Company snapshot: Kaneka NA
Industry: Chemical manufacturing
Headquarters: Texas, USA – maintains multiple offices, manufacturing sites, and R&D facilities across North America. Serves 100s of customers across multiple industries and territories.
Employees: 700+ in North America
Products:
- High-performance polymers and advanced materials
- Specialty and functional chemicals
- Life science, pharmaceutical, and nutraceutical ingredients
SAP landscape:
- Running on S/4HANA, primarily operating in Fiori
- Operating 3-tiers support landscape and N+1 for upgrade projects
- Using Freshservice for ITSM
The Challenge
Managing transport sequencing in production support and project landscapes became increasingly complex as Kaneka’s SAP environment grew.
Sequencing changes was largely manual and lacked consistent structure, increasing the risk of production issues.
Governance was difficult to enforce consistently and visibility across changes was limited. Over time, these challenges began to impact both operational stability and release delays.
Key issues included:
- Operational risk: unstructured transport sequencing increased the likelihood of production issues and unplanned downtime
- Low efficiency: heavy manual effort slowed releases and consumed valuable IT resources
- Governance gaps: limited control and visibility made it difficult to consistently enforce change policies
- Audit burden: audit preparation was time-consuming and disruptive, increasing compliance effort and cost
Together these, reduced agility, slowed down delivery of SAP changes, and delayed business initiatives.
The Solution
Kaneka sought a solution that would bring consistency, automation and stronger governance and approval controls to SAP transport management. It needed a solution capable of reducing operational risk while maintaining seamless integration with their existing SAP environment.
Specifically, they were looking for:
- Automated transport sequencing and dependency management
- Strong governance and approval controls
- Audit-ready reporting with full traceability
- Reduced manual effort and lower operational risk
- Support for parallel production support (N) and project (N+1) landscapes
How Rev-Trac helped
Kaneka selected Rev-Trac, a solution purpose built for SAP change and transport management. Rev-Trac’s enforcement capabilities, full audit history of every change, automated transport sequencing enables faster, more reliable releases with lower operational overhead.
After considering other solutions, Rev-Trac was selected for its automation capabilities – reducing risk and manual effort – long-standing market stability, and intuitive design which required minimal training.
Reduction in audit preparation time and effort
Kaneka realized business value immediately after go-live with noticeable gains in efficiency and control within weeks. With Rev-Trac in place, it resolved pain points around sequencing, compliance, and deployment risk.
Automated transport and release management significantly reduced manual effort and improved productivity through enforced governance. Greater visibility and control over SAP changes led to fewer transport errors in production and simplified audit preparation with complete change traceability and reporting.
Why SAP change control matters!
Rev-Trac has become a core part of Kaneka’s daily SAP operations. The automation solution acts as a standard change and release management platform across both production support and project landscapes.
Looking ahead, Kaneka plans to expands its use of Rev-Trac to support larger modernization projects and possibly BTP and Clean Core initiatives. It will standardize and automate DevOps and governance processes with Rev-Trac to enhance scalability, ensure compliance, and support continuous improvement as their SAP environment evolves.
