3 years ago I saw the challenges of migrating Seeburger message mappings on SAP PI to use B2B Add-on. It was a different structure that people needed to use and it would cause a lot of problems to get it working.
I got an idea for a project to make the process automated. I found a developer that could create a Proof of Concept for it and it did work. We could take a Seeburger Message Mapping on our SAP PO system and update the mapping to use B2B Add-on. It was not a really pretty operation in the beginning and it did strike as a PoC. SMT was working and customers could try it. We have been able to convince some customers to use it, and they have converted 300+ mappings with the tool. They had just started, so they had 1000 more planned.
You can see a video of the tool here to see what it can do.
Watch on YouTube Seeburger Migration Tool 2019
What is new
Now it was time for a version 2.0. We had learned quite a lot about how the tool worked and what customers problems were with it. We have made improvements to the following areas
- Licensing. Before, users needed us to sign a license request before they could use the tool. It was not a really easy process that caused a lot of manual work on our and the customer’s side. So now we just give users a license they can use when they start the application. Then it will count each license. Customers can then see the licenses they have used in a document
- Test driven approach: The original application was developed as a PoC that was then extended with bug fixes. It meant that we did not have a good way of testing how a change would impact, so it was a lot of manual testing to try to figure out how it can be improved. We had taken some examples that we got bug reports from and created test cases based on it. After it, we could rewrite our code to be simpler and every time validate that we did not cause more problems. So we could rewrite the code so it was easier to add rules and functions.
- VDA: 28 days ago one of our customers was trying to convert a VDA mapping. It failed because our algorithms did not know how to convert the mappings. It is now possible to convert VDA.
- UI: We had just created a simple application that could help convert mappings. It was not optimal and difficult to use. We now went for a UI5 approach just like with our Figaf IRT tool. It is now possible to search for mappings and schemas, so the conversion process should be a lot faster.
I want to try
If you have Seeburger Mappings and want to convert them fast then try the Seeburger Migration Tool. See our prices for the conversions.
