Digital Transformation Challenge for a Global Battery Manufacturer
The Company is a leading global enterprise supplying electric vehicle batteries to major automotive manufacturers worldwide, including Tesla, Volkswagen, GM, and Hyundai. The company has grown into a large-scale manufacturing enterprise with tens of thousands of employees working at production facilities around the world and annual revenue in the tens of billions.
The company decided to migrate from SAP ECC to the next-generation S/4 HANA solution to strengthen global competitiveness and secure business agility. This large-scale project, spanning approximately 3 years, involved the challenging task of simultaneously transitioning systems across multiple international subsidiaries.
Project Challenges
Difficulties in Validating Massive Data Volumes
A Company faced unique challenges during the migration process:
Managing and migrating data for hundreds of thousands of battery components and raw materials
Need to transfer millions of production and quality control records
Requirements for perfect traceability - even small errors in battery quality could lead to major incidents
Traditional manual testing methods made it impossible to effectively validate this volume of data. Checking all data points would require thousands of hours of manpower and effort.
Challenges in Integration Tests
Another significant challenge was the various external systems connected to the SAP system:
Integration with Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES)
Connections to Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions
Interfaces with Quality Management and other systems
This made it extremely difficult to generate baseline test data for SAP testing. Work orders (W/O), purchase orders (P/O), sales orders (S/O), and accounting documents were often generated through connections with external systems.
Unique Challenges in the Battery Industry
Unlike general manufacturing, the battery industry has the following special requirements:
Extreme Quality Control: Even a single defect can lead to serious safety issues such as vehicle fires
Perfect Traceability: All production processes and quality test results for every battery cell must be tracked for over 10 years
Complex Chemical Properties: Management of all manufacturing environmental data including temperature and humidity
Global Regulatory Compliance: Reflecting different safety certifications and regulatory requirements by country
Innovative Test Automation Solution with PerfecTwin
A Company introduced PerfecTwin, a test automation solution specialized for SAP environments, to address these challenges.
Implementation of Mass Data-Based Automated Testing
Using PerfecTwin, A Company was able to utilize vast amounts of data from actual operational environments for testing:
MES production results equivalent to several months of daily production data amounting to millions of records
Over a million work order records covering all production processes and product families
Large volumes of inventory data encompassing diverse product lines
Testing with this real data enabled comprehensive validation at a level impossible with manual work.
External System Integration Testing
Another strength of PerfecTwin was its ability to simulate external system interfaces for integration testing:
Support for testing 10+ connected systems including production, logistics, SCM, procurement, finance, and HR
Simulation of interface data flowing from external systems to SAP
Verification of data accuracy flowing from SAP to external systems
This approach enabled comprehensive business process validation while reducing test environment setup costs.
Remarkable Results: Discovering Hidden Errors and Reducing Project Risks
The introduction of test automation was a decisive success factor in A Company's SAP migration project.
"Through PerfecTwin, we discovered various errors that would have been impossible to find through manual testing among hundreds of thousands of battery cell data points," the project QA manager evaluated.
Particularly notable was the discovery of subtle data conversion errors that occurred only under specific conditions.
Major Types of Errors Discovered
The test automation through PerfecTwin identified the following types of errors in advance:
1. Data Migration Errors
Inconsistencies in battery cell attribute information
Missing hierarchical information in complex BOM structures
Differences in cost data calculation logic
2. Business Logic Differences
Inconsistencies in battery traceability code systems
Changes in quality data processing methods
3. Interface Timing Issues
Discrepancies in MES data synchronization timing
Race conditions during mass order processing
Data transmission delays between global subsidiaries
Key Achievements of Test Automation Implementation
The main results A Company achieved through PerfecTwin include:
Test Coverage: Increased from 30% to 99.9% (In terms of test data variety)
Testing Time: 95% reduction compared to manual testing
Hidden Error Detection: Dozens of critical defects discovered in advance
External System Integration: Testing support for more than 10 integrated systems
Conclusion: A New Standard for Large-Scale Data Migration
A Company's SAP S/4 HANA migration case demonstrates the importance of test automation in modern manufacturing, especially in industries like battery production that require high precision and traceability.
This project, which conducted comprehensive testing based on actual operational data and verified integration with more than 10 external systems, has set a new standard for large-scale ERP migration.
As manufacturers accelerate their digital transformation journeys, A Company's case serves as an important reference showing how test automation can reduce project risks and enable successful migration in environments with massive data and complex system integrations.
