How UCT streamlined its acquisition strategy and ensured continuous innovation during S/4HANA upgrades with Basis Technologies
Overview
Embracing change with confidence
Ultra Clean Technology (UCT) is a leading developer & supplier of subsystems, components, & ultra-high purity cleaning & analytical services primarily for the semiconductor manufacturing industry. Founded in 1991, UCT has grown to serve customers around the world with more than 7,000 employees globally. UCT generated revenues in excess of USD 2.1 billion in 2021.
Challenges
Too many major production incidents
Slow delivery of change and manual spreadsheet approach making management difficult
Significant business disruption due to operational change freezes
Solution
Built specifically for SAP, ActiveControl delivers a fundamentally new approach that enables companies to adopt agile development, DevOps and Continuous Delivery in SAP environments
ActiveControl’s automation features helped helped UCT accelerate change, reduce risk and lower costs
Automation accelerated delivery of change by removing manual effort and associated risk, enabling UCT to safely deploy innovation on demand
Results
Significant decrease in production downtime, ensuring business continuity
Faster delivery of SAP change for greater business output
‘Single source of truth’ minimized audit effort, freeing up time for other tasks
Customer testimonial
Ensuring business continuity with Basis Technologies
UCT used ActiveControl to eliminate manual effort and ensure business agility during S/4HANA upgrades
Executive Summary
UCT has grown significantly since 2015, driven by a strong expansion strategy and surging global demand in the semiconductor industry. The company realized its existing SAP change management approach was preventing the business from delivering innovation at the speed it required, exposing them to risk of significant business disruption. UCT chose ActiveControl from Basis Technologies for greater business agility to support the company’s growth strategy.
The Challenge
UCT continues to have a strong global expansion strategy, and its original SAP change management approach was not designed to support such rapid growth.
Employing multiple SAP modules across its SAP landscape to support several areas of the company including Engineering, Manufacturing & Operations, Customer Business Management, Quality, Supply Chain & Materials, and Finance & Reporting, UCT’s landscape is set up in a four-system pipeline consisting of Dev, QA, Pre-Prod & Production, running on S/4HANA, BW/4HANA.
UCT realized its team needed automation that would seamlessly manage retrofitting across multiple development landscapes and back out changes if there was an error, eliminating production downtime.
The Solution
ActiveControl’s powerful DevOps automation capabilities proved to be the answer to UCT’s business challenges. With ActiveControl in place, nearly all manual effort – and associated error and risk – was eliminated and processes like transport sequencing, dependency management, and code conflict resolution were highly automated, enabling a faster, safer, more cost-effective approach.
One of the largest challenges for UCT was in transport dependencies, due to multiple new SAP systems to integrate and a globally dispersed DevOps team. ActiveControl’s Dependency Checks solved this challenge by automatically scanning transports for any missing objects, ensuring proper sequencing while importing changes into production.
ActiveControl also prepared UCT to effortlessly scale their SAP environment to add additional landscapes and applications. The scalable nature of ActiveControl delivers value in almost any landscape configuration whether simple or complex, on ECC or S/4HANA. The same powerful automation features that are helping UCT accelerate change, reduce risk and lower costs in their current environment are also laying the foundation for the company to add more systems.
While trying to consolidate systems and manage these ongoing projects, UCT also had to apply an S/4HANA update. Using ActiveControl to merge changes across systems and keep development tracks in sync, UCT was able to deploy the update quickly without disrupting any other projects. UCT plans to update S/4HANA yearly to get maximum value from the new platform, and can now do so with confidence while eliminating risk.
Ultimately, UCT successfully adopted DevOps automation for SAP to eliminate manual effort and ensure business agility during critical projects and S/4HANA upgrades.
The Result
UCT’s pace of growth and innovation was previously being hindered by risky and inefficient manual SAP change processes – limiting their ability to scale their SAP landscape to deliver projects faster and posing unnecessary risks to business operations.
Automation through ActiveControl accelerated delivery of change for UCT by removing manual effort and associated risk, enabling the business to safely deploy innovation on demand.
ActiveControl’s Merge functionality helped them seamlessly manage multiple development tracks so they could safely and efficiently consolidate their many separate ERP landscapes into a unified environment to support a more agile organization.
Thanks to ActiveControl, UCT saw a significant decrease in production downtime – ensuring business continuity – and significantly faster delivery of SAP change for greater business output. A ‘single source of truth’ through ActiveControl minimized audit effort, freeing up the team’s time for other tasks within the business.
