Panaya SAP Upgrade Automation [EOL] Reviews

- Cloud-based solution - little for us to support and administer. We went from nothing to a fully working solution in a few hours work.
- It tells us exactly what I need to test. More importantly, it tells me what I don't need to test.
- Panaya is useful for more than just upgrades. Any time we do development, we have it analysed by Panaya. This shows us what other transactions are touched by our changes, as it's not always obvious what other transactions are used in the background. This increases the value to us, and makes it a product we use on a regular basis, not just during upgrades.
- End-user documentation. A nice side-effect of users recording their job processes is that Panaya uses that to generate end-user documentation on how that function is performed.

We were relatively early adopters of Panaya and as such, the product was still maturing. However, this quickly turns into faint criticism, as they quickly responded to every design suggestion we made, and the couple of problems we had with their solution were fixed in a matter of days. In subsequent projects, we have encountered zero technical issues.
- One other very minor quibble is that because they are developing the product so rapidly, the extraction and scenario recorders do need to be updated on a regular basis, causing a regular series of transports through the environment. That said, a few transports a month during a project is really the extent of product maintenance required, which compared to the alternatives is trivial.

We are a very small support team with only a few years experience. We needed to implement EHP5, but had no experience with upgrading SAP. We needed help with testing, as we were using the same testing scripts from the original 4.6 implementation (We inherited the system from another department). The options were all way too big for us to support, we needed something we could just use, not something that required a team to run. After trying several products, we encountered Panaya, which was a clear fit from the outset.
The company provides excellent support, with both a dedicated account manager providing a single point of contact for questions and issues, and a very responsive technical support team.

There are a number of things I was completely sold on with the Panaya tool set but ultimately it was a standout product in terms of flexibility and its agile technology. During our planning of our upgrade Panaya was actually recommended to me by another company that I was familiar with. I am now returning the favour to others who do not know what this solution could do for their upgrade or indeed next support pack. To summarise the quick wins I felt Panaya gave our company & my SAP team:- Cloud Based solution that was so quick and easy to deploy (I am talking minutes not hours or days)
- We were a small SAP team but Panaya is so simple to use – no real techies required
- Cost effective - we saved ABAP resource & lots of time by using Panaya

I am being brutally honest here when I say this but from a management/strategic point of view there are No nagatives. The only one area maybe I can say could be improved would be that maybe Panaya had an idetnity crisis when they launched the product & the test automation function could be percieved as a ‘halfway house’ to test automation – The tool itself is great for upgrades / support packs & analsysing the results but not so good on the automated testing tool (it certianly would not replace some of the market leaders out there) but I believe Panaya are already onto these elements to improve it in later releases. That’s my view anyway.