Maria Homann
SAP is for many enterprises the foundation upon which their most critical business processes are built. Now, more than ever, these enterprises need the confidence that their processes run as intended.
There’s little room for risk in today’s market, and intuitive SAP test automation is the only way to ensure that you as an enterprise stay competitive and don’t suffer unnecessary financial loss.
In this blog post, we'll take a closer look at SAP, and what can and should be automated, giving you the fastest route to success with testing in SAP with automation.
What is SAP?
SAP as a company is the fourth largest software company in the world measured by turnover, after Microsoft, IBM and Oracle. SAP’s headquarter is in Germany, and the name SAP is an abbreviation of the three German words Systeme, Anwendungen and Produkte, which mean System, Application and Product.
SAP provides the largest global enterprises with IT systems for managing all their processes – simply put. It’s a bit like the veins that run through your body – they’re everywhere, and they’re vital to most of the processes that go on within your system.
In reality, SAP is many different things to many different enterprises, and in addition to the numerous sub-products within SAP, there are also countless use cases.
Overall, SAP is used for ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and the purpose of it is to streamline and systemize businesses’ internal processes. These processes can be within any area of the business – inventory management, finance, HR, procurement. You name it, SAP does it.
In fact, if you’ve worked with any of the above areas in an enterprise, odds are that you’ve worked with SAP.
SAP is used by the largest enterprises in the world for two main reasons: It’s highly customizable and scalable. SAP’s large product portfolio makes it possible for enterprises to find a solution that accurately matches their unique needs and to scale that solution indefinitely.
Related reading: What Businesses Forget When Testing Enterprise Applications
What types of SAP automation are there?
There are many opportunities for automating SAP. These fall under two categories:
- Test automation
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
While RPA is used to automate processes that are not currently supported within SAP, test automation is used to check that SAP integrations or processes function as intended.
For RPA, it's important to distinguish between the automated processes that SAP facilitates and the automated processes that you need an RPA tool for. SAP in itself allows you to automate an array of processes – that’s actually a core part of the product. When we talk about needing an RPA tool, it’s about filling gaps in business support and processes that SAP doesn’t facilitate.
Given the importance of the processes that run within SAP, testing that these work as intended (and thereby mitigating risk to business continuity) is of the utmost importance.
Test automation is particularly important when transitioning to SAP S/4 HANA, which you can learn more about here: SAP S/4HANA: Are you ready for the move?
Learn more about SAP automation
Learn more about SAP test automation and RPA in our comprehensive guide, where we cover:
- What is SAP automation?
- How to get started with SAP test automation
- How to get started with SAP RPA
- How to find the right SAP automation tool
Download the guide here:
