ActiveControl 8.0: A Powerful New Rules Engine

The best things in life are always worth waiting for.

No, I am not talking about Scottish independence. Or even Manchester United doing the quadruple. I am talking about ActiveControl 8.0, which was announced just before SAPPHIRE NOW 2019 and has now reached GA.

If you are an existing ActiveControl customer, there is a high probability you have asked me or one of my colleagues one or more of the following questions over the past few years:

1. Can I have our Change Manager approving CR transports, our Incident Manager approving Incident fixes and our Project Managers approving Project Changes, all within the same single workflow?
2. Can I ensure only relevant ECC objects are migrated into new S/4 landscape as part of our S/4HANA migration.
3. Is it possible to have our external consultants transports stop for an additional Development approval prior to them being deployed through our landscape?
4. Is it possible to force an additional approval on transports older than X years?
5. Can I easily deploy certain Projects to additional test systems?

Well the answer is finally now a resounding YES to all these questions (and more) - thanks to the powerful new Rules Engine in ActiveControl 8.0.

The Rules Engine aims to give our customers a lot more flexibility and versatility in how they manage their processes than has been possible to date. With powerful new capabilities such as the ability to create rules using AND, OR or NOT logic, and also to create reusable ‘template’ rules, we expect that ActiveControl 8.0 will not only open the door to new possibilities in how customers manage SAP change, but also cut down on the configuration that some of our larger more complex customers have had to maintain in the past.

As an example, one of the largest customers I work with is expecting to reduce the number of approval rules they implement from thousands to less than a hundred through the use of templated rules, and they certainly won’t be the only ones to benefit.

The first version of the Rules Engine is focused on control and configuration of rules for approvals and skipping - two of the most commonly used functions in ActiveControl (skipping rules form part of the approval workflow, allowing transport forms to skip certain Inboxes, Test Queues and Outboxes based on particular field values). We also intend to evolve the Rules Engine out to other key functionalities such as imports and emails in the future. Yes – we have also been listening to those of you out there that would like more control on what notifications get sent out to their user community!

Throw in other new functionalities including the ability for developers/functional teams to reimport transports via the Web UI (I am looking at all you ‘this is an expected RC8 that needs reimporting” BW consultants out there!), bulk tester re-assignment functionality for test managers and a new impacted batch job analyser to inform change and release managers what batches will be impacted by the transports they are about to deploy - and I guarantee that the majority of our existing (and future) customers will find numerous reasons to want to get onto the latest version of ActiveControl.

Want to find out more? Request a demonstration and see ActiveControl 8.0 in action!