SAP Change Management


SAP Change Management

The demand of business for rapid innovation to support digital transformation has increased across all organizations. Non-SAP applications, especially those on the cloud, are often deployed within months. In an SAPInsider survey on Change Management and Testing for SAP Change Management and Testing in SAP,  40% of respondents said their goal was rapid deployment of updates and upgrades with 61% wanting to reduce business risk and 42% wanting negligible disruption.

SAP Change Management

The demand of business for rapid innovation to support digital transformation has increased across all organizations. Non-SAP applications, especially those on the cloud, are often deployed within months. In an SAPInsider survey on Change Management and Testing for SAP Change Management and Testing in SAP,  40% of respondents said their goal was rapid deployment of updates and upgrades with 61% wanting to reduce business risk and 42% wanting negligible disruption.

Change management is critical is such scenarios to make sure developers know what is changing, what the impact of changes are and plan for seamless rollouts that minimize business downtime. Change management is the process of managing, planning, scheduling, and controlling a software build through testing and deploying in the production environment. The end goal is successful deployment of all planned changes into the production environment.

Like a well-orchestrated supply chain, change management ensures the rollout of series of changes (called release cycle) to achieve the product rollout. There can be major releases which are long projects taking from 1-3 years and minor releases which may take days or weeks.

SAP provides change management capabilities to plan and execute change execution. Some of the benefits of the capabilities are:

  • Reduced risk through extensive testing
  • Less business risks
  • Better test system environment through better planning
  • Increased productivity due to standardization, schedules and roles
  • Better planning and tracking of implementation activities

The release process involves several stages of the release cycle

  1. Scoping – documenting the requirements and developing the IT requirements
  2. Building – developing the software changes for a certain release cycle
  3. Testing – testing the changes through various tests such as user acceptance, regression and integration testing
  4. Deploying – implements the technical cutover of the release by importing all transports into production, which is managed using SAP Solution Manager.

System integrators and consultants such as Cognizant, Microexcel, TechMahindra,

SAP Solution Manager has long been used to plan, create packages for deployment, and assign requirements and changes to a release. SAP ChaRM is an SAP Solution Manager tool to manage processes that occur in a transition from concept to testing until final advertising and Production. We can track changes and transport requests for change management systems throughout the entire business system. SAP Solution Manager Project will keep track of which requests for transport are linked to which projects and in what order they have for import.

Many specialized vendors have rolled out innovative products to manage change such as Panaya, Rev-Trac,  and ServiceNow. As more and more customers move to a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) or Agile/DevOps approaches, there is significant effort to plan and track all the changes. Strong collaboration, planning and automation of processes including testing and rollover are required.

Read this case study to learn  how a Government Organization Improved Its ChaRM Release Strategy and Release Management Process.

7 results

  1. Leveraging Automation for Optimized SAP Change Management – SA Power Network’s Journey

    For SA Power Networks, the journey with Rev-Trac has been transformative, particularly in overcoming the myriad challenges associated with traditional SAP change management. Prior to Rev-Trac, SA Power Networks faced the common pitfalls of the manual change management process - prolonged downtimes, sequence inefficiencies, vulnerability to errors, and conflicts amongst various changes. These issues often…
  2. Hawaiian Electric powers up SAP change management with Rev-Trac

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    Hawaiian Electric needed a more efficient and cost-effective way to manage SAP changes across its multiple landscapes. To address this challenge, they implemented Rev-Trac, an automated SAP change management platform, which reduced manual effort and simplified the delivery of SAP applications and enhancements. The automation technology also enabled the company to address risky overtake and…
  3. Change Management and Testing for SAP

    Benchmark Report: Change Management and Testing for SAP

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    In This Report: SAP customers today face increasing business demand for high-quality and rapid software deployments and updates. SAP’s accelerating product roadmap demands a faster and more collaborative approach to development, change management, and testing. In addition, most SAP customers continue to add non-SAP applications that integrate with SAP. SAP teams, used to multi-year development…...…
  4. Delivering New Savings in Robin Hood Country

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    Local government plays a vital community role at all times, but especially in times like the pandemic. The United Kingdom’s Nottinghamshire county council serves over 70,000 citizens and uses technology to help meet the community’s shifting needs. Since 2011 SAP has served as the core platform for Nottinghamshire County Council’s finance management, an essential piece…
  5. The Human Side of Change: How Employee Adoption Affects SAP S/4HANA Implementation Success

    There are many benefits to an SAP S/4HANA transformation, but without employee adoption, the implementation could fail. Organizations looking to reduce risk need to understand how to address, plan for, monitor, and drive employee adoption through organizational change management, communication, and training – areas in which some organizations don’t have a strong competency. So how…
  6. Case Study: How Hunter Douglas Got Illumination from SAP S/4HANA Consolidation

    True business transformation extends beyond simply implementing an ERP solution, whether SAP or otherwise. It can entail establishing enterprise-wide and integrated processes, re-defining or clarifying roles and responsibilities, employing new technologies, and shifting the mindset of the organization. Most importantly, it requires executive buy-in and support and a universally shared vision. But how can an…
  7. Customize Your Logistics and Finance Processes by Changing Production Master Data with ECM

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    Engineering Change Management (ECM) is a central function in logistics that you can use to change various aspects of production master data (e.g., bills of material, routings, and materials) with history (using effectivity dates) or depending on specific conditions. Understand the purpose of ECM using SAP ERP Central Component 6.0 and how you can use…...…