In one of my old jobs, I pretty much lived in Microsoft Excel.
Every day, five days a week – and sometimes even weekends – I had to keep a single spreadsheet up to date.
It was actually a really, really important spreadsheet. It was the excel Build List for a major SAP Programme at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies.
Every transport and every non-transportable change (aka Red Book Entries and Manual Activities) relating to a project release had to be recorded and tracked in a Build List to make sure everything got deployed through the landscape in the correct sequence.
It was an exciting project to work on, but definitely not an exciting job.
Not only does the Build List report do all the sequencing automatically (and also avoid the risk of any transports or manual changes being forgotten about) – it even predicts how long each transport and manual activity will take to deploy based on the time it took in the previous system deployment.
This means that Change & Release Managers and Project Managers can accurately forecast when all the SAP developers and functional consultants will be needed in the next cutover drop to support their transports, perform any manual activities and do any appropriate post-import checks.
And it’s real time.
And it’s accessible by everybody.
Anybody with access to ActiveControl can run the Build Report at any point in time to get an accurate estimate of how long an upcoming cutover is likely to take. And when the big day of the project drop arrives, it gives a real-time view of whether the build is progressing on schedule or not.
Imagine you’re doing a release with 1000+ SAP transports this coming weekend…
Do you as an SAP Change and Release Manager really want to go ‘spreadsheet-blind’ manually consolidating a Build List based on STMS import histories (and any manual steps which are not recorded in SAP) – whilst never really being 100% confident that it is 100% accurate?
Do you as an SAP Project Manager really want to be second-guessing which of your expensive SAP resources will be needed and when over the weekend?
Or would you rather plug in the date/time you intend to start your project build drop, click a few buttons, and wait a few seconds for your Build List to be automatically generated for you?
I could have avoided a lot of late nights and weekend work if I had used the ActiveControl Build List Report a few years ago.
To learn more about ActiveControl, book a demo now.
