Most organizations using the SAP HR system will sooner or later face the need to copy personnel and payroll data to non-production environments (test and development ones). During the software creation, configuration and testing, there are situations in which you have to work with data as close as possible to the production data. Tests on such sets enable us to minimize the risk of future problems – solutions will behave analogously in the production environment. Sometimes it is even necessary to reproduce a case from the production system on the test one to identify and correct an error.

The following common tasks of people managing SAP HR systems are worth mentioning:

  • analyzing the impact of HR updates on running systems;
  • verification and testing of problematic cases;
  • SAP HR development by configuring and adding new functions;
  • HR upgrade.

In all these activities, a tool for copying data from the production system to the test system is necessary.

In view of the GDPR and, in particular, the consequences for a company in the event of a violation of the Act, it is crucial to ensure that data copied to non-production systems undergoes anonymization, i.e. preventing an individual from being identified on a permanent basis. Going further, we can say that we no longer process personal data and we do not need to have a legal basis to process it. Thanks to anonymization, the processing and storage of copied files on test systems is excluded from the scope of the GDPR requirements (the rights under articles 15-20 of the regulation are not applied).

Description of the solution

For years, SNP Poland (now All for One Poland) has been offering and using in its projects HR Cloner, an application which effectively copies and anonymizes HR data.

With All for One HR Cloner, the diversity and complexity of test cases corresponds to actual data existing in SAP HR, but people testing new system functions do not have access to real employee data. It is easy to create test cases, and employees’ personal data is secure.

It is possible to copy employee data, payroll and working time accounting results, organizational structure objects and tables selected by the user. Data can be cloned using an RFC connection or by exporting it from a source system to a local file, and then importing from the file to the target system.

The scheme of the application operation is simple. Cloning is carried out in two steps:

1) In the source system, we select the scope of data that we want to copy, the attributes of anonymization and the method of transfer:

  • what personal numbers, infotypes, custom tables, connections, payroll results and working time evaluation results
  • what will the target numbering of employees look like?
  • which information types will be anonymized
  • will the anonymized data be transferred to the target system in the file or via RFC.

2) In the target system, we import data (for transfer using files), indicating:

  • what information types are to be imported from the package
  • should also payroll results and working time evaluation results be cloned?

Additional functions of All for One HR Cloner

In addition to copying data (with anonymization), HR Cloner facilitates the creation of test databases based on the model personal number. If we want to test the new functionality on a large set of personal numbers, we can register e.g. 5 fictitious people and generate hundreds or thousands of clones with a few clicks.

Like any tool of this type, HR Cloner allows you to delete or overwrite test databases so that you can easily and quickly perform subsequent iterations of tests.

One more application of HR Cloner is worth mentioning – supporting the migration of HR data. The application allows you to transfer production data from one system to another.