Don’t Overlook the Details: How Automation Can Streamline Operations

⇨ IT leaders face pressure to maintain SAP systems efficiently, with manual authorizations complicating the management of user access and wasting valuable time.

⇨ The transaction SU53 in SAP is crucial for analyzing authorization errors, but it often involves a significant amount of manual work for both users and the support team, leading to delays in resolution.

⇨ Automation solutions like the ITSM Connector by STA Technologies can simplify and expedite the authorization process by automating role searches and integrating with various ticketing systems, allowing IT teams to focus on more critical tasks.

In an age when every minute counts, IT leaders are pressured to maintain systems to near perfection. This includes specific features and functions within the SAP landscape – such as authorizations for end-users, internal employee movement and more. With the need to control an enormous amount of data already, manual authorizations can make the job even more tedious, wasting the precious time that IT specialists do not have enough of in the first place.

Among the functions like that is the transaction SU53 in SAP, a tool for analyzing authorization errors in a system. A small, but important part of SAP, it helps keep HR functions in check, such as displaying the last authorization error and troubleshooting for SAP GUI.

However, as explained by Tamás Holics, CTO of STA Technologies, SU53 can involve a lot of manual activity and therefore delay resolution time. For instance, when employees change jobs within the organization and the first time they want to execute a transaction, perform an action or access data that they were not allowed to before, they may raise a service request/incident or just send an email to the service desk.

According to Holics, this is where the support system usually guides the user in executing transaction SU53 and sending the result. Then, the team would analyze the SU53 log and identify the additional authorization that the user needs. Finally, the support would search for an existing role that contains this authorization.

“As you can imagine, the problem here is the manual work,” Holics said. “Such a simple request needs manual work both from the end user and the support team members.”

How integration and automation can offer a hand

While the user’s request for transaction SU53 may remain manual, some solutions can help automate the rest of the process. As such, STA Technologies offers the ITSM Connector, which is a certified ABAP add-on for SAP systems that allows SAP users to create tickets in their existing ITSM platforms directly from SAP.

As the company’s CTO explained, ITSM Connector includes an enhancement of transaction SU53 so it automates the entire process after the user’s request. An automatic SAP Role search is performed and the output of SU53 is extended with the roles which contain the missing authorizations.

He added that the important feature of the software is that the output of SU53 can be attached to a ticket in any external system, be it Jira, ServiceNow, 4me, Cherwell or whatever ticketing tool you use, with the possibility to use a similar ticket-creation process in SAP Fiori.

While it is impossible to oversee every single transaction, request or authorization manually, some solutions can help make the process quick and painless. Among them is the ITSM Connector by STA Technologies, which can allow the IT support teams to spend their valuable time on more critical tasks that require human intervention and involvement, rather than spend hours waiting and analyzing data that modern-day technology can easily automate.