In 2020, Prime Control was hired by Alpargatas, a large Brazilian footwear wholesaler owner of such brands as Havaianas, Osklen and Dupé. There was a concern about SAP’s ideal capacity to process e-commerce originated sales orders. An important date on the trade calendar was around the corner: Black Friday.
The managers needed to be sure that the system was stable and robust enough to support the expected high volume of access and sales. It should be noted that, due to the measures for responding to the new coronavirus pandemic, e-commerce sales significantly increased in 2020. Digital channels became fundamental to ensure sales and revenues.
Alpargatas IT professionals had been continuously improving their e-commerce infrastructure, but they were not sure whether their actions were enough. To solve the problem, Prime Control team set out a project to plan the capacity limits for different scenarios.
Starting in June, the project was enhanced with different performance test techniques. The main tested systems were SAP PI (Process Integration) responsible for integrating with e-commerce to receive orders, and SAP ERP ECC, responsible for issuing and billing sales orders (in the SD – Sales and Distribution module).
The planning of load tests was based on 4 cycles, as follows:
We highlight below the main points during the project execution:
- It was possible to observe the degradation of the PI performance as the number of connections increased. With 10 connections, PI responded in 2 seconds; but with 200 connections the PI began to respond in 43 seconds.
- The 4th cycle did not meet the acceptance criteria that it was to process orders and billing tasks below 3 hours. The other cycles made it.
- In addition to the 4 cycles, a stress test with 400 simultaneous accesses was also carried out to test the SAP PI connections limit. It wasn’t supported, and it was established that the PI limit was 200 simultaneous connections.
- Even with the variation in the SAP PI response time, it was possible to create all sales orders necessary to measure the job processing time.
- All the CPU, Network and SAN registered peaks were generated by the Incremental backup Job. During all tests, CPU consumption on SAP PI was high.
Prime Control team submitted to Alpargatas a conclusive test report. Below we have samples of the measurement graphs included in the final report:
Customer satisfaction and the fact that the system had the expected performance on Black Friday 2020 indicate that this is a successful case.