Ensuring Peak Performance for a Global Retail & Entertainment Giant’s SAP Platform

Our client, a Global Retail & Entertainment Conglomerate (G-REC), is a multinational pioneer and market leader across the retail, leisure and property development sectors in the Middle East, Africa and Asia, operating extensive portfolios of shopping malls, hypermarkets and entertainment venues

G-REC, a leading force in the MENA’s retail and leisure sector, was undertaking a significant digital transformation. This programme involved migrating core business functionality—including supply chain logistics, high-volume retail transactions and financial reporting – onto a consolidated SAP S/4HANA platform. This modern core was closely integrated with its public-facing e-commerce and omnichannel systems (e.g., SAP Commerce Cloud).

The key risk was the system’s ability to cope with massive, unpredictable load spikes during major regional sales and holiday periods (such as Ramadan and the annual “White Friday” events), where transaction volumes were projected to surge by up to 350% above normal traffic. A single performance failure could lead to substantial revenue loss and reputational damage.

The testing initiative required a robust, high-scale solution to:

1. Accurately simulate peak-hour transactions across diverse SAP interfaces: SAP Fiori, classic SAP GUI, and critical API integrations.
2. Rapidly develop, execute, and maintain performance test scripts for the highly customised S/4HANA retail solution.
3. Validate system stability by simulating over 40,000 concurrent virtual users across all business units.

Testhouse implemented a targeted, “shift-left” performance engineering programme utilising the capabilities of Tricentis NeoLoad to proactively guarantee the stability and scalability of the new SAP landscape.

• Comprehensive SAP Coverage: NeoLoad’s specialised support for SAP protocols (Fiori, GUI, RFC/IDoc) enabled the team to accurately script and test complex end-to-end business processes in core modules like Sales & Distribution (SD), Finance (FI), and Materials Management (MM).
• True Omnichannel Emulation: The team used NeoLoad’s RealBrowser technology to accurately simulate customer journeys on the e-commerce platform and in-store applications, capturing genuine client-side performance metrics for critical services like “Click & Collect” and loyalty program validation.
• High-Volume Cloud Scaling: NeoLoad’s dynamic cloud infrastructure was leveraged to simulate 40,000 concurrent virtual users—a load that exceeded the historical peak by 2.0x—ensuring the system could handle anticipated future growth.
• Continuous Quality Gates: Performance tests were integrated directly into the DevOps Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline, automating the validation process and ensuring performance metrics were consistently met for every release.

The programme successfully identified and eliminated critical performance risks, securing G-REC’s system stability and ensuring a smooth transition to the new S/4HANA environment.