Achieve Continuous Improvement in Your SAP Environment

ActiveControl provides a suite of metrics that can be used to assess and improve performance on an on-going basis, supporting the feedback loops that are core to Agile and DevOps approaches. Performance insight is essential when focusing on rapid, incremental delivery of specific goals: it allows objective milestones to be set and can be used to track continuous improvement.

Granular information about your SAP development and delivery processes is available, along with the means to create at-a-glance dashboards. Review data in the SAP GUI, import it into other visualization tools, or dig right into the spreadsheets.

As quality and delivery speed improve – tracked through metrics such as cycle time and rework rate – costs are lowered, risk is reduced, and customers are ultimately more satisfied.

ActiveControl delivers thirty-five pre-defined, configurable metrics across five key areas: velocity, cycle times, rework and waste, work in progress and approval times.

Velocity shows just how much new and updated functionality is being delivered into your SAP systems; cycle times are a measure of the total time it takes to deliver something new; rework and waste metrics measure the efficiency of your development and delivery processes; work in progress metrics provide visibility of your investment in development that has yet to be delivered; and approval times measure the effectiveness of approval processes, highlighting bottlenecks that could delay delivery.

Data from all of these categories can be combined to provide the view that best helps to drive improvement in your business, and save both time and money.

Teams are often looking for ways to improve overall performance and develop their SAP optimization strategy. Which supplier is delivering the most value? Which of your SAP projects were most efficient and cost-effective? ActiveControl acts as a benchmarking tool for SAP development, to help you answer these questions and more.

Detailed, granular output provides the means to build performance metrics into supplier contracts and assess ongoing performance, while internal best practice and high-performing teams can be identified.

Present data across any date range and refine the results using a variety of categories, including SAP module (e.g. ECC, BW), SAP system (Dev, QA, etc), functional area (e.g. finance) and supplier. Categories can be combined to provide specific insights, so that you can create the individual reports that are most appropriate to the teams you want to compare and benchmarks you need to set.

ActiveControl provides a means to close the ‘visibility gap’ that can exist between IT/Operations teams and the rest of the business, helping to avoid confusion and ensure that senior management receive the most accurate picture possible. Near real-time data is available and can be refreshed on a daily basis to give the latest view. Reports can be generated in a standard SAP GUI, or data can be exported for creation of dashboards in other common data visualization tools such as QlikView and Tableau. Dashboards can also be presented in the ActiveControl Web UI using Microsoft’s PowerBI tool.

What’s more, historical data can be used to improve planning of future projects. Required resource and duration can be more accurately predicted based on past performance; the same data can highlight which earlier projects have gone well, helping to identify approaches that can mitigate risk and promote best practice in future.

ActiveControl’s performance monitoring is simple to set up, connecting directly to an existing instance of Solution Manager running on your SAP system.

This means that while it is fully compatible with new SAP platforms such as S/4HANA, it’s equally capable of providing insight into an on-premise system running on HANA, or older SAP releases.

Whether you’re undertaking a platform transition and wish to monitor performance levels during what can be a disruptive and resource-intensive process, or you’ve made the move already and would like to compare SAP development metrics before and after the shift, ActiveControl can provide the insight that you need.