Headquartered in Maumee, Ohio, Dana Incorporated is a worldwide supplier of drivetrain, sealing, and thermal-management technologies. As a Fortune 500 company, Dana Incorporated employs more than 30,000 people in 25 countries on six continents. The company reported sales of $7.2 billion in 2017 and is ranked among the Drucker Institute’s listing of the 250 most effectively managed companies. Dana’s vision is to be the global technology leader in efficient power conveyance and energy-management solutions that enable its customers to achieve their sustainability objectives.
To realize its objectives and drive further growth, Dana recognized it needed to improve the stability of its SAP infrastructure landscape. The company acknowledged that automation of its existing SAP change processes was crucial to keeping its systems up and running. Importantly a Release Management strategy would enable it to meet increasing business demands within the ever-growing automotive parts and supply market.
Error prone manual tasks
eliminated
Dana approached the automation project with a number of specific goals including advancing production stability of its SAP solutions to avoid systems outages and meet customer’s expectations. Automation was seen as key to implementing a release management strategy that eliminated high-risk processes and accelerated transformation of its SAP environment.
Furthermore, Dana wanted to build a tighter integration between the SAP change control processes and HP Quality Center Auto Testing, which manages the complete application testing process.
“Pre-work on approval flows was crucial. With these roadmaps in hand and assistance from the Revelation Software Concepts team, it was a good experience.”
Mark Sievert, SAP Production Change Manager, Dana Incorporated
With the goal to automate its change management process, Dana investigated available software on the market including the Rev-Trac change control automation platform and SAP Solution Manager ChaRM. After due diligence was completed, Dana selected Rev-Trac ahead of ChaRM as the automation tool to manage its SAP change processes.
Rev-Trac is a user-friendly solution which is easy to integrate and deploy, working out of the box. Dana implemented Rev-Trav and it was up and running, and productive in less than one month.
New strategy
drives productivity
Since implementing and deploying Rev-Trac, Dana has achieved the initial goals of its automation project and transformed its SAP landscape. Firstly, eliminating traditional, manual-heavy SAP change processes has seen a massive increase more than 90 per cent in production system stability – based on error reductions.
Automation has allowed Dana to not only keep its SAP systems stable but rapidly increase the volume of change its IT team manages. Speeding up the enterprise through removing high-risk manual effort has enabled a 90 per cent plus boost in the volumes of SAP change. Overall, change control and change management efficiencies have improved by over 70 per cent. As a result of the project, Dana can do more with less, allowing the company’s SAP IT team to focus on innovation and not just keeping the lights on.
Its automated change release strategy has resulted in huge reductions of more than 70 per cent, particularly in N to N+1 retrofit effort. Additionally, Dana has benefitted from more than a 90 per cent reduction in time spent on audit tasks, enabling it to confidently meet even the most stringent legal regulations.
Business Results
- Streamline SAP environment, enabling IT team to do more with less
- Eliminate high-risk manual intervention to boost production system stability
- Massive cuts in time spent on audit tasks
- More efficient change management processes to meet business demands
- 90% Change volume increase
- 70%> Change management efficiency increase
Rev-Trac drives Dana Inc.’s SAP automation strategy
