I recently caught up with an SAP support team manager at a customer who has been using Rev-Trac change control automation software for about 4 years.
At the time of implementing Rev-Trac, the customer was a “Green Field” SAP installation. This meant Rev-Trac was installed with the initial SAP systems and every transport from the very first development transport created has been tracked and change controlled using Rev-Trac.
I asked what some of the most valuable benefits were Rev-Trac had brought to the support team.
I expected something like OOPS, Extended Locking, Release Management Workbench, or another feature I considered valuable that we had specifically designed to meet the needs of SAP IT support teams.
However, the customer surprised me. It wasn’t one of these, or any other feature specifically designed to make a difference at all.
Rather the ability to track root causes of bugs and to quickly apply fixes due to the extensive change history recorded in Rev-Trac was the main benefit cited.
Something he termed “blue print mapping to help resolve bug fixes”. When I gave a puzzled look, the customer explained.
Because they had installed Rev-Trac before commencing any customization of any SAP system, the modification of every single object had been recorded and mapped to Rev-Trac requests with original specifications associated to each.
Any time a bug is discovered, the support manager could easily identify which Rev-Trac change request was used to provide the original business requirement, and any additional modification since.
This made it easy to identify when and how bugs might have been introduced into the system and quickly apply the correct fix.
The support manager revealed that by learning how bugs were introduced into the system, they could implement strategies and policies that minimized the number of incidents, and reduced the overall support costs.
This site has served as a great reference to the benefits of implementing Rev-Trac before any system build or a project undertaking.
Having the ability to analyze all object modification history along with the overall benefit automated change control brings from things like process enforcement and conflict detection has provided a level of control otherwise unavailable.
For more information on how Rev-Trac can help you with your root cause analysis of SAP issues, please feel free to reach out to our in-house experts.
