Automation Chemistry: Integrating ActiveControl with SAP ChaRM
ActiveControl has integrated for many years with a large number of the ITSM tools used by SAP customers.
Think well-known solutions such as Remedy, ServiceNow, HP ALM and IBM Rational, plus slightly lesser common tools (in an SAP context) such as Cherwell and Microsoft Team Foundation Server. Also slightly newer - but increasingly popular - products like JIRA and Gitlab, both of which Basis Technologies are increasingly seeing customers turn to in their quest to move towards Agile and DevOps-based delivery methods.
This week saw the customer go-live of another one of these out-of-the-box ActiveControl integrations - one which some of you might find surprising but actually makes perfect sense.
In this case our customer wanted to integrate ActiveControl with SAP ChaRM itself.
So why did an organization that already uses standard SAP functionality also buy ActiveControl?
Simple. To get the best of all worlds.
The company in question had already expended a considerable amount of effort on implementing SAP Solution Manager.
They wanted to retain the improvements that the SolMan implementation had delivered, but also wanted to benefit from the numerous additional features that have long since kept ActiveControl customers happy. Things like the suite of 60+ ShiftLeft analyzers that help to minimize deployment risk and reduce avoidable development rework (not to mention completely unnecessary testing defects). And the advanced multi-track management features that help keep parallel Development tracks in sync without the need for manual rekeying - whilst avoiding any risk of project change being overwritten during the highly automated process.
That is where the ActiveControl/ChaRM integration came in.
This particular SAP customer - a large pharmaceutical company - didn't want to have to retrain all their business users on a brand new tool and associated processes. So instead the Basis Technologies development team delivered an integration that helps them benefit from both products whilst also automating the interaction between the two tools.
Carry on raising tickets in ChaRM, and automatically create corresponding Business Tasks in ActiveControl to manage those requirements? CHECK
Automatically manage the deployment and retrofit of ChaRM transports between BAU and project landscapes using ActiveControl? CHECK
Allow business users to continue with their established approvals process, whilst enabling SAP technical teams to improve the quality of their SAP change and the consistency of their SAP landscapes? CHECK!
Result? A happy customer who is automating more processes than ever before, with all the benefits that can bring.
More and more of the users of SAP software that we speak to are interested in integrating their change control processes with other tooling, for a variety of reasons.
If you’re one of them and would like to understand how ActiveControl and its integration capabilities can help automate and streamline your SAP processes, contact us to learn more.
