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Using 360Suite
Every Day Keeps The Doctor Away
SAP BusinessObjects Continuous
Testing At Spire Healthcare

spire-healthcare

medical-icon 

Healthcare

Products Used:

360Bind

360Eyes

Security and business continuity are paramount when it comes to the healthcare industry because of the amount of confidential information that they handle. This is why Spire Healthcare needs to make sure that everything is working correctly across its SAP BusinessObjects environment. Harry Horwood, BI Technical Analyst at Spire Healthcare, explains that to avoid any of these problems, his team carries out a lot of testing to make sure everything runs as it should be. With nearly 200 live reports and 550 live users ranging from central functions all the way out to hospitals, it’s very important that reports are accessible for all users at any time with the highest confidence due to the high-level of sensitive data in its system. In this article, Harry will provide insights into how they implemented 360Suite to implement a continuous integration (CI) process and continuous testing

 

Testing Testing 1-2-3

Spire Healthcare’s SAP BusinessObjects deployment holds lots of sensitive information such as financial information, medical consultants, and GP Practices information. To make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible they carry out a lot of continuous testing in which Harry Horwood is involved in. Spire Healthcare invested in 360Bind to overcome this challenge. Our solution allowed Harry to set-up automatic regression testing by pre-populating and selecting reports, setting them up with five different test users, and pre-populating the prompts for these reports. Let’s say for example they chose an admission date of January for one hospital in a particular area; they can set up these tests to run every week in their production system so they can check that:

  1. The testing has run successfully to show them the reports are still running correctly without someone having to manually go and do each one. It would confirm that the data, security measures, SAP BusinessObjects server, database, BW Queries, and universes are all still working, and performance is good.
  2. The reports that were run include actual data and the data included is at match level to the previous snapshot, as well as checking the data, security, and prompts are running correctly. 

Harry also carries out weekly checks in their production system to verify that all users are able to access the reports and that the information in those reports is correct, such as the data, security, prompts, and authentication. Having to manually go through and run 200 reports would take a very long time. 

Spire Healthcare is using 360Bind for Exception Testing. Harry wouldn’t want his CFO to flag a report to him when his role is to test everything is working. Our solution allows them to pick up any problems before users find out, carry out spot checks, and most importantly cut down the time to resolve issues as they are identified early on. For example, they schedule to run testing on a Sunday, and by Monday morning it’s all done. Spire Healthcare has 360Bind set up in its test environments to also be able to verify nothing would be broken if they carried out an upgrade. 

Preparing For All Scenarios With Proactive Testing 

Whenever the organization needs to make developments or changes to objects in SAP BW, Harry needs to check if these changes will impact their SAP BusinessObjects deployment. His team receives a lot of requests on a monthly basis from employees all over the business, predominantly hospitals or those higher up in the central team. Most often, they have a new reporting requirement but they don’t want to make the change without checking what it will affect. Cue 360Eyes. For example, the company has Material as an object so Harry will see that if they make a change to this object, how many reports will be affected because of this change. This proactive testing allows Spire Healthcare to carry out more spot checks easily to avoid any redundant errors. 

360Eyes allows them to mitigate and minimize any downtime for people to be able to update the report. For example, a user wants to modify an object, our solution carries out an impact analysis to identify all the reports that will be affected in order to determine how many BI analysts are needed to update the reports and how long it will take (half a day, 1 day or even a whole week) to update them. What’s great is that thanks to 360Eyes, Harry and his team are able to notify their users to say they’ll be making this change rather than regularly getting users asking why a specific report has been changed and were not notified. It allows Spire Healthcare to practice continuous delivery (CD) in order to maintain consistency across its whole environment. 

Conclusion

Thanks to 360Suite solutions Spire Healthcare is able to correctly practice the CI process because of the ability to automatically run regression testing and carry out impact analysis on its SAP BusinessObjects environment. This process reduces any unnecessary errors and assures quality data for all users. 

Are you looking for the same sweet success for your SAP BusinessObjects deployment? Get in contact and one of our experts will get you on the right track. 

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