EPI-USE Labs used the Data Sync Manager product suite to create new copies from production to build QAS and DEV environments. This enabled the team to align all systems in the SAP estate from both a configuration and data perspective, and provide a stable platform to support testing requirements.

Many of the issues that Dunelm experienced in Production were because they couldn't do any performance testing in their old landscape. The nature of the retail sector, with thousands of orders created every day, made it necessary for them to implement a pre-production environment to avoid surprises in the production environment.

EPI-USE Labs supported Dunelm to implement development and governance policies that would help the business be more agile and use the new environment to its full potential, while creating the appropriate developer roles and authorisations for security and risk management.

With GDPR compliance and security risks high in Dunelm’s strategy, Data Secure was used to scramble Customer, Vendor and Address data in all the non-production systems built using Data Sync Manager.

The project enabled Dunelm to migrate their non-production SAP systems to the cloud. This has been a long-term strategy, and they can now leverage key benefits of the cloud like infrastructure-as-a-service and cost savings. It was a great benefit for Dunelm that Data Sync Manager could be used to refresh systems on-premise and in the cloud.

One of the biggest challenges was that Dunelm couldn’t have a landscape freeze for an extended period, as projects needed to continue. Specifically, a project where they were closing a warehouse and consolidating it into another warehouse needed to be completed within a specific time frame. EPI-USE Labs was able to support Dunelm by working this requirement into the project timelines. The completed project was delivered within 12 weeks and supported ongoing developments in the scope.

To assist with the DevOps process, Dunelm implemented Transport Expresso from Basis Technologies to automate and align the SAP Transport Management process. EPI-USE Labs helped the business to formulate a transport release strategy, thus eliminating the future issues with transports and would help Dunelm maintain the landscape. They also needed to formalise a data refresh strategy and schedule, and EPI-USE Labs helped to ensure the landscape would stay updated in the future. 

The integrated nature of the ERP landscape with non-SAP systems was also important for the overall success of aligning the SAP environment. Due to the nature of the business processes and the inter-dependencies between the non-SAP systems, data consistency across the entire enterprise was key for testing core inbound and outbound processes. Also, the process integration landscape which acts a gateway between the non-SAP and SAP systems increased complexity as the SAP environments were now hosted in the AWS cloud. Through strong project collaboration with the infrastructure and technical teams, the non-SAP systems were re-integrated to enable both comprehensive system integrated and performance testing.