Testing Major Meat Producer’s SAP Makes System 8 Times Faster

How the Need for SAP Load Testing Arose

Our client, a major nation-wide meat producer, was actively using local WMS and TMS. As a result, their 5,000 employees used to waste much time and effort storing and processing a lot of data in different systems.

To increase the effectiveness of the document flow, the client decided to move all the processes to one SAP ERP system. Massive migration was about to happen, since enormous amounts of data from different legacy systems had to be centralized.

The unified database was enormous, so, unsurprisingly, document processing speed was rather low. Thus, the client encountered a performance tuning problem.

Why the Client Trusted SAP Load Testing to Us

The client had extremely high requirements for a performance tuning project contractor. They wanted to entrust the task only to a highly experienced team.

The choice fell on PFLB, as the company has a proven track record of delivering SAP load testing projects for many corporate clients around the world.

Our client is a meat production company co-owned by JPMorgan Chase Bank.

The company possesses eight poultry farms of a complete cycle, 14 modern pig farms, six meat-processing plants, and six combined feed mills. In 2016, net profits of the company amounted to $50 million.

Performance Optimization Results

The Solution

To find ways to optimize performance of the document flow processes, we deployed a unique SAP ERP test environment for load testing. Then, we developed load scripts and scenarios to emulate the life cycle of purchases, sales, logistics, and related financial processes, at the client’s eight production plants. We used LoadRunner as a tool to emulate the workload on the SAP ERP system.

We supplied the load from workstations located at the production plants, where real users would deal with their tasks.

SAP ERP Implemented in 8 Factories:

Purchases

Finances

Sales

Logistics

How We Did It

During the project, we developed scripts that emulate the work of specific tablets. In addition, our engineers were launching the formation of heavy annual reports.

The analysis of the system operation under load was carried out, and we identified bottlenecks. Ultimately, we found a working configuration that met the customer’s performance requirements.

Conclusions

Data migration to SAP was successful. Load capacity of the system was improved in accordance with the client’s business plan. For example, we increased document processing speed by 8 times.
Increased system’s load capacity allowed the business to grow further. By now, the company is already employing 30,000 people.