Massive increase in change volume
Danone is a leading global food company operating in more than 130 countries across five continents. The company’s brand
portfolio incorporates both international and local products built on four business lines – Essential Dairy and Plant-Based, Early Life Nutrition, Waters and Medical Nutrition. Its mission is to achieve health through food for as many people as possible, regardless of age, social and cultural environment.
To expand and realize its goal to help people in every part of the world, the food company launched its ‘2020’ transformation journey in 2014. Primarily it wanted to optimize its ability to capture long- term growth opportunities and increase operational efficiencies within the organization.
SAP system key enablers of journey
Danone’s IT infrastructure plays a significant role in the transformation journey. In time, the business looked at its increasingly complex SAP landscape. The food company wanted to increase production system stability and realize improved performance during software upgrades or other significant SAP projects and migrations.
Luis Carlos Reis, IT Professional, Danone said the company often encountered problems in production after migrations due to incorrect sequencing.
Danone evaluated SAP Solution Manager ChaRM and the Rev-Trac Platinum, the SAP DevOps Platform, as potential solutions. After due diligence was completed, Rev-Trac was selected for its
flexibility and ease of use. Rev-Trac’s ability to easily integrate with Danone’s existing documentation systems, as well as their impact analysis solutions
– SAP Solution Manager BPCA and Intellicorp LiveCompare – were also key factors in the selection.
“Rev-Trac has had a positive impact on change control performance and has contributed to the success of new SAP implementations, with great reliability.” Luis Carlos, Danone
End out of sequence transports
Danone has achieved the initial goals of its
project to transform its SAP landscape, since the implementation and deployment of Rev-Trac. Firstly, the food company has significantly reduced the risk of systems downtime through minimizing exposure to out of sequence transports.
Rev-Trac enables Danone to secure its migrations via enforcement which ensures predetermined change control processes are followed and change rules are complied with.
“Once the first landscape was stable, we added more and more systems until today we have several dozens of systems monitored and several hundreds of migrations every day with only the occasional minor issue,” Mr. Reis said.
Huge improvements in production system stability at a lower cost
Automation has enabled Danone IT to significantly reduce error prone manual involvement – 90 per cent plus – in its SAP change processes. The result is more stable production systems, with accidental outages slashed by more than 75 per cent.
Additionally, Rev-Trac has helped to optimize Danone’s operations including:
- 90% increase in the volume of SAP change
- 70-90% reduction in time spent on audit tasks
- Accelerated change delivery through Workflow approval, Transport deployment, BAU/support track retrofit and Transport sequencing
A taste of automated change management
Rev-Trac has had a massive impact on Danone’s change management effectiveness.
Danone IT experienced 7-10 potentially dangerous overtake and/or overwrite situations per month prior to implementing Rev-Trac. Each taking between 2-5 hours to fix. The software’s OOPS (overtake overwrite protection system) functionality, in combination with Release Management Workbench, mass approvals and auto transport deployment has minimised the problems, saving Danone time and money.
When rolling out software, expenses can rise if the solution is difficult to integrate of involves extensive user training. “Rev-Trac users have no formal training,” Mr. Reis said. “They just use it.”
