Retrofit. Dual Maintenance. Rekeying.

Three different terms for a vital activity in any multi-track (or ‘N+N’) SAP landscape setup – that of ensuring your project landscapes are kept up to date with all the SAP changes that have been delivered through your BAU landscape.

Three terms that can bring even the hardest SAP development and functional consultants to tears.

Achieving Continuous SAP Development

If you work in the BAU team delivering incident fixes and changes to Production to challenging SLAs, the last thing you want to do is to then have to manually recreate all your changes in another development system in which you don’t even normally work.

Similarly, if you work in a project team delivering a project to tight deadlines, the last thing you want to have to do is manually recreate BAU changes that you were not involved in your project development system.

In my own past experience nobody ever wanted to take ownership for the activity that is vital if you’re going to avoid unnecessary business issues (and ultimately more work for the same people) when a project goes live in production.

Worse, it is often the case that the team that does eventually pick up the responsibility does not do it 100% effectively because in their (tearful) eyes, it is not really their main priority. In one of my previous roles, I was responsible for managing maintenance of multiple development tracks in a large SAP programme.

Apart from going spreadsheet blind (again), it was rather a thankless task trying to get an already overloaded project team to rekey BAU changes they knew nothing about, let alone to make sure that they actually did it correctly.

Ultimately the rekeying exercise got done at the last minute (ironically after the project testing phase had been signed off) and became no more than a box-ticking exercise – we just needed to be able to demonstrate as part of the go/no-go decision for project go-live that all originating BAU transports had a corresponding rekey transport in the project landscape.

Whether those rekey transports actually contained all the changes delivered in the BAU landscape is of course anybody’s guess.

My guess (based on the number of unexpected issues that invariably occurred when the projects did actually cutover into BAU) is that it was unfortunately not always the case.

So how can I eliminate manual rekeying and lower SAP development cost?

ActiveControl helps lots of SAP BAU and Project teams focus on their main priorities, namely delivering BAU change within SLA and delivering projects on schedule.

ActiveControl’s Merge capability automatically recreates all the BAU changes in your project landscapes, freeing up your BAU and Project teams to focus on those main priorities (and avoiding their eyes filling up with tears).

Our customers tell us that around 95% of BAU changes have no conflicts with project changes. ActiveControl’s conflict analysis informs them about the that 5% do.

This means they can automatically merge the 95% with a few mouse clicks, and focus their time on deciding what to do with the remaining 5%. E.g. whether to overwrite the project changes with the conflicting BAU changes etc, or something else.

Moreover, the Conflict Analysis tells you exactly where the conflicts are, avoiding the need for manual analysis (and the associated risk of human error of it not being done properly).

Interested in finding out more how ActiveControl can help you run your multi-track SAP landscape more efficiently and help your SAP organization move towards more continuous SAP delivery?

Request a demo to learn how to achieve greater consistency and automation in your multi-track SAP estate.