Med-device maker automates test-bed provisioning while preserving data structure, context

“Our SAP system is hardly a static environment,” says Brion Booth, senior business systems analyst with Varian Medical Systems. Booth manages SAP application development & support for Varian's Salt Lake City-based x-ray tube and digital-imaging division. He says it's not unusual to have several dozen small to large business-driven projects that require configuration changes or new program development within the ERP environment at any point in time.

Like any high-tech products company, Palo Alto, Calif.-based Varian serves a market characterized by high-paced innovation and a fluid regulatory environment. Given demands for constant innovation, the ERP system must respond to frequent demands for functionality to support a new manufacturing process, or for integrating a recent business acquisition. When an application environment constantly changes, there is a corresponding need for real-time data transfers to test platforms where new functionality can be vetted.

Each change has a life cycle, and a critical part of that life cycle is the testing process—i.e., simulating changes to eliminate defects before they enter production.

Testing against a live production system isn't feasible, but the next best thing is to off-load a representative sample of that data into a well-provisioned test client. With Varian's Enterprise Application Systems group typically maintaining between 25 and 30 test clients globally at any one time, it faces a significant data-management challenge. With traditional manual methods, it could take a day or more to load enough transactional and master data to populate a test bed for just a single client.

The group ultimately chose InfoShuttle from Gamma Enterprise Technologies, an SAP-certified offering that automates provisioning of data from production into off-line environments.

The challenge, according to Gamma CEO Allan Peters, is that data in most enterprise systems is not fully relational. “It's one thing to migrate the data; it's another challenge altogether to migrate the relationships and keep the data in context,” says Peters.

Lacking that information, it requires a lot of manual effort to ensure data for an SAP module is migrated intact. Gamma's solution not only reads the clustered structure of SAP data in the source system, but also wraps migrated data with metadata that acts as a road map to the relationships of the various items, once deployed in the target system.

Using InfoShuttle, Varian now automatically populates clients, driven by the underlying repository that generates the schema that guides the process.