We have been asked a few times how Gekkobrain came about and why it’s so unique. Why did we develop Gekkobrain? And Why should you use it?
Why did we develop Gekkobrain?
Gekkobrain is developed by us, a team of SAP experts, who like to work efficiently. In 2015 we needed to upgrade an SAP ECC system to HANA and we called in SAP to do an analysis of our system to find out, how many issues we needed to fix before we could actually do the upgrade. We knew that we couldn’t just upgrade because some of the custom code would either no longer work or make SAP perform worse than before the upgrade.
The SAP Analysis
The analysis took about a week and cost…..well, you can probably guess it wasn’t cheap. The analysis was delivered as a nice spreadsheet highlighting all issues in our custom code. The issues were marked as priority 1, priority 2 or priority 3. Next to each issue, there was an estimated effort to fix it.
Our spreadsheet showed a little more than 30,000 issues that needed to be either fixed or ignored. We knew, we could probably save the priority 3 issues for a later day, but what about priority 1 and 2? And how should we go about allocating resources to fix them? And even worse, how could we know if they were actually fixing them on time?
At a certain point we also discovered that some of the issues were in fact from obsolete modules. So spending time fixing them was kind of stupid. And — as I mentioned — we like to work efficiently, so fixing issues in unused code seemed a little like a waste of time.
We met up as a team and looked at the 30,000 rows in the spreadsheet. Then we looked at each other and considered changing career paths.
This was especially relevant when the technical project manager said: “That’s all good and well. What about the new code that’s being committed to SAP as we speak? Do we need to call SAP to have them run a new report again next week?”
In truth, we were as lost as a child alone in the mall.
The inception of Gekkobrain
Until we came up with the brilliant idea of developing Gekkobrain. What if we could import the analysis straight into a web application that would allow us to filter the issues, keep track of the process and monitor new code as it was introduced. What if we could develop an application that could even tell us, which issues to fix first for maximum impact?
Now — there’s an idea. And there’s Gekkobrain for you.
Gekkobrain didn’t fix the code, but it told us exactly what to fix and when to fix it to achieve the highest impact.
And we could do a whole lot more:
- We were able to filter away more than 15,000 issues that could be ignored
- We were able to estimate exactly how long it would take to fix the rest
- We were able to generate suggestions for optimal sprints for our agile process
- We were able to manage and monitor our dev team’s upgrade process
- We were able to keep new code clean, as it was committed to SAP
- We saved hundreds of hours on technical project management
As you can imagine, this made our day. And we knew instantly that we needed to offer this application, Gekkobrain, to the rest of the SAP community.
Conclusion
So here we are. Gekkobrain changed everything for us.
So back to the why? Why did we develop Gekkobrain? To save us from going mad.
And why should you use Gekkobrain? The short answer is: To avoid unnecessary headaches.