In the SAP world, a digital transformation is commonly associated with a migration to S/4HANA.
Yet, an S/4HANA transformation is still a significant decision for any organization. It can be fraught with competing priorities and decisions. Investment is crucial for the digital transformation, but realizing the benefits is complex.
Migrating to S/4HANA enables organizations to adopt industry standards and best practices while minimizing dependencies on custom code. How much custom code is reduced depends on an organization’s use of industry standards in their current ECC environment and the competitive advantage gained from customizations (or IP).
It is easy to continue using the same processes you have for the last five, 10 or more years and delay change for budget, timing, or resources. Antiquated systems can feel safe.
We know them; we understand the problems with them. So many organizations easily justify maintaining stable and well-understood environments to save money and effort. This is often a relevant strategy for an organization that is not heavily reliant on constant innovation or subject to frequent market changes.
However, many organizations see the benefits in simplifying their business capabilities and investing in the next generation of ERP. For some, migrating to S/4HANA enables the business to keep pace in competitive or constantly changing markets.
More importantly, a digital transformation (to S/4HANA) allows you to improve processes, become more flexible, reduce TCO, and challenge your business to be better.
How to approach an S/4HANA migration
Whatever your size or industry, there are three approaches to a digital transformation.
Greenfield: In this scenario, you stand up brand-new environments reimagining business processes and user interaction from scratch.
Businesses adopting this digital transformation approach can use Rev-Trac to synchronize the environments at a work order level.
Brownfield: Here, organizations copy their ECC environments and upgrade and adapt the copy. This process is a technical upgrade to an environment and will utilize many existing processes.
You can use Rev-Trac to sync the work orders and technical changes across the legacy and newly upgraded S/4 environments.
Bluefield: Organizations adopting this approach map requirements to a new S/4HANA system. You embrace as much standard functionality as possible, migrate custom ECC functions to the S/4HANA system, and adapt on arrival.
Rev-Trac can keep the legacy and S/4HANA environments in sync at both a work order level and a technical level where appropriate during the digital transformation.
| Greenfield | Brownfield | Bluefield | |
| Work Order Synchronization | Y | Y | Y |
| Technical Synchronization | N/A | Y | Y |
| Code Merge Insights | N/A | Y | Case by case where applicable |
Why Rev-Trac for your digital transformation?
Automating your SAP change management process allows you to deliver rapid, low-risk change, accelerates your S/4HANA migration, and supports agile and DevOps goals.
Rev-Trac, the SAP DevOps Orchestration Platform, combines many features and capabilities for a smooth and safe transition to S/4HANA.
Key functionalities include:
Workflow: Rev-Trac Platinum is a highly flexible and tightly controlled ABAP workflow engine but to SAP–certified and best practice standards. The technology controls the end-to-end process for your SAP changes.
That is, from the initial need for a change, such as a Production fix or project-related change, to testing and documentation, and deployment to Production. Rev-Trac also manages retrofits if you have an environment with secondary development and quality systems.
With Rev-Trac, all the relevant team members are automatically notified when their approval is needed. It enforces all the required documentation and testing steps and provides a complete audit trail for all SAP changes.
Error Detection: A key component of Rev-Trac is its real-time and automated error detection capabilities, reducing the risk of SAP system availability issues.
Rev-Trac’s error detection suite includes sequencing checks. OOPS (Overtake and Overwrite Protection System) ensures transports are imported in the correct order and ensures S/4 work is not compromised when synchronizing legacy changes.
Deployment: A key feature of Rev-Trac is the capability to deploy SAP transports to the target systems automatically. Deployments can be on-demand or event-driven, which is often the case for migration into Quality systems.
Or they can be scheduled for specific times, as most businesses do for their production imports. Organizations can use variants to control import jobs accurately.
Process emergency changes immediately while leaving non-emergency changes for a weekend import is just one example.
Rev-Trac uses the SAP native functionality for the deployment steps. So, all the SAP native logs are still in place.
The software automatically notifies the appropriate people when technical import errors occur and can easily create reports on those errors.
DevOps Orchestration: Ensuring all systems and teams are kept involved and up to date is crucial as you embark on a digital transformation initiative.
Creating a fully automated unified SAP DevOps toolchain requires an integrated workflow process.
Rev-Trac is the orchestration engine in this unified approach. It integrates ALM and DevOps toolsets into highly flexible workflows, allowing organizations to create a best-of-breed end-to-end toolchain, calling tools at the appropriate time and removing organizations silos for cross-team collaboration.
Key benefits of using Rev-Trac as the SAP DevOps orchestration layer include:
- Reduced cost and effort to manage change
- Accelerating the process while ensuring quality and governance
- Shifting development errors and corrections to the left
- Improved system stability
For more information on using Rev-Trac to simplify and accelerate your digital transformation, please feel free to reach out to one of our SAP change management experts.
