ImpactQA announce GenAI NeX-AI solution at Gastech 2024

⇨ Gastech 2024 attracted 45,000 attendees from 156 countries, emphasizing the growing focus on climate technologies, AI, and low-carbon energy solutions in the energy sector.

⇨ Chevron CEO Mike Wirth highlighted the need for innovation and collaboration in the energy transition, stressing that any technology that reduces emissions should be considered part of the solution.

⇨ ImpactQA introduced its generative AI solution NeX-AI at the conference, which it says will significantly enhance testing efficiency for SAP S/4HANA and energy trading platforms, built following its prior experience in enabling companies in the industry, like Indraprastha Gas Limited, to achieve substantial performance improvements.

The Gastech 2024 conference last week saw 45,000 attendees from 156 countries flock to Houston to catch the latest developments in climate technologies and AI, natural gas, LNG, hydrogen, energy manufacturing and low-carbon solutions.

In the event’s keynote, Chevron CEO Mike Wirth touted the importance of creating a sustainable future, and said: “The energy transition requires unprecedented innovation and collaboration […] any viable technology that can move the needle on reduction of emissions should be part of the solution set.”

He also went on to state the importance of “partnerships that reduce the cost and risk of investment, unlock needed capital, improve efficiency, speed up integration”, which, one might say, is where the work of enterprise technology really comes to the fore for the sector.

Of the enterprise technology vendors in attendance, one announcement came from software testing and quality assurance firm ImpactQA, who announced its new generative AI solution, NeX-AI.

The GenAI-powered solution is said to increase the effectiveness and efficiency of SAP S/4HANA implementations and commodity/energy trading and risk management (C/ETRM) platforms including Endur, RightAngle and SAP CTRM. Directly supporting shift-left testing methodologies (moving testing activities earlier in the development process), ImpactQA NeX-AI offers features such as automated generation of testing scenarios, test data, and adaptive test management, reducing test creation and execution time by almost 70 percent.

ImpactQA has stated that the new solution is specifically helpful for companies seeking to address the intricacies of testing SAP S/4HANA and C/ETRM projects. The GenAI offering adds to ImpactQA’s wider suite of testing solutions designed to improve system reliability, enhance quality, and optimize processes.

Jyoti Prasad Bhatt, CEO of ImpactQA, commenting further on the announcement, said: “We were excited to demonstrate how our AI-driven solution can support the SAP CTRM, Endur, and RightAngle implementations and drive operational success.”

The announcement follows a range of customer wins for ImpactQA in the energy sector. One such success was for Indraprastha Gas Limited (IGL), one of India’s largest Natural Gas distribution firms, which operates in cities across India with 652 CNG stations, two million residential connections, and over 8,000 industrial and commercial customers.

With IGL having invested in SAP CRM and other business management software to enhance its customer experience delivery, it sought a performance improvement after experiencing various session errors and constraints.

The systems were reaching session limits, producing 503 server errors and showcasing unusual sessions together, with multiple sessions for the same user.

Hardware bottlenecks were leading to delayed user requests, and billing and some back-office processes needed re-engineering. Lastly, internal constraints prevented IGL from implementing a single tool for performance testing.

Analyzing the system in two stages or “cycles”, ImpactQA firstly carried out performance testing in a QA environment to understand the application behavior, wherein an allocated team of engineers worked on these observations before testing was performed in the production environment. Lastly, the ImpactQA team then developed a framework for IGL that utilized two tools combined to implement performance testing of the systems across both cycles.

In the production environment for instance, fixes like enhancing the RAM and CPU configuration up to 20-50 percent, designing a pipeline to better handle remote function calls (RFC), and assigning a time frame for back-end queries to avoid impacting SAP CRM work were recommended and supported by ImpactQA.

Following the ImpactQA testing solution, the vendor supported IGL in implementing the recommended fixes, enabling the natural gas distributor to experience a 60 percent improvement in system performance for event handling, a 30 percent boost in customer retention from enhanced cross-sell and upsell opportunities and the automation of complex billing processes leading to a 37 percent reduction in revenue leakage.

It’s savings such as these that can really “move the needle” for energy firms’ efforts, meaning more valuable time and resources can be redirected to where they most count. With GenAI-driven technologies now entering ImpactQA’s offering too, SAPInsider will be waiting in the wings to see what can be achieved next for SAP users in the energy sector.