Many organizations today struggle with integrating and orchestrating tools in their non-SAP and SAP landscapes. This disconnection can lead to inefficiencies, increased manual workloads, and a greater risk of errors when managing SAP change.
Agile SAP change management relies on seamless integration and an automated unified workflow for success. In this blog we highlight the path one of our customers, a German insurance company, took to achieve its agile/DevOps for SAP objectives and operational excellence.
A background to agile SAP change!
This insurance business, a subsidiary of a larger company, operated its IT agilely, using tools like Jenkins, Jira, Tricentis Tosca, and ServiceNow. While these tools were well integrated into their non-SAP Landscapes, SAP-Changes were managed manually and were highly fragmented.
The company managed requirements and incidents in JIRA and ServiceNow. However, there was no automatic exchange of information between these tools and SAP. As a result, Developers worked hard to manually document their SAP transports by copying and pasting data etc. Despite best efforts, only about 80% were correctly done.
This lack of integration and automation led to various issues:
- Expensive audits due to incomplete and inaccurate reports
- Tedious and time-consuming tasks for system developers and testers, who had to spend considerable time on manual processes. Daily work involved a lot of tedious, annoying tasks for people who were doing the system development and testing as they had to spend a lot of time on satisfying the process.
- Delays in achieving agile/DevOps goals for SAP, as manual steps slowed down the delivery of changes.
- Impact on quality
It made sense for them to seek a solution that could close the gap – a tool that would enforce their processes even on their SAP-Landscapes and automates the change process as much as possible. They also wanted to use TOSCA in an automated way on SAP to close the DevSecOps Chain.
Sprint 1 – Rev-Trac Implementation
Their journey to DevSecOps began in 2019 with a standalone implementation of Rev-Trac Platinum.
Rev-Trac went live in less than three months after the contracts were signed. The implementation included admin training, workflow configuration, and go-live end-user training.
This first sprint ensured process consistency and raised compliance, as Rev-Trac ensures that a ticket is assigned to a transport and enforces that process. Still, some manual tasks were necessary, for example, assigning ServiceNow change requests to the Rev-Trac Ticket and vice versa.
Sprint 2 – ServiceNow Integration
ServiceNow manages Incidents as one source of changes. Before go-live, the process requires a ServiceNow change request to get CAB approvals.
Integrating ServiceNow with Rev-Trac using REST APIs provides significant advantages:
- Automate the process further by generating Rev-Trac tickets out of ServiceNow
- Tighten compliance: SAP change is only possible with an assigned ServiceNow Ticket
The configuration took about two days after some organizational hurdles to establish network connections.
The results of this Sprint brought great relief to the management and the developers. Their process requires many fields to be filled out in ServiceNow, which is now done automatically, consistently, and compliantly.
Sprint 3 – Jira Integration
Yet, ServiceNow only handled incidents, leaving a gap. New requirements are planned in Jira and still maintained manually. So, integrating Jira with Rev-Trac Sprint 3 was the logical next step.
To close this gap, in Jira issues they defined where to connect to Rev-Trac. For this integration they chose Subtasks. The outcome was a bi-directional integration, updating Jira and Rev-Trac at the right point in the process.
The process starts with the creation of a Rev-Trac Ticket as soon as a Subtask of Type “Rev-Trac” has been created in Jira. The Rev-Trac Ticket holds references (with links) to the Jira Subtask and its parent (usually the User-Story) and the Jira Subtask gets a link to the Rev-Trac ticket and all status updates.
Last Step to SAP DevSecOps
Sprint 4 – Tricentis Tosca Integration
With Tosca in place, it makes sense to integrate into the unified toolchain that includes Rev-Trac, Jira, and ServiceNow.
Technically Rev-Trac can call Tosca to run automated test-scripts. Tosca returns the result, and the Rev-Trac workflow proceeds based on the outcome.
At the time of writing, Sprint 4 is still in the planning stage.
Contact one of our change management experts for more information on Rev-Trac Platinum’s bi-directional integration with popular ITSM and ALM tools.
