In this interview I spoke with Rafi Kretchmer, VM marketing at Panaya a company focused on helping enterprise clients using Oracle and SAP ERP run a more agile operation.

Panaya helps organizations test and manage ERP changes that drive core business processes, faster and better at a fraction of the cost. They focus on ERP organizations based on the Oracle EBS and SAP software S/4HANA.  Panaya is a subsidiary of Infosys.

Using a cloud-based solution customers get visibility and actionable insights to mitigate ERP change risks, gain automated code fixes, accelerated tests and reporting. Having worked on several enterpise projects and organizations I know first-hand how time consuming, and error-prone changes can be to any part of the system.  And mistakes or ommissions can be very costly when you have billion dollar organizations so it makes good sense to automate the process as much as possible.  This becomes even more of a challenge with organizations spread across continents, time zone and languages.

This in my book is the closest definition of an agile enterprise in the monolith software package universe.  The ultimate being a microservices (MSA) architecture organization, which many enterprises are starting the evolution to.  That said, the vast majorist of current IT is run on the monolith software and it makes greate sense to make these existing system more agile and nimble.

Retailers are no exception to this challenge, as software is the backbone of all large retailers and can make or break them depending on how it runs.

One of the major activities of large ERP SCM (Supply-Chain Management) software is the upgrade process. As the vendors improve and enhance their applications ever year custoemrs need to keep up with these changes and if they don't they can lose ground in functionality, performance, security and other aspects of their business impacting their bottom ine and customer satisfaction amonth other benefits.  SAP is aiming to make this process more efficient by their Enhancement Packages according to the linked document.  

The upgrade projects often involve large teams with multi-month durations and can be very disruptive to business so I was happy to see the CloudQuality products specifically addresses the upgrade challenge.

And here's a link to a recent white paper on a SCM case study.