We’re working in partnership with another leading SAP automation provider to help SAP users to accelerate and de-risk modernization of legacy systems.
June 2020 has been a busy time at Basis Technologies. Hot on the heels of our recent update to ActiveControl, our leading SAP DevOps automation software, we’ve got more exciting news in the form of a newly-announced partnership initiative with smartShift Technologies that will enable SAP users to accelerate and de-risk modernization of legacy systems.
Like Basis Technologies, smartShift are experts in SAP automation, so it made sense for the two organizations to team up in order to share our common vision of bringing a DevOps mindset and automation to Enterprise IT.
In particular, we’ve worked together to create a uniquely integrated, best practice approach to ‘dual maintenance’ of ECC and S/4HANA that allows companies of any size to deliver faster, safer, more cost-effective S/4HANA transformation projects.
Accelerating time to value in S/4HANA transformation
‘Dual maintenance’ refers to the phase of an ECC-to-S/4HANA migration when you need to maintain concurrent ECC and S/4 landscapes that support the same parts of the business. It’s likely to last for months at least, and possibly for years if you’re planning a phased migration. One Basis Technologies customer has a seven-year dual maintenance plan!
Effective dual maintenance is vital for S/4HANA success but can be an extremely difficult task, especially in large SAP estates. It essentially features all the transport management complexity of an N+n ECC project, but with some additional complications:
- S/4HANA is not equal to ECC. There are new, changed and similar components and the user interface has changed (Fiori), so you can’t just deploy all ECC transports directly into your S/4 systems;
- S/4 is a ‘moving target’, with regular new releases that contain new and improved business functions.
This extra level of complexity makes a manual approach even more slow, error-prone, expensive and opaque than usual. Challenges abound. How can you even identify which changes matter to both systems? How can you update ECC custom code quickly and without error, so that it runs correctly on S/4? How can you synchronize all code and configuration changes across both landscapes? And so on.
That’s where integrated automation from Basis Technologies and smartShift comes in. First of all, ActiveControl automates almost every aspect of the SAP change and release process. We’ve seen our customers eliminate up to ninety-five percent of manual effort – a massive saving. During an S/4HANA transition ActiveControl automatically, safely and efficiently deploys every relevant ECC change to S/4HANA systems while maintaining a full and comprehensive audit history.
smartRetrofit plays a key role in this process – that of automatically updating custom code to meet the technical requirements of S/4HANA as it is merged into the new systems. More than ninety percent of code can automatically be remediated in this way without any end user intervention – a significant benefit given the thousands of monthly transports involved in a typical cross-release dual maintenance process.
And there’s more…
All that said, adoption of S/4HANA is not the only SAP transformation project where the combination of ActiveControl and smartRetrofit delivers positive outcomes. Other scenarios that can benefit include migration to HANA DB and replatforming in the cloud. Whatever your requirement, the combination of two market-leading automation solutions results in faster, more efficient execution with less manual effort, less risk of disruption and complete transparency.
We’re looking forward to working with the smartShift team to bring the significant benefits of automation to more SAP users around the world. If you’d like to learn more about how ActiveControl can transform the way you manage SAP change and accelerate time to value in your S/4HANA transition, please get in touch.
