An S/4HANA migration is a significant project for organizations. It can be a journey with obstacles and setbacks contributing to missed deadlines and overblown budgets. However, some solutions on the market can make the migration smoother, whether Greenfield, Hybrid, or Brownfield.
Rev-Trac Platinum, the SAP DevOps Orchestration Platform, is a tool that can assist with the technical component of your digital transformation. It enables you to respond quickly to constantly changing business requests and smooths your migration to S/4HANA with repeated, automated, custom workflows.
In this blog, I will put a real-world application under the microscope. In this scenario, a US-based health company embarked on a multi-year project to implement a new Greenfield S/4 landscape following recent mergers and acquisitions.
Greenfield S/4HANA transition challenge
Rev-Trac was familiar to the company. Our software managed SAP change across several of the company’s SAP landscapes. But it had never previously used Rev-Trac to help deploy an S/4HANA landscape.
The goal was to perfect the go-live using multiple ‘mock’ cutovers to simulate the process effectively and repeatedly. In the old days, we would spin up new SIDs (SAP System Identifiers) to provide a landscape with multiple QA, Test, and Pre-Production systems.
However, with the cost of new S4/HANA SIDs, many organizations are choosing to use multiple clients in a single SID system to replicate the process. It’s not the perfect solution; some transports are client-independent. However, the lion’s share of the transports for the new S4/HANA landscape are configuration transports; therefore, they are primarily client-dependent.
The only TMS requirement that Rev-Trac has concerning transport routes is that the development system has a target system defined, so it doesn’t create local ($TMP) transports. The target system defined in the STMS transport route can easily be a virtual one.
How it works
Rev-Trac leverages the concept of using “target groups” to define logical destinations for the transports to follow.
In this example, we used target groups named QS4-100, QS4-200, QS4-300, SS4-100, and PS4-100 to give us four mock cutovers before the production system PS4. We are using three different clients in QS4 and one client in a staging SID in S4/HANA named SS4.
With Rev-Trac, you can bundle or collect multiple Rev-Trac Requests (RTRs) into a Rev-Trac Release Request (RTRR). Think of this as a parent/child relationship. A “release” in Rev-Trac provides you with the ability to group all your RTRs (children) into a single RTRR (parent) request.
The advantage of using a Release (RTRR) is that you roll all the changes contained in these multiple RTRs (that are required for the mock cutover) into a single release (RTRR). With all the changes bundled into a single RTRR, you can run Rev-Trac’s automated safety checks against the release instead of individual changes. In this way, Rev-Trac makes it easier to move all the transports required to roll out a new S/4HANA environment.
Each mock go-live identifies gaps, and additional changes can be added to the original RTRR, creating a new release that is treated as a supplement to the original. The releases (original and supplement) are imported into the next target system/client, and identifying gaps starts again.
When you are ready for the actual go-live, the process is familiar, the timing is known, and the gaps are filled. Post-go-live, you can use Rev-Trac to manage all support changes, which can be broken into categories such as break/fix, enhancements, etc.
The Bottom Line
Rev-Trac Platinum is highly flexible and adapts to your needs when migrating to S/4HANA. For example, if 10 businesses are rolling out an S/4HANA landscape, each will have different requirements. Rev-Trac doesn’t enforce a one-size-fits-all approach.
Our solution allows organizations to build an automated and repeatable process (workflow) to satisfy the simplest to the most complex requirements. These Rev-Trac workflows automate the movement of transports and provide a documentation repository. They also support the coveted separation of duties and include multiple safety checks to guarantee that changes migrate in the proper sequence and no objects are left behind.
Contact one of our in-house experts for more information on how Rev-Trac Platinum can streamline your Greenfield S/4HANA transition.
