernie Schilling, Jr., executive vice president at Powell Electronics. “We’re global, shipping worldwide to a diverse customer base.”

Winner of the 2007 Americas’ SAP User Group (ASUG) Small to Medium Enterprise Impact Award, Powell Electronics knows how to leverage the SAP ecosystem to deliver value to its own users. The company’s latest challenge was no exception: running on SAP R/3 4.7 in 2009, Powell’s SAP team had been increasingly tasked to provide new functionality that Mike Ayars, SAP project manager for Powell, knew was already in SAP ERP 6.0 enhancement packages. “We realized we had run out of string with 4.7,” Ayars says. Still, in a down economy with an ERP solution that wasn’t exactly broken, selling a technical upgrade to upper management took proper care and due diligence. Plus, it needed to get done on a fast timeline — it had to be complete before Powell’s fiscal year ended in December 2009.

To sell the upgrade, Bob Oldrati, controller and IT director for Powell, broke the project into components, asking, What would we have to do anyway? “We wanted an upgrade to SAP Solution Manager; we needed to upgrade our servers and enhance SAP user security; we needed to relocate our disaster recovery hardware; and we were in the middle of an ABAP optimization and remediation project. We had to do all of these things anyway, so that’s how we started to sell it,” Oldrati explains.

To complete the full circuit and flip the project switch to On, Oldrati invited a representative from SAP’s Wholesale Distribution unit to make an executive presentation on SAP’s Wholesale Distribution roadmap, covering the existing functionality as well as the vision for where it was going. “Our executive team could see it all, and that’s important,” Oldrati says. “We’re not like a lot of other SAP customers: We’re a long sell cycle and a short implementation cycle. We want to be educated. We want to know and understand everything we’re looking at. Part of my project management strategy is educating people, and that includes our executives.”

Circuits of Assistance

As project manager, Ayars knew he had to combine two in-house experts with more than a dozen consultants and solutions for the elements of his upgrade, starting with two new 64-bit servers, working through custom ABAP code, rewiring SAP user security — and then testing it all for go-live.

To ensure a strong foundation, Powell started by running a sandbox test with SAP ERP 6.0 on a 64-bit server to benchmark response times. With a 74 percent improvement, not only would 170 SAP users see significant productivity gains, but overnight jobs would run faster. Powell installed a quad-core server for production, along with an additional server with one virtual instance for development and another for quality assurance in early September 2009.

With a pair of capable new servers lined up, Ayars began planning for ABAP remediation with Powell’s implementation partner, Innovant Consulting. Because Powell had been using SAP R/3 4.7 since 2003, the company had created plenty of custom code. When Powell upgraded to SAP ERP 6.0, Ayars knew applications were going to break. “What scared me about the upgrade was that we were going to have to find those things ourselves. I would have to have my business users sitting down, finding out what was going to break, and then we’d have to figure out why it didn’t work,” Ayars explains. “I thought that alone would be a six-week effort of hard work, and even then we wouldn’t find everything.”

Panaya to the Rescue

Oldrati and Ayars ran into Panaya representatives at an industry conference, and the company’s pitch caught their attention. The software-as-a-service consulting company is dedicated to helping organizations reduce their ERP upgrade and test times. Using a cloud-based supercomputer, Panaya would simulate Powell’s upcoming upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0, automatically pinpointing which custom programs would break, thereby drastically cutting the need to manually test everything.

Ayars and Dave McGuire, IT technical lead for Powell, made reference calls to Panaya customers to get the inside scoop, and the results were positive. “Panaya started us out with a four-hour webcast training session, which we had our implementation team sit in on, too,” Ayars says. “At the end of the training, we not only knew how the tool worked, but we also knew what the workflow process was for remediating the needed changes. I’m a functional guy, not technical at all, and I understood not just the tool, but the whole workflow — how to do an upgrade using Panaya.”

In the second week of the upgrade project, Powell inserted an SAP-certified ABAP report into its SAP R/3 4.7 system. The report extracted custom code and usage statistics into a file that was then uploaded to Panaya, which analyzed the custom code and usage files, mapping all objects and their dependencies. Panaya then ran Powell’s code on SAP ERP 6.0, generating a list of problems.

“I uploaded the file one day, and the next morning the report was already in. It told us what was going to break and how to fix it,” McGuire says. “They had looked at every program we’ve written — though we did mark the retired programs as out of scope.”

In many cases, Powell didn’t have to rewrite custom code to fix problems. “Panaya recommended changes and improvements that we could make because of new function modules in SAP ERP 6,” McGuire says, noting that Powell could replace customizations entirely or make them more effective just by utilizing function modules.

After Powell ran a mock upgrade to its QA system, it inserted the ABAP report into the new system, extracted the custom code, and uploaded it to Panaya for another round of analyzation. “By repeating the report, you can make sure there are no gaps, and you can do as many as you want,” McGuire says. “We did four and the last one was pretty easy. We didn’t have any surprises.”

Overall, Ayars estimates that Panaya’s service shaved six weeks off of Powell’s test effort. “The biggest thing for me was that it took all the risk out of it,” Ayars notes. “And that’s huge, to know you have it under control.”

Plugging into SAP Solution Manager 

As Powell started evaluating end-user testing tools, Innovant consulting partner Gilles Samoun recommended using SAP Solution Manager’s Test Workbench. With Powell’s tight timeline, the company couldn’t afford to install and learn how to use a new testing tool. Because Powell was only concerned about unit and integration testing — not load testing — the SAP Solution Manager Test Workbench could help.

“We started with the Wholesale Distribution roadmap from SAP and mapped our processes to it,” Ayars says. “We had teams of people in the business come in, and we interviewed them on what they did, how they did it, and then we took the Wholesale Distribution roadmap and incorporated it into the business process repository of SAP Solution Manager.”

Next, from the business process repository, Powell’s upgrade team drilled out a test plan organized around business processes. End users logged into SAP Solution Manager for testing in the project’s sixth week.

“I nicknamed our QA system our Test Drive System,” Ayars says, giving it a positive connotation for end users — after all, who doesn’t like a good test drive? “We told our end users that they were going to find some things that didn’t work and we needed to know about them. We expected issues with security profiles because, remember, we had scrapped our old security profiles and started with new security profiles because there was so much more in SAP ERP 6.”

Beyond the test drives, how did SAP Solution Manager’s Test Workbench work?

“For example, we would bring in our purchasing expert, and we’d go through the whole procure-to-pay process, and he would sit down and create a task list for end users so they could log in to Solution Manager and execute the tests against SAP ERP 6.0 that were loaded up on our QA Test Drive System,” Ayars explains. “I could monitor who had done them, how many had been done, how many they had to do, how many errors they found, and all their comments. For users who don’t work in SAP other than their own worlds, they picked up on this right away because it was logically oriented around the type of work they do.”

Anything that the implementation team missed was integrated back into Powell’s test plan. “Solution Manager is the testing tool you already own. It lets end users log in to the Test Workbench and execute their own business processes,” Ayars notes, adding, “It was a joy to use because it was so well organized.”

The Great Big Non-Event

As Powell neared Thanksgiving weekend and the planned date for the cutover to SAP ERP 6.0, the implementation team was in the project’s eleventh week and a week ahead of schedule. “We decided we didn’t want to work over Thanksgiving weekend, so we upgraded the weekend before,” Oldrati says. Audacious? Maybe, but only a little.

Stepping back in time a few weeks, Oldrati describes the preparation process (Figure 1): “With an upgrade, you want to make sure you’re not freezing your development effort too long. By leaving our old Development, QA, and Production systems alone, we copied our old Development system to the new virtualized Development system, and we then remediated and refreshed our new QA box with our Production data, then did a mock upgrade to it to see what the issues would be,” he explains.

Figure 1

Powell’s upgrade plan

“We did two of them — stood up the Production server, did a mock go-live, then restored to R/3 4.7. We had it all attached, all the hardware and network interfaces worked out and functioning a week before we went live, so we were ready,” Oldrati says. “We had our upgrade book in hand, and the go-live cutover to SAP ERP 6 was a non-event.” 

Of course, with the new 64-bit quad-core production server, end users immediately saw quicker response times, and nightly processing was much faster, giving the Powell IT team more time to manage new updates without having to schedule them for weekends. Plus, the new foundation of SAP ERP 6.0 provided additional benefits.

“With our previous implementation, we had been running radio frequency (RF) through the SAP console, but with SAP ERP 6 you can use the Internet Transaction Server, which talks directly to SAP and doesn’t need to go through a separate server. For us, that was an unexpected benefit — less landscape complexity in supporting our RF environment,” Ayars says.

5 Keys to Success

1. Capture business processes with SAP Solution Manager. By capturing business processes using SAP Solution Manager and the Wholesale Distribution roadmap, Powell could align its organization with the functions needed at the time — and those they would want to enhance in the future.

2. Use SAP Solution Manager Test Workbench for end-user testing. Because Powell coordinated testing around business processes, it was easy for users to test around their areas of expertise. “The monitoring capabilities make it a non-event, too. For example, you can see where an end user has 35 test cases but has only done 10,” Ayars says.

3. Let an SAP upgrade automation service do the heavy lifting. By simulating Powell’s upgrade using the company’s own code, Panaya was able to automatically test thousands of different transactions using custom code that had been originally written years earlier. Panaya was able to point out fixes and the use of new enhancement modules to eliminate breaks.

4. Consider bundling related projects into your upgrade. This advice seems to fly in the face of keeping projects as simple as possible, but sometimes working small projects into a bigger project make good sense. Case in point: Powell’s user security profiles were aging and needed a complete overhaul. By working these profiles into the company’s SAP ERP 6.0 upgrade, Powell was not only better able to sell a technical upgrade to management, but also to ensure that security profiles were completely aligned with the company’s new SAP foundation.

5. Respect the quality of each stage. “Before you move to each stage, make sure you complete the testing,” Ayars recommends. “Don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ve got 80 percent done and I’ll start moving on,’ because you might not catch up to it and miss something in the 20 percent that’s left.” Powell unit tested 2,800 transactions on its development server, finishing each phase completely before moving onto the next, ensuring the ability to go live — a week ahead of plan, no less — with total confidence.

Foundation for the Future 

While the technical upgrade to SAP ERP 6.0 took just 11 weeks, a successful project for Oldrati and Powell Electronics starts well before the first project step. “It’s part of our mantra of being an educated customer,” Oldrati explains. “Take the time to learn up front, know how everything is going to work, and investigate the tools that can help do it faster and remove risk.”

With the technical upgrade in place, the SAP future for Powell is all about delivering on the vision that sold the technical upgrade to Powell’s executive team: the functionality in Warehouse Management and the SAP roadmap. “The user benefit will be to bring new functionality that we couldn’t bring before,” Oldrati says.

“We have 225 employees and SAP is pervasive in our organization. We run our entire business on it, and almost everyone uses SAP every day. It’s integrated with purchasing, MRP, production planning — which wholesale distributors don’t generally do, but we have a significant assemble-to-order process to various military specifications, so we use production planning for that. We’re implementing Warehouse Management functionality, but shipping, billing, quotations — everything is now on SAP ERP 6.0,” Schilling says. “We don’t have customers interacting with SAP directly, but that’s in our 2011 plan.”