It’s no secret that ERP systems are a significant investment in time and money. Firstly, implementations are notorious for being time-consuming and expensive. Factor in ongoing expenses — such as staff resources, maintenance and upgrades, and customization — and costs can spiral upwards rapidly.
The cost of SAP change is rarely calculated, not well understood, and too often poorly managed. Costs mount up swiftly, not from creating or coding the changes, but from the time and effort to guide the changes from requirement to productive use. SAP change costs vary from organization to organization but are commonly between US$150 to US$350 per change, depending on the complexity of both systems and processes.
At the same time, SAP IT teams are under pressure to continually introduce improvements, configuration changes, interface developments, upgrades, fixes, and business process changes into these productive environments.
Significantly more SAP change is demanded, faster than ever before without disruption to daily business operations. Traditional manual processes driven by spreadsheets and emails no longer cut it. Automating processes allows you to deliver SAP change quickly and safely with lower effort and cost.
Why would you consider automation?
No doubt automation in change and transport management is a massive game-changer.
Customization and demand for enhancements create change management challenges that can impact the business values from your SAP systems. These include:
- Managing increasing volumes of change
- Enforcement of compliance with system change governance processes and authorization procedures
- Creating reliable audit trails revealing who authorized, made, moved, tested, and accepted changes
- Maintaining links between business issues, documentation requirements, technical changes, and the change management process
- Tracking, monitoring, and controlling all system changes across all landscapes
- Keeping the sandbox, projects, and N+1 systems synchronized
- Ensuring proper migration of transports to prevent inadvertent out-of-sequence delivery of changes into production (overtaking and or overwriting)
Automating your SAP change management process is crucial to overcoming the challenges and getting the best out of your SAP investment.
It’s why we created Rev-Trac — an automated SAP change management solution — a market leader for more than 20 years.
Benefits of automation
In the early days, we talked about automating transports. Rev-Trac offered the capability to automate the movement of transports across multiple SAP solution landscapes with one (Rev-Trac) request.
As a result, SAP IT teams could efficiently manage change across complex SAP environments. Rev-Trac ensures consistent change management processes and provides an extensive audit trail of every SAP change. It doesn’t matter who is involved in the approval process or whether you work in the office or remotely.
With Rev-Trac, once approval is given at each stage, the SAP change or unit work migrates to the next step in the process until it’s deployed in production. This end-to-end change management automation allowed SAP IT teams to deliver faster and more frequent SAP releases.
Automation eliminates the manual tasks and bottlenecks of traditional change and transport management, culminating in internal and external benefits that have a massive impact on businesses.
In today’s digital business world, automating your SAP change management reduces the risk of system downtime and increases productivity, enabling projects to be delivered on time and within budget.
Other benefits that allow you to get the best out of your SAP investment include:
- More SAP change, more frequently
- Lower cost of SAP change management
- High-quality SAP change
- Faster market response
- Improved regulatory compliance
- Frees up time and money for innovation
Make SAP DevOps a reality
Automating change management tasks is not just about replacing manual migration of transports and approval processes.
Despite the buzz around DevOps, organizations have questioned that DevOps is even possible in an SAP environment. Why? Too many stakeholders with separate focus areas are a challenge that large teams often face in building a tightly integrated DevOps backend.
Test managers are focused on testing, and Dev team leads want to deliver more code faster than ever before, while Ops teams are nervous about what is migrated into the production environment. Where do you invest in tools that essentially work on the same value stream?
Yet, despite the competing objectives, the various groups have a common goal. Each team wants its focus area to be more automated. SAP IT teams are realizing the closer you get to achieving your DevOps objectives, the more automated your systems and processes need to be.
Undeniably the foundation of a successful DevOps toolchain – where all toolsets are integrated to allow the continuous delivery of SAP change – is integration and automation.
How Rev-Trac helps!
Certainly, over the last few years, we have seen a shift from simplifying SAP change management to SAP change orchestration.
In this scenario, the automation solution also acts as an orchestrator, automating the calling of other best-of-breed third-party tools involved in the change process. The right tool is called at the right stage of the process every time, creating a unified DevOps toolchain.
Rev-Trac assists in the orchestration of an end-to-end process, integrating bi-directionally with a broad range of service desk and testing toolsets, including Jira, ServiceNow, Tosca, and LiveCompare.
Automating and enforcing many of the SAP IT change management tasks and processes can significantly reduce the costs of managing change, typically between 35 and 75 percent. Costly human error is eliminated, enabling teams to prevent SAP applications and enhancements from breaking in production.
The bottom line
Rapid ROI on software investment is the goal of every business. And SAP systems require a considerable investment in time and money before, during, and post-implementation.
Yet, it is possible to minimize costs and unscheduled downtime, maximizing business value from your SAP investment. Transforming your change management processes by eliminating manual effort with an automated solution like Rev-Trac is crucial. Automation facilitates SAP DevOps and continuous delivery of change.
To learn more about how Rev-Trac can accelerate the business benefits from your SAP investment, contact one of our SAP experts.
