6 COMMON SAP CHANGE MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND HOW TO AVOID THEM

SAP Systems need constant care and continuous feeding. Development and configuration are on-going to meet the ever-changing needs of your business. The pace of change is always increasing.

The need for a solid change management process is real. Most companies don’t comprehend the amount of time or money being spent on manual change management processes. No organization can afford for incomplete or imperfect code to make it to the production environment, where errors are very costly.

SAP has embraced agile development concepts and DevOps methodologies to facilitate rapid development changes aligned with operations for faster changes for the business. Managing these without an effective automated change management solution can lead to very serious problems.

We’ve seen these six common issues with manual change management processes:

1. Time consuming: Manually moving changes through SAP environments is counterintuitive to a DevOps philosophy. By performing a manual process, there is a continual need for people to intervene, whether to check the status, take an action, or to initiate the next step which slows down the entire process. Wouldn’t it be great to spend less time doing these manual steps and have a solution that takes care of it for you?
2. Increased risk: If changes don’t make it to production, the business doesn’t benefit from the change. Worse, if untested changes make it to production, business is stalled as errors are fixed which are a very costly endeavour. These risks need to be avoided at all costs. Any error can cause a company hours of damage control and millions of dollars.  The objective is applying changes quickly and correctly, and in a controlled and repeatable processes, while lowering the risk of errors.  Wouldn’t it be awesome to deliver SAP change management in an automated and controlled process?
3. Process gaps: Manual processes tend to be more complex and are more error prone than automated processes. These manual processes are rarely optimized to match SAP best practices and companies tend to overcomplicate their change management processes. For companies, change management is an evolving process that no one really tries to automate or fix. Instead more steps are added to a binder. Wouldn’t it be nice to leverage the latest and greatest SAP certified solution? REALTECH has over 20 years of specialized SAP Change Management experience.
4. Audit complexity: All companies require internal and external audits of their SAP environments for compliance. With a manual approach, multiple people must go into the system to verify changes and dig through logs to find answers. This is a very time consuming and error prone process. An automated centralized solution can provide detailed documentation & quick access to all audit needs. A couple of clicks shows the change process from beginning through the introduction into production. Wouldn’t it be nice to have one system that is the central repository for all your change tracking and auditing requirements?
5. Overtaker Issues: Most organizations using manual change management processes have faced technical issues upon importing changes into QA and Production when new versions of code or configuration are released. The new code then attempts to take over an earlier released version in the next target system and errors can occur. Wouldn’t it be great to have a system that proactively checks before changes are applied to the system?
6. Slow or Interrupted Communication Flow: Manual processes rely on multiple applications to manage the existing process and one is email communication. Even when everyone is on top of this, the content is separate from the SAP system, running the risk of developers having to wait for changes to be approved to QA or Production thus slowing down changes for the business. Why wait when you can have an SAP change management tool send the correct communications to the right people at the right time whether it’s an approval step or a developer waiting for an email on a successful return code or not?

Automate with theGuard! SmartChange

theGuard! SmartChange Solution automates SAP change management processes and has been around for over 25 years and is used by some of the largest Fortune 500 companies in the world, avoiding common pain points of manual change management that could cause detrimental production outage issues that can be avoided easily.

theGuard! SmartChange gives you intelligent SAP change management. Its modular design provides support for all SAP change management challenges:

• Manage all SAP change management processes from a single point of control
• An SAP based workflow monitor that provides ease of use and administration
• Complete Transparency and Visibility across all your environments at the object level
• Proactive Technical checks such as return code forecasting, collision/overtaker detection and critical object checking along the way which ensures lower risk to your SAP environments
• Ensures the synchronous and secure import of S4/HANA and ABAP changes with automated workflows specific to your process today.

All modules share a common data repository called the IQ_LIBRARY to make sure that the people involved in a process can find the information they need when they need it.

Do any of the change management issues mentioned above sound familiar to you? Reach out to us today for a free 30-minute discussion with one of our SAP certified change management experts to learn more about how REALTECH’s software solutions can solve these challenges mentioned above!

For more information please contact us thru our website at https://realtech-us.com/contact/