I’ve been spending the last week or so travelling and speaking with customers and potential customers. In two consecutive meetings, two SAP IT team leaders from two different companies told me the exact same reason for automating their SAP change control processes.
Volume, velocity and quality
They told me they needed change control automation because they needed to deliver higher volumes of change at a greater velocity and were concerned about maintaining quality and production stability.
One leader was from a large European energy company and the other was from a large US consumer food company.
Two very different companies operating in two different markets, offering their customers very different products and services but with the same concerns.
What I found interesting was that neither mentioned digital transformation, DevOps, agile development or continuous delivery.
However, it was clear from the conversations that digital transformation was a corporate goal and they believed that they were going to need to change things so their SAP enterprise systems could become more responsive.
In their minds, automation was a requirement for them to meet the impending business need for more from their teams without disrupting stability.
SAP change control automation delivers
And automation will deliver, that’s for sure, and here are a few ways how.
Firstly, change control automation facilitates better management of changes.
By enabling and enforcing methods like multi track delivery of change, agile development or release management, change is better managed, and teams can deliver higher volumes.
Secondly, change control automation removes manual activities.
Things like manual transport deployment, extensive manual analysis of transport lists and manual workflow guarantee slow things down. Automating these keeps work moving enabling teams to increase the velocity of change.
Thirdly, automation enforces critical process steps.
Quality is no accident. Automated processes make sure things like testing, code review and parallel developments are managed as intended, significantly reducing production system incidents and improving system stability.
Responding to a business need for speed, volume and stability within the SAP enterprise core will require things to change.
Purpose developed change control automation solutions available through software like Rev-Trac, will help.
For more information, please feel free to reach out to our in-house experts.
