Evaluating SAP systems

Originally founded as a purchasing organization for the Swiss automotive industry, ESA is now one of the most important associations in Switzerland and serves the car and motor vehicle trade. ESA is a full-service provider, supplying everything its partners (garage and body shop owners) need in their everyday work. These partners benefit from low prices, thanks to central purchasing, innovative assortments, and ecological logistics.

As the leading purchasing organization in the Swiss auto and motor vehicle business, ESA supplies a full range of products and services for auto shops. The association manages all business processes across a multi-level SAP system landscape, to which a web shop is also connected as a central ordering tool. At irregular intervals, users of the SAP systems experienced performance losses or extended response times, without a direct cause being apparent.

“We had our suspicions,” reports Heinz Rolli, Head of IT Business Development at ESA. “One of the mainstays of our business is the tire retail trade. Twice a year, when people are getting ready to change their tires, we experience heightened demand. And we also offer regular discounts. We wanted to find out whether these load peaks might be responsible for the latencies.” ESA learned about Fujitsu’s SAP SystemInspection Service from an external contact. “After Fujitsu introduced us to the service, we immediately knew that it was the perfect answer to our problem,” Rolli adds.

Fujitsu developed the SAP SystemInspection Service in close collaboration with the University of Magdeburg. It can measure, record, and evaluate the status, capacity utilization, response times, and many other parameters of SAP systems in real time and during live operation. The service is easy to implement, and Heinz Rolli needed to invest very little of his time. It then ran autonomously for the agreed period of approximately four months.

Rolli was eager to see how the evaluation would turn out. “The service from Fujitsu delivered highly satisfactory and at the same time surprising results,” he remarks. Although the suspected load peaks were apparent, they did not result in performance fluctuations. To the contrary. “Based on real measurement data, the service showed us that our system’s dimensioning was ideal. The response times are even above average,” rejoices the SAP administrator. “We were able to see that our latencies were caused by individual users.”

To discover whether the load peaks did indeed have something to do with the weather, Fujitsu correlated the measurements with external temperature data and precipitation figures. “We clearly saw a definite increase in demand on cold and wet autumn days,” says Dr. Hendrik Müller, Lead SAP Solution Architect at Fujitsu.

One benefit of the optimally dimensioned SAP systems is their efficient use of resources. “If a system like ours is perfectly adapted to actual use, we only need to provide the least amount of infrastructure needed for this purpose,” Rolli explains. “This saves energy and reduces investment. ” The association can now rest assured that its systems run efficiently. “To make sure it remains this way, we will now use the SystemInspection Service regularly before and after each SAP update,” Rolli adds.