Transforming IT From a Blocker to an Enabler of Business Growth with ActiveControl 9.0

4 Principles for Removing Bottlenecks from SAP Change Delivery

As enterprises increasingly operate in a world of constant change, technology plays an ever-expanding role in driving business success.

According to Gartner, 89% of Board Directors say technology is embedded in all business growth strategies, yet only 35% have achieved or are on track to achieving the necessary digital transformation goals.

The pressure to transform IT from a blocker to an enabler of business growth has never been greater, so removing bottlenecks from processes across the IT landscape is fundamental to success. For many organizations, SAP is a crucial part of the IT ecosystem, driving business-critical operations across the enterprise and therefore should be included in modernization and transformation strategies.

However, the unique nature of SAP has often meant exclusion from these initiatives, leaving teams to rely on slow, outdated processes, thus reducing overall productivity.

By adopting four key principles, IT leaders can empower their teams to remove bottlenecks across the SAP change delivery process, enabling SAP to become a driver of business growth and transformation.

Agility: adapting SAP with the speed and efficiency the business requires

Delivering change in SAP systems is often slow, inefficient, and prone to errors which leads to project delays, additional operational costs, and missed business opportunities.

The key to unlocking greater agility in SAP is automating and modernizing these inefficient manual delivery processes with ActiveControl’s powerful change automation technology. ActiveControl eliminates up to 95% of manual efforts from SAP change and release processes and minimizes risk through rigorous analysis and controls.

ActiveControl’s powerful analyzers automatically assess impact, manage dependencies and enforce standardized processes. With customized delivery workflows teams can shift quality left, eliminating business disruption and enabling many of our customers to achieve 100% Production uptime.

With the recent release of ActiveControl 9.0, customers gain even more tools to improve responsiveness and business agility. Our most comprehensive quality control analysis capabilities have been streamlined to enable near instantaneous reporting on the most critical issues with upcoming deployments. This substantially reduces the time needed to review, repair and approve deployments, allowing companies to deliver change and adapt SAP on pace with business demands.

Visibility: aligning SAP to business goals through better resource planning

With the considerable amount of manual work required in traditional SAP change management, teams have limited visibility into the resources and requirements needed to deliver innovation. Without this information, long-term planning and reporting in SAP becomes challenging and difficult to align with the strategic needs of the business. This leads to project delays and opportunity costs for firms striving to maintain competitive advantage.

ActiveControl offers companies complete visibility and transparency by tracking every change and providing granular documentation for every action – what was done, who performed the task, when it happened, and more.

The more than 70 out-of-the box analyzers in ActiveControl have always offered users a way to shift development left for higher quality deployments, but now there are even more capabilities for more efficient resource planning.

Teams can now receive recommendations on the best time to deploy releases based on the impact the changes will have on the business. With visibility into what other tasks and objects are in use, teams can plan deployments at times when impact to the business will be minimal. This helps further mitigate the risk of business disruption by alerting users to dependency issues early in development and gives managers and decision makers a detailed, accurate view of the status of tasks and projects to better inform resource planning and reporting.

Flexibility: unlocking the full potential of SAP

With so many important aspects of the business relying on SAP, the process for approving changes can often be complicated and inflexible.

Change automation powered by ActiveControl provides companies with the flexibility needed to adapt SAP on-demand by streamlining processes and reducing the time it takes to build, test, approve, and deploy releases. With ActiveControl 9.0, the approvals workflows can be customized and streamlined even more to unlock greater efficiencies and speed when delivering SAP change, without sacrificing the stability and rigor of approvals.

We’ve already seen the power of these analyzers to detect problems and eliminate errors, but now firms have even more control over what the analyzers are looking for. Teams can customize what parts of the release to analyze so they aren’t wasting time following up on unnecessary analysis and known issues, enabling them to deliver value to the business sooner.

Usability: driving SAP into the future

The cloud has been a big part of digital transformation for years but many SAP customers have yet to move their landscapes to the platform of the future. With business-critical processes relying on the secure foundations of SAP infrastructure, continuity is paramount, and the risk of disruption or delay can deter organizations from embracing the transformation. To encourage customers to make the transition and to help them with the process, SAP recently launched its Business Technology Platform (BTP). BTP is all about giving IT organizations more options for managing their complex landscapes on-premises and in the cloud and many larger organizations, including several of our customers, are using BTP to adopt a hybrid landscape to achieve greater control and flexibility in their SAP environment.

The challenge is that although SAP promises moving to the cloud will unlock greater agility and potential for SAP, the reality is that most change management tools don’t offer the same capabilities in the cloud as they do for on-premises landscapes. This leaves companies struggling to manually manage change in the cloud environment, bringing with it all the same bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and risk of manual change management. The key to unlocking the potential offered in cloud-based environments is to ensure that resources, skills and processes surrounding the transition are consistent. With teams applying the same processes to change management throughout the transition, efficiency is protected, transformation is seamless, and value is optimized at every stage.

With ActiveControl 9.0, the same powerful automation capabilities that have helped firms unlock greater agility, flexibility, and visibility in SAP are available for the BTP cloud environment. Companies can now adopt a fully automated end-to-end SAP change management pipeline that removes manual effort, time, and risk, with full support for hybrid environments.

Conclusion

With the need to innovate at pace to ensure competitive advantage, SAP must be included in modernization initiatives. Automated SAP change delivery can give companies the speed, agility and flexibility they need to deliver on critical business strategy. ActiveControl has been helping organizations modernize SAP change management and adopt DevOps for more than 20 years. Contact us today for a free demo of ActiveControl 9.0.