Safely Deliver Complex SAP Application Change

ActiveControl makes manual migration of application change through your SAP landscape a thing of the past by automating more than 90% of manual activities, including build, approval and deployment.

Automatic deployment of SAP transports, and even non-SAP changes, avoids reliance on manual intervention by the Basis team and ensures that only approved changes are imported. ActiveControl gives you the opportunity to automate and orchestrate cross-system deployments; activities that must be performed manually can also be included in the deployment sequence to ensure that automated delivery doesn’t move on until all necessary actions have been taken. Transports are automatically sequenced to eliminate overwrites, overtakes and dependency issues – capability which also supports agile development through dynamic drag-and-drop prioritization of planned changes and associated transports.

Our release automation technology supports both traditional on-premise infrastructure and more modern, cloud-based environments. Add any local, cloud or virtualized SAP system into a transport path, then automatically queue up and import all missing transports to update the system.

ActiveControl streamlines and automates approval of SAP change, eliminating delivery bottlenecks and storing a comprehensive audit trail in a ‘single source of truth’. It provides contextual information – notably from a comprehensive suite of automatic code analyzers – that helps you consciously approve changes. An easy-to-use web interface allows fast, independent access from any device, so that approvals don’t put a brake on continuous delivery processes. SAP GUI and Windows GUI options are also available for alternative workflows.

A powerful Rules Engine makes approval workflows flexible and fully configurable, so your change process can be precisely modeled, enforced and audited to meet governance and compliance needs. Notifications are automatically sent to the relevant individuals as soon as a change requires approval or testing. A direct link to the specific change (and all associated information) is provided so it can be actioned instantly.

Powerful metadata fields allow you to categorize changes, combining with configurable custom fields to give you the means to develop the perfect SAP change management process. ActiveControl maintains a full history of all actions performed on every change (such as approvals, imports, errors and amendments), making governance and compliance with regulatory requirements easier than ever.

ActiveControl integrates your SAP change management process with the wider software tool chain used to manage software development across the rest of your enterprise. An integrated tool chain enables more efficient customer support, coordinated agile development, and adoption of DevOps for SAP, providing the means to integrate SAP into a truly automated, multiple-application continuous delivery pipeline.

ActiveControl’s open APIs provide the flexibility to cope with all kinds of integration scenarios. Outbound interactions (including queuing, re-sends, error processing and reporting) and inbound communication are managed through exposure of several fully documented APIs and web-services.

A range of integration options – a low-code Node-RED framework, out-of-the-box configurations, or your own custom API-based solutions – let you connect SAP development to other tools like Jira, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps and Slack, so that SAP systems become part of your global IT landscape and best-practice delivery processes. ActiveControl also integrates with the Eclipse IDE, providing the means to automate the delivery of cloud-based development projects as you look to adopt the SAP Business Technology Platform.

Visibility and cross-team communication are critical aspects of a DevOps approach, so ActiveControl’s Web UI features a project dashboard that provides all stakeholders with a central point for collaboration across projects, changes, transports, and objects, regardless of their geographical location or functional responsibility.

It’s easy for teams to keep up to date on what their colleagues are doing – wherever they’re located and whatever their role may be – thanks to a real-time feed that provides visibility of approvals, test results, emergency changes and other key events across your entire SAP landscape. Users gain the ability to log, follow, comment on and action business requirements and change requests throughout the change delivery process, all the way through to production.

Thanks to ActiveControl’s Node-RED integration framework it’s even possible to connect your SAP change management process to common collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams – critical in an era of greater remote working.

The traditional solution to production issues – identify the issue, develop a fix and move it through your SAP landscape as an emergency change – is slow and complicated, so arguably the single most desirable function in any change and release process is an ‘undo’ button.

ActiveControl’s patented BackOut function gives you the ability to reverse your transports and restore a system to a pre-import state, providing a final layer of insurance against expensive business downtime. BackOut preserves sequencing when backing out an import run, ensuring that the order in which changes are reversed is the exact opposite of the import order.

BackOut also provides support for a DevOps approach, where the speed at which you can recover from failure (Mean Time To Recovery, or MTTR) is often considered just as important as deployment frequency or change failure rate.