It is quite common for customers to outsource their SAP system support to external partners or a System Integrator (SI).
Last week I visited Mumbai, India to train a new SI team to support Rev-Trac on behalf of one of our larger customers.
When we looked under the covers to identify how Rev-Trac change control automation was being used, we found some disturbing results.
The previous SI team used by our customer had removed many of the automation aspects of Rev-Trac to create scenarios that closer resembled the native TMS methodologies.
This required their Basis resources to manually perform the sequence checks, sequence settings and even the manual migration of the transports.
Naturally, the new SI team was struggling to see the value of Rev-Trac due to their inheriting the limited Rev-Trac functionality from the old SI team.
The value of an automation health check
After some discussion and digging through audit trails, we could identify that the manual effort had accumulated to more than 10 hours per week for the previous 4 years.
This provided an incentive for the new SI team to better understand and implement a greater range of standard Rev-Trac automation functions.
The new SI team could start implementing these automation features immediately providing significant time and cost savings as well as a better level of service for our mutual customer.
Further process improvement discussions identified a potential to utilize Rev-Trac to perform automated retrofits and reapplications from the Support Track into the Project Tracks.
As a result, potential savings of hundreds of developer days for a planned upcoming project are highlighted, ending in significantly more time and cost savings for both the customer and the new SI team.
However, in some improvement scenarios the newer automation features were not available when Rev-Trac was initially installed.
But in other improvement scenarios some existing features had been turned off, because handovers between the customer and the old SI team, had not been performed correctly.
This experience highlighted to me the value of a regular Rev-Trac system, process and automation Health Check.
As part of my visit, after providing this health check I could provide a roadmap to a more efficient and better value use of Rev-Trac’s automation and safety features.
For more information or to arrange a Rev-Trac Health Check, feel free to reach out to one of our in-house experts.
