SAP ERP systems come in all shapes and sizes. The Corevist team has seen them all–we have over 300,000 collective hours of SAP ecommerce experience. We’ve also seen a wide range of response times in SAP performance, from lightning-fast systems to sluggish ones.

In the age of cloud software, you can access SAP in many ways. However, one thing is the same no matter how you’re talking to SAP: performance matters. It’s crucial to benchmark your SAP system, whether you’re looking into an ecommerce integration or you just want to improve performance for your SAP GUI users.

In this post, I’ll give you a benchmark for performance based on a subset of Corevist clients. Then I’ll explain how you can measure your system against these numbers.

Measuring performance: Sales doc simulation

Because we optimize SAP systems to integrate with the Corevist Platform, our benchmarking process uses sales doc simulation. Corevist runs an SAP-certified Function Module, “/COREVIST/SALESDOC_CREATE.” This simulates or creates an order and uses “SD_SALES_DOCU_MAINTAIN” (function module used by BAPI_SALESORDER_CREATEFROMDAT2) to post the order in SAP.

Running single tests of this function module, we routinely measure and record response times in two categories:

• General performance
• Large order performance (>50 line items)

Benchmarking general performance

For the purposes of this post, I’ve taken a representative sample of 17 live production clients who are running this FM and reported the stats below. You can see for the month of July that the average call time to/from SAP is about 2.5 seconds, with an average line item size of 6.3 lines.

Benchmarking large order performance (>50 line items)

Large orders represent a unique challenge for SAP-integrated ecommerce. When CSRs key in orders, they can’t move as fast as software, so this slow order entry process can mask how poor SAP performance really is. In the case of real-time ecommerce, large orders can bring out poor SAP performance that wasn’t apparent before.

At Corevist, we’ve developed a solution to this problem that’s resulted in an 86% increase in performance time for large orders.

Below, you’ll see 50+ line items and the average call time of 19 seconds, as well as the number of transactions. These stats reflect large order response times with our improvements implemented.

Benchmarking your system

Single test your “SD_SALES_DOCU_MAINTAIN” and record your response times. Compare them to these 17 live SAP production environments and tell us what you get. You’ll need to remove outliers and ensure you run a lot of transactions over time to get good averages. If your times are off from these benchmarks, we can help optimize your SAP system using the standard SAP tools such as:

• ST12 – Single transaction analysis
• DB02 – Tables and Indexes Monitor
• STAD – Statistics display for all systems

This will improve the system performance for both GUI and web (ecommerce) users.