Foodstuffs South Island, a major grocery chain in New Zealand, has migrated more than 100 integrations from SAP PI to SAP Cloud Integration. The migration ran alongside an SAP S/4HANA project, which set the pace: a certain number of interfaces had to be migrated in time to keep up with it. You can read more about the wider program in SAP’s news article on Foodstuffs South Island.
The team used both the Figaf DevOps Suite and the Figaf Migration Tool. Below are five insights from the project, from planning the migration to running it in production.
Insight #1: Figaf’s Migration Assessment Report can save you time
To prepare for the migration, the team had spent a few days creating their own assessment-like report to plan the migration.
After that, the team generated an Assessment Report with Figaf. What they got in the report by Figaf was much more useful for planning how to work with the migration. This alone saved some days of the project and made it possible to start the planning phase much faster. Figaf’s Assessment Report also gives more details than the previous reports they had created themselves. This is a free feature that you can use in the Figaf DevOps Suite, Migration Edition.
“The assessment tool, I think was a lesson learned here, if we were starting from scratch again or for the next migration, I would use the assessment tool as it really is a good starting place for migration planning.”
Insight #2: Migration of ICOs
In general, the effort needed for migrating ICOs was fairly small. They also had ICOs with multiple receivers and it worked smoothly without any problems. However, it was difficult to estimate the effort required for each ICO and how much time it took for them. Though, in general, it was relatively easy and the Figaf tool transformed the ICOs without the need for further development or configuration.
There was from time to time a requirement to fix some of the Function Libraries used. In most cases it was fixed fairly quickly, so they could continue with the scenario. In the early phase of the project they found that the import of some specific PI Netweaver libraries that were no longer acceptable so they needed to do some work on resolving it.
They also tried to migrate ICOs using SAP tooling. They used it and it seemed to work but it had limitations, they had iFlows that used Function Libraries where it would not have worked.
Insight #3: Creating test cases for the migration
A key part (predicted to be over two-thirds of your migration effort) of the migration is to test that everything is working. Figaf comes with an industry-leading test tool that makes it easy to perform the testing.
It has been fairly straight forward to see how they had been able to take messages from SAP PI/PO and convert them into iFlows. It has helped to check the migrated integrations and without too much information about the case.
They migrated their ICOs from their SAP PI/PO production environment to SAP Integration Suite on Cloud Foundry and they found it was of huge benefit to be able to also retrieve test cases from the production environment for use in testing their migrated iflows. This allowed the test data to be like for like and thereby ensured that the iflows had been migrated successfully.
Insight #4: DevOps for SAP Cloud Integration
There is more than just migrating single integrations. You need to be able to move it these integrations into production. They also used the DevOps tool as part of the Figaf DevOps Suite, for transporting integrations. This made it a lot easier to manage the integration.
One feature they used during transportation from Dev to test, was the batch feature. They performed a batch update of external parameters, which we added in to support cases where you needed to update a large number of parameters in the iFlows.
“We have got the odd interface that has a lot of endpoints on it based on their conditions and we found that we could export those out onto the spreadsheet, change them all at once and then import them again. This saved a huge amount of time”
Insight #5: Groovy Editor is seen as a game-changer
One interesting insight. We didn’t mention earlier in this use case is their excitement with one of the features in one of our latest updates: The Groovy Editor.
“What a brilliant feature that is, that makes it so much easier to test the functionality of Groovy scripts from end to end. Added development can be completed within the editor, tested and then imported back into the iFlow.
And yeah, going forward that’s probably the feature that’s got me most excited to be honest.”
Support
The team have admitted that they had requested a few support incidents over the period. Moreover, they were impressed that these have all been resolved quickly and new code has been updated within the DevOps tool to be able to support their cases.
Implementation
The team did not implement all the features of the Figaf DevOps Suite. During the interview, we covered the Monitoring and Alerting Tool, which is the next phase of the project. This is a reminder that there are many features within the Figaf DevOps Suite, and you don’t need to implement everything at once.
