Who we are

We are SAP’s Center of Expertise (COE) for Analytics, Planning, and Consolidation in the globally operating Adoption Service Center. Our goal is to drive adoption and consumption of SAP Business Technology Platform technologies and lay the foundation for the Intelligent Enterprise. We are a trusted partner for customers with MaxAttention or Premium Engagement (PE). Also, we engage in the area of Professional Services, Preferred Success and other partnerships.

Introduction

After verifying that the performance of the important business process steps in SAC meets the expectation, it is also important to test how the response time will behave when multiple users are working concurrently in the system, especially for planning processes where the user activity is increasing shortly before the deadline.

In the on-premise world we delivered a lot of very successful multi-user tests (e.g. for SAP Business Planning and Consolidation), giving our large customers the confidence that the system will run fast and stable in the peak phases after go-live (customers also call it load test, volume test, stress test, performance test). Our service offering covering this topic is called Volume Test Optimization (VTO).

VTO for SAC

We often get the question if such a volume test is also possible and useful for a SaaS solution like SAC… it is! But isn’t a public cloud solution scalable per default? Not necessarily. Depending on the complexity of a planning scenario, the SAC system can allocation a lot of memory due to the creation of very large versions or can use a lot of CPU threads due to very complex custom-built calculations and functions.

Complex Model

Complex Advanced Formula

Most of our PE customers run their SAC planning processes (and some also their reporting) on a private tenant, providing dedicated resources for a single customer instead of sharing the HANA DB with others. These customers have the possibility to run a volume test supported by an automated test tool like MicroFocus LoadRunner or Tricentis Neoload.

(If SAC is running on a public tenant (shared), automated load testing is prohibited; in that case we can support with different sizing techniques, e.g. running manual performance tests with one or few concurrent users.)

Data Action Runtimes

CPU and Memory

CPU per User

What about processes that involve a remote system (e.g. live reporting on BW/4HANA, S/4HANA or HANA, live planning with BPC)? No problem either. We can include these systems in our monitoring and RCA activities, since we have experts from all different areas available.

Customer-tailored Approach

Some customers might have own experts in-house or partners who organize the volume test project and create the necessary test scripts, and or team is needed mainly for monitoring the resource consumption in HANA (not accessible for customers) and the SAC performance. But we can also deliver the complete volume tests end-to end. In the VTO service we can support our customers with a tailored approach that fits exactly to their needs. A typical VTO service is delivered in one week, but it can be shortened or extended as required.

Deliverables

• Test script creation or review (optional)
• Test plan review (optional)
• SAC HANA monitoring (CPU/memory/threads/….)
• Monitoring of the load on the remote systems (optional)
• Analysis of SAC performance statistics
• Error Analysis

Each customer will receive a report with the detailed observations, analysis and recommendations, according to our well established VTO methodology. All findings will be discussed together with the customer in a wrap-up meeting.

Conclusion

Multi-User tests are an essential step in an implementation project, especially for system usage that is not distributed equally over the year but has certain phases of high concurrency. Testing these situations before go-live is also possible for an SaaS solution like SAC.

So when your  implementation phase in SAC is finished, the performance test for a single user shows acceptable response times, the go-live date is not far away and many users are expected to the process concurrently, don’t hesitate to reach out to your Technical Quality Manager (TQM), your SAP Account, your Customer Success Partner (CSP), or our central entry channel, the Virtual Project Room (VPR).