By Bill Rojas, SAP Digital
Back in 2011, when Ken Gnazdowsky and his team were looking for market validation for their new code-change impact analysis software, they knew they were on to something when the offering won an award for innovation from Microsoft. Clearly, they had identified a tool that companies needed. Now, six years later, Ken’s company has made its own impact, with scores of customers using Find it EZ Code Search Pro.
Instant identification of the impact of code changes on reports and databases
The problem solved by the software focuses on delays and inaccuracies caused by code changes in underlying data sources that affect reports. Manual methods used to identify the impact of a code change – typically spreadsheets and disconnected analysis with a variety of independent tools – are inefficient, labor intensive, and unreliable. Imagine the work involved in using a spreadsheet to track hundreds of reports when you’re making a software upgrade.
Ken shared a good example: Pan American Life, a Louisiana-based insurance and employee benefits provider for local and multinational companies. The company relies on SAP Crystal Reports, which run against a SQL Server data warehouse. Some reports were running prematurely before the data warehouse was refreshed, causing inaccurate reports to be mailed to end users. Ouch. But now, using Code Search Pro, Pan American’s IT staff can search, document, and mass-change data-source connections in its library of hundreds of reports – in just minutes; preventing errors before they occur, and expediting corrective action required when they do.
Then there’s Stony Brook Medicine, a New York–based healthcare organization that depends on a high volume of complex and critical medical reports. Any new software release received from their Healthcare vendor Epic Systems Corp often modifies fields in the database tables, and the IT staff needs to know what reports are affected. For the first project using Code Search Pro, a search of some 1,800 reports saved about 60 hours of impact-analysis time – and US$5,000. Fast analysis, fast ROI.
While Code Search Pro originally targeted SAP Crystal Reports, the software is now product- and database-agnostic. It works with most business intelligence (BI) tools, all major SQL databases, plus Microsoft Office documents (including Excel) and PDFs, searching across interconnected components and all software layers. Code Search Pro is certified HIPAA compliant and has passed a stringent security audit conducted at one of the world’s largest nuclear power plant manufacturing facilities.
A firsthand discovery
I asked Ken about how his team discovered that so many companies were running into these snags, and how they came up with a way to help. It turns out that he started his company over 25 years ago as a service-based consulting firm, developing custom enterprise software for large multinationals like Boeing. Like many entrepreneurs, he experienced the problem himself. “Any time the model would change, a dozen reports would stop working. And we had no visibility into the underlying table or source changes,” he told me. “It was embarrassing.” He decided to take the leap into packaging and marketing a commercialized version, and joined technology accelerator programs Microsoft BizSpark and Accelerate Okanagan for access to startup resources and mentoring.
Faster and more cost-effective enterprise software upgrades
You can now save time and improve code quality whenever you change your software code. This single integrated productivity tool helps you search your entire software application codebase, propose software changes, and identify the exact type of skills and number of resources required to implement that change. Code Search Pro lets you know the impact of the proposed change before it happens while helping you chose the most cost-effective design with “what if” scenarios.
Ken and I were initially introduced via the SAP extensions directory, and I was glad to onboard Code Search Pro to SAP Store. Many of our customers have shared with us that with each new software release, whenever changes are made to the underlying database in any enterprise software application, things can go wrong. Code Search Pro gives you a full 360° view to better manage those software changes.
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