To reduce both infrastructure costs and manual workloads in postmodern ERP projects, SAP application leaders and SAP Basis operations leaders should evaluate specialized software tools for automating the regular refresh of their SAP ERP test data. SAP selective test data management tools perform selective copying of SAP test data, but they vary in their approach to data selection, scrambling and performance optimization. There are two user constituencies for these tools: (1) Basis operations teams require repetitive data copy operations that must be as automated as possible (2) SAP application data objects for ad hoc data copying. Some of the tools also enable Basis operations teams to produce a “shell system,” which is an identical copy of a complete production system, but without the transaction data. This is very useful in many projects for testing purposes.