Effective SAP release management is crucial to achieving successful outcomes during the deploy phase of SAP application delivery. As organizations prepare for production deployment, maintaining control and visibility across multiple SAP changes becomes essential.
SAP IT teams are under constant pressure to deliver more change, more frequently and with less risk. To meet these demands, teams must rely on automated tools that assess readiness and change quality, enabling predictable outcomes for deployment to production.
This approach ensures the quality build remains consistent across every phases of the delivery process.
Planned releases maximize uptime
The foundation of a SAP DevOps initiative is change control automation, delivered through a fully integrated and enforced SAP change and release management process.
During the build phase, automation helps SAP IT teams:
- Eliminate manual, time-consuming tasks
- Keep SAP systems synchronized
- Ensure technical dependencies and manual tasks are identified
As SAP changes progress, these outcomes must be leveraged and guaranteed during the deployment phase to minimize disruption to the production system.
Visibility and control during the deployment phase
To deploy SAP changes safely, production assurance teams and release managers need the right tool sets to provide:
- Provide real-time visibility into build progress
- Clear insight into release content and readiness
This visibility enables them to carefully plan SAP deployments, preventing massive disruption to the production system.
Critical toolsets for successful SAP deployments:
- Release management
- Go-live orchestration
Reduce risk and optimize SAP releases
Regardless of whether releases occur daily, monthly, or quarterly, release managers must have full visibility into the proposed release.
This allows them to quickly identify:
- Unplanned changes
- Changes that may delay a release
- Dependencies tied to future releases
Release managers must also be able to:
- Add or remove changes depending based on Change Advisory Board (CAB) decision
- Delay changes to a different release
- Promote changes that may hold dependencies
Built-in safety checks should prevent untested SAP changes from being sent to production and alert teams to sequencing or dependency issues with the release’s content before deployment.
Predictable outcomes for release deployment
Once the CAB and release manager approves a release for production, responsibility shifts to the Basis team for deployment.
For a deployment to run smoothly, the Basis team must understand:
- The entire scope of the release
- Object version sequencing and dependencies
- Manual tasks required during deployment
The most effective toolsets automate the transport sequence and include the manual steps within the transport list. Basis teams should know when the import is likely to start and at which point resources will be required to perform the manual tasks.
As manual tasks are completed and signed off, imports should continue automatically. This enables your organizations to:
- Accurately plan production outage windows
- Minimize SAP downtime
- Keep on-call support staff informed regarding scheduling of a specific manual task
How Rev-Trac improves release management
Rev-Trac, Revelation Software Concepts (RSC), integrates release management and go-live orchestration capabilities to deliver faster, safer and more predictable SAP applications and enhancements.
Key capabilities of Rev-Trac include:
- A Release Management Workbench (RMWB) that allows a CAB to release risk and readiness
- RMWB drag and drop functionality, enabling rapid changes to release content
- Direct execution of the Go-Live orchestration with a nominated start time
- Automatic calculation of import time and manual task windows
- Intelligent handling of expected migration failures and unexpected return codes
- End-to-end reporting from build through to deployment
Together these capabilities ensure SAP releases are controlled, auditable, and precisely orchestrated to go-live.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is release management?
Release management is the process of planning, sequencing, approving, and deploying SAP changes into production in a controlled way.
Why is release management critical in SAP environments?
SAP systems support core business processes. Poorly managed releases can cause unplanned downtime, data inconsistencies, and compliance issues.
How does automation improve SAP release outcomes?
Automation removes risky manual effort, enforces consistent processes, and ensures only tested, approved changes reach production.
How does Rev-Trac support SAP DevOps?
Rev-Trac seamlessly integrates and orchestrates third-party applications for a unified SAP DevOps approach to optimizing deployments.
Become skilled at SAP change management
For more information download our eBook, “Make SAP change control more manageable“.
To discuss how automation can transform SAP application delivery through enhanced release management capabilities, contact one of our SAP change management experts.
