Can you guarantee the order that your SAP transports are moved to Production is identical to the order they were moved into Testing?

If you can’t, there’s a good chance that you will introduce issues into Production that simply didn’t exist in your Test systems.

Transports provide a granular way to control every code and configuration change made in your SAP system – essentially creating a snapshot of objects at the time the Transport Request is ‘released’ – so that you can be confident the right change is being ‘deployed’.

But the irony in this highly controlled environment is that SAP does not store a timestamp for the release – meaning that the standard SAP CTS system has no idea in which order your Transports should be imported.

And, because Transports are often migrated in an ad-hoc manner between environments during a project, by the time you reach Testing, you really have no idea in which sequence the Transports were imported.

Add in 2 or 3 test cycles and the risk is – you may be promoting a project into Production where incorrect ‘sequencing’ of Transports causes code and configuration to be over-written.

What you saw in Testing is most definitely not what you see in Production.

And of course, the larger the project, the greater the risk.

Complex dependencies between projects, changes and transport requests mean that you are essentially relying on luck as a strategy to ensure system integrity.

ActiveControl completely automates Transport Sequencing – guaranteeing the order your SAP Transports are imported into every environment is identical.

It has been at the heart of the product since its inception in 1997 and it continues to this day to enable significant automation of the change process.

So, what you saw in Testing is what you see in Production.

Luck is no longer a strategy.