Welcome to Part 2 in our blog series about using OnScreen with SAP Activate methodology. If you are thinking about implementing S/4HANA or if you are in the middle of an implementation, this blog series is for you. In this edition, we will be discussing uses for OnScreen during the Realize Phase. If you would like to read our first blog in this series which focuses on the Explore Phase, you can find it here.
What is the Realize Phase of SAP Activate? What happens in the Realize Phase?
The Realize Phase of SAP Activate is where the rubber hits the road. All of the whiteboard drawings, demos and Visio diagrams of the previous phases get translated into an actual, working system solution. The SAP Roadmap Viewer says this about the Realize Phase, “During Realize phase, the project team uses a series of iterations to incrementally configure, test, confirm, and document the entire end-to-end solution and to create legacy data conversion programs.”
Practically all development, configuration, documentation, testing, and data conversion preparation happens during Realize. Depending on whether your project sticks very close to SAP Best Practice or has a lot of customization, the Realize Phase can be short or can be quite long. Regardless, it is where everything finally comes together.
Although there are many important activities occurring during Realize, in this article we will be focusing on Testing. Whether it’s Scenario Testing, Integration Testing, or User Acceptance Testing, this will be one of the major deliverables of the Realize Phase. Typically at this point in the project, although customers may be investigating or even setting up automated tests, the solution is still too fluid to use automated testing. That means you guessed it, good old manual testing.
OnScreen Enhances and Streamlines the Manual Testing Effort
Most SAP Customers and Partners have been using the same procedures and processes for testing since the 1990s. Typically the test scenario is defined in a Word doc or Excel spreadsheet. Testers will execute the process in SAP and manually type in results into the Test document.
This method of testing is time consuming and confusing for the tester, especially during User Acceptance Testing, where members of the user community, not the project team, are executing tests. OnScreen can be used during this stage to speed up the testing process and lessen the burden on the user of recording test results.
OnScreen guides are the perfect addition to a manual testing process. Rather than Excel or Word docs that can be difficult to locate and control versions, OnScreen guides are available directly in the SAP application and always up to date with the current version. The tester simply executes the OnScreen guide as usual. If they are able to complete the process, the test passes. If not, the test fails. It’s as simple as that.
As for recording test results, OnScreen automatically records the user ID of the tester, the application server, the start date and time, the finish date and time, and steps successfully executed versus steps skipped or not successfully executed. These metrics are available to anyone with the correct OnScreen role like your project manager or testing coordinator.
Additionally, the OnScreen guides used for testing will be the exact same guides used for training and production support. There is no need to create multiple documents with the same information. You can even start with existing guides for SAP Standard Best Practices and modify them rather than creating from scratch!
Contact OnScreen today to find out how you can get the most out of SAP Activate with Onscreen.
OnScreen is the agile digital adoption platform for SAP and web-based enterprise applications that boosts process efficiency and employee productivity by empowering any user to become a super user. Book a Demo to learn the other ways DAPs can save your enterprise money through successful digital adoption.
