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Flowers Foods
How Flowers Foods, Inc. maintained data integrity and business continuity during SAP S/4HANA migration
coverage of production data during preproduction test cycles
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reduction in time spent validating data during migration as test coverage increased to the entire data set
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increase in automated test coverage of critical business data
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reduction in test cycle duration
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Company overview
Flowers Foods, headquartered in Thomasville, Ga., is a producer and marketer of packed bakery food, operating 47 bakeries producing bread, buns, rolls, snack cakes, pastries, and tortillas. Flowers Foods’ products, which include popular brands like Nature’s Own and Dave’s Killer Bread, are sold through a direct store delivery network that serves all corners of the United States and delivers nationwide to retailer’s warehouses. After acquisitions of several bakeries and other food companies over the years, the company is now the second-largest baking company in the United States.
As the business grew, ensuring stable logistics and communications became increasingly important to keep Flowers’ bakeries well-stocked and their customers well-fed on a consistent basis. To ensure the business could scale to meet increasing demands, Flowers’ technology leadership began putting the pieces in place to modernize their supply chain systems in processes, starting with a migration from a 20-year-old SAP ECC environment to S/4HANA. To ensure ongoing functionality of key business processes throughout the migration, the QA team knew they would need a more structured, integrated approach to software testing.
- Industry: Food and Beverage
- Organization size: 9,000
- Location: United States
- Products:
A unified approach to quality engineering
Previously, the Flowers QA team had mainly tested on an ad hoc basis, with no toolset equipped to support integrated end-to-end testing across a complex, increasingly digitized supply chain. With a long-term objective from the leadership team to build a scalable and consistent testing suite across their large SAP landscape, they invested in Tricentis Tosca and Tricentis LiveCompare to develop an intelligent, automated approach.
The ease-of-use of Tricentis Tosca’s codeless, model-based test automation would enable the team to scale at the pace the business demanded. According to Sundar Iyer, Sr. Director QA and Release, “Tosca, by the way it was architected, accelerated our build out of end-to-end data reconciliation and functional tests.”
The Flowers team maintains an expansive SAP environment spanning Dev, QA, N+1 and production. LiveCompare helps them perform environment-to-environment comparisons to maintain interim state design while ECC is migrated to S/4 HANA. They also use LiveCompare to perform impact analysis, to understand how each incremental change could pose risks to business processes, and to ensure those areas have adequate test coverage. Through the integration with Tosca, LiveCompare highlights which test cases to run and where there are gaps in their Tosca test library.
The team also uses Tosca to create test data through native SAP transactions to inform downstream testing. This allows them to focus on higher value projects and not waste valuable time manually creating test data. They also utilize Tosca to scale testing for their hosted SaaS and PaaS applications, such as Concur or Ariba, as well as for post-Windows patch testing.
Flowers uses LiveCompare’s Change Impact Analysis (CIA) to identify the SAP objects in their environment that are put at risk from a ChaRM change request or custom code change, and then compare that code between SAP versions to identify discrepancies. To provide insights to stakeholders on any configuration-related changes, the team built LiveCompare reports that identify changes affecting configuration and master data through LiveCompare’s Continuous Configuration Impact Analysis. This ensures that any configurations affected by the migration are identified and resolved before they reach production environments.