Company snapshot

Employees: 120
Industries: IT Services
Services/Products: Provides IT services to regional bottlers

This large food and beverage company runs one of the biggest single instance Software as a Service (SaaS) environments in the world. The company provides solutions to its regional bottling partners through its IT platform, with over 80,000 employees processing $21 billion in annual revenue. The provision of a common set of processes, data standards, and solutions enables its bottlers to run their businesses without interruption and keep refrigerators stocked worldwide.

With customers located in many regions, compliance and adherence to standards are crucial. The company’s infrastructure over the years – Revelation Software Concepts’ (RSC) automated SAP change management technology – and ServiceNow to ensure consistent IT processes. It has been using Rev-Trac (now Rev-Trac Platinum, the SAP DevOps Platform) to automate SAP change management tasks and processes since 2014 and ServiceNow to manage SAP application development and project enhancements.

Both technologies automate the flow of work; however, Rev-Trac and ServiceNow are operated in siloes by two different teams, ensuring appropriate separation of duties. This separation resulted in time lags, duplicated effort and the potential for necessary change approvals to be missed, increasing the risk of unplanned downtime. The company needed a single auditable source of truth for all SAP changes. For example, ServiceNow change approvals had to be passed through to Rev-Trac to trigger importing approved SAP changes into development or production.

Integration ensures compliance

The problem was the potential for (unintended) incidents to increase while teams used Rev-Trac and ServiceNow as standalone solutions. Without being linked, every change request in Rev-Trac had to be manually verified and referenced to the ServiceNow change request before approval was given for importing changes into production. This manual effort was risky and could negatively impact the SAP change management process.

The extensive manual effort to update both systems with daily SAP changes often led to missed unintentional references to incorrect change requests.

The company engaged Rev-Trac Consulting Services to integrate its solution with ServiceNow to meet the challenge and enforce compliance. Rev-Trac integrates bi-directionally with popular ALM tools such as ServiceNow, Jira, and Tricentis Tosca via REST APIs, which allows automated data exchanges between the linked technologies.

The new integration went live in 2019 after a three-month implementation. It extends ServiceNow approvals and workflows into the SAP technical layer to achieve a cohesive and well-governed SAP change management process. The automated data synching ensures complete visibility from the SAP object changed back to the ServiceNow Change Request authorizing and approving the change.

Integrating the technologies ensured that the internal process for migrating approved SAP changes to production is followed and trackable from Rev-Trac.

It allows the company to be sure a (ServiceNow) Change Request exists and is linked to any new SAP change request created in Rev-Trac, and the approval workflow of the change request in ServiceNow is obeyed. The process eliminates the potential to migrate transports without authorized permission from the appropriate owners.

Suppose a Rev-Trac owner tries to approve a change into production without a referenced ServiceNow Change Request. In that case, the Rev-Trac process enforcement rules kick in, and they are redirected into ServiceNow and forced to create a new change request. This change request is then populated automatically from Rev-Trac data, and the Rev-Trac owner can then approve the SAP change for migration to production.

Enhance SAP change process and achieve agile/DevOps goals

While guaranteeing compliance with internal processes was behind the decision to integrate Rev-Trac and ServiceNow, the food and beverage giant has realized additional benefits.

Users can view the entire change request relationship to Rev-Trac from ServiceNow, whether part of the developer team, configuration team, or project team. The integration provided real-time details of SAP change progression and enabled a consistent end-to-end data flow between Rev-Trac and ServiceNow. An automated workflow eliminated manual replication, minimized manual handling errors, improved efficiencies, and reduced the overall cost of producing SAP change.

Like an increasing number of organizations in today’s digital business world, the company leveraged the power of integrating automated toolsets to achieve SAP agile and DevOps success. With the combined capabilities of Rev-Trac and ServiceNow, it can easily track, govern, and mitigate risks to its production environment.

The company holds a daily CAB meeting to review the Rev-Trac Requests queued for approval to production. With the integration, it can effectively track the migration and check linked change requests to ServiceNow. Users can also review test cases to determine approval for moving to production. Additionally, this helps mitigate the impact and evaluate the risk of the Rev-Trac Request moving into production.

Integrating Rev-Trac with ServiceNow allows the company to maximize value from both systems: the business side, ServiceNow overall change management system and Rev-Trac, the SAP IT team’s system to manage and govern specific changes. With the ultimate source of information for all SAP technical changes coming from the SAP IT team and Rev-Trac, the integration ensures compliance with its internal processes. As a result, it can manage a higher volume of changes without interrupting daily operations.

 

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