Delivering unprecedented speed and efficiency in SAP custom code upgrades

MigrationWare, a South African company with 13 years of international legacy systems modernisation and migration experience, has selected smartShift Technologies as its partner to deliver unique Advanced Business Application Programming (ABAP) analysis and remediation technology to the South African market.

With more than 20 years of experience providing unique, rule-based techniques and services for SAP ABAP clients around the world, smartShift Technologies brings complementary capabilities to the partnership that will benefit current and future customers. smartShift Technologies' industry leading tools use unique and proprietary techniques to identify and automatically correct potential coding errors, security vulnerabilities and performance issues. The company's systems simultaneously resolve coding challenges while also updating the ABAP programming language to the latest SAP and Unicode standards.

For example, a US-based Fortune 500 SAP customer - the world's leading designer, marketer and distributor of athletic footwear, apparel and accessories - turned to smartShift Technologies for assistance in upgrading and ensuring Unicode compliance of SAP custom code from SAP R/3 4.6c to ECC 6.0.

This was the customer's biggest upgrade in nearly a decade, and it posed several challenges. In addition to modernising customised application code while preserving functionality, smartShift had to do so in a way that enabled comprehensive system testing without disrupting or delaying the progress of several other concurrent development projects. While manual conversion of more than 6 000 custom objects normally requires the involvement of dozens of resources over a period of months, smartShift's solution guaranteed completion in a matter of weeks, from planning to completion.

"smartShift's technology takes the analysis deep into the source code, providing a clear picture of the issues themselves, not just the number of the affected objects," said Stefan Hetges, CEO of smartshift Technologies. "A detailed insight at this level allows vastly more efficient, rapid, comprehensive and consistent code remediation."

smartShift Technologies' smartAnalzye tool for SAP also issues notifications and recommendations for outdated and obsolete coding constructs. These coding construct issues can be addressed proactively through transformation rules, effectively future-proofing the code, while simultaneously applying corporate coding and commenting standards. smartShift not only preserves, but also enhances the value of custom code while reducing the time, resources and expense required to execute the overall project.

Ultimately, smartShift executed the complete code conversion - free of syntax and Unicode errors - within three days. smartShift technology handled the detection and correction of all warnings sent from SAP's code inspector, and provided previews of before and after transformations and issued detailed reports that enabled the team to iteratively refine the transformation process to dramatically reduce the scope of manual effort.

"In an environment of scarce resources, the automation of otherwise lengthy manual practices has to be the way to go," says MigrationWare Sales and Marketing Director Jo~ao de Oliveira. "And since we have been applying automation to legacy migrations for years, we are delighted to have found such a powerful solution for the South African SAP market."