SNP - Test Data Organizer - Introduction

[ssuratharajan]

Hello Data Migration Community,

I wish to talk about a third party tool from SNP that I had the chance to explore the tool and innovate and rethink client copies from a different perspective. At the start of this 3 part series, We should know that, there is Still a competitive battle on, who would be the first to attain the SAP certified status to perform the data migration activities with related to SDT (Selective Data Transformations). On the other hand the attention towards Brownfield implementations have slowed down in the past, We could actually see some partners ready with their SDT tools to perform the data transition using a Shell S/4 HANA systems and innovate after data migrations.

I wish to talk about such tool in this Blog, SNP has a global footprint in its solution for Data Migration  and one such tool that we will talk extensively here is the Test Data Organizer from SNP. Initially this tool was built to address the time constraint for constant system refreshes that we have to perform for the Migration team to cleanse and transfer the data. This could be compared to the SAP very own TDMS (Test Data Migration). Although this is not a blog that compares the functionalities of the tool - But to lay it upfront for the knowledge of hugry community. TDO addresses 2 main issues with respect to test data migration, which is Data Quality and Data Privacy.

 

Data Quality

Keeping specific data in SAP system as a center point , for example Vendor, Customer, Business Partner, Employees, SNP delivers a content that intelligently maps the underlying tables that are dependant on former data. You might not be able to achieve this specific migrations through SAP client copies and System refresh. Havent you come across this question to your Basis folks, where you would just ask them to not spend more time doing a system refresh, But just copy the Vendor data from the Production system to your Quality landscape. This is exactly what the tool is capable of and more.

Another scenario that we can think of is, you want to copy the Master and transaction data alone but not the customizing settings. Even SAP in their own statement does not want to do this as it could lead to a lot of inconsistencies in the test environment. The fact that SNP can achieve this with lesser inconsistencies is mainly because of its customizations that we will talk in the later parts

 

Data Privacy

When you deal with Production data , Data Privacy is a big concern and SNP addresses this with its Data Scrambling and data masking functionalities. In Addition to GDPR compliance, business users expect the data to be protected when such data migrations happen. When we look at the GDPR specifics, there is a lot of room for improvement. Currently SNP offers Data Scrambling for only a few single objects such as Customers, Vendors, Employee and Business Partner.

 

Verdict

Now combine Data refresh and Data Scrambling together and you will have a comprehensive tool that addresses your needs for test data availability and less time spent on post activities. The tool is almost S/4 HANA ready with test data refresh and scrambling because there are certain limitations when it comes to address issues like, Business partner, Model company data, data from third party etc., With that said, Let us dive deeper into some technical aspects that makes Test data organizer stand out.

Finally If you have had any experiences with SNP Tools, Feel free to share your experiences in the comments.