I have seen it many times – despite best efforts to correctly manage changes into SAP systems, there will always be the situation where a transport has been imported accidentally that causes an unplanned outage or prevents a key business team from working. If it happened to you what would you do?

SAP’s advice is to create a new transport in your development system that reverses the original change. A logical option but how long will that take you in reality?

Our typical process would follow the 5 general steps of:

1. Identify the exact cause of the outage
2. Make the appropriate change unit test and release
3. Promote the change to your test environment
4. Time allowing, carry out testing
5. Sign-off and migrate to production.

Whilst the process above is running its course, the pressure on your senior management and IT departments is extreme because of the following concerns –

What impact and cost is this outage having on the business?

I have seen from past business cases that when your SAP system fails the effects can be vast: loss of sales, delivery problems, failed production runs, inability to service customers and a negative impact on business reputation.

We have one customer with a global brand who estimated that the impact of their SAP system being unavailable to one particular country for one day would mean over $2 million off their bottom line. In today’s economic climate that is a risk they are unwilling to make and have put tools in place to ensure that it will not happen.

Our solution ActiveControl enables businesses to complete all the steps above whilst minimizing the impact on critical business processes by using a unique Back Out Function for SAP systems.

Assisted Back Out allows users to import a transport or a release of multiple transports, for a given SAP instance, to create a back-up copy of those transports and if disaster strikes, a back-out process is invoked within the tool to re-instate the pre-import status of the SAP instance within a few minutes.

The benefits of this are vast but I would say the two main ones are:

1. It allows business users to continue their normal operations with minimal impact and restoration of business confidence
2. The IT department is given the time needed to investigate and resolve the cause of the incident in a controlled manner.

If you are interested in looking further into how SAP Transport Back Out can provide that extra layer of insurance for your SAP production systems, please contact us for a demonstration of this functionality.