From the CEO

June is our end of financial year month in Australia, and the period in which we look backwards and forwards at the same time to analyse and predict.

I am very happy to report that both directions look excellent!

It has been our pleasure to bring on so many new customers this year and, with SAP change control becoming the business critical issue we always knew it was, it looks like we will be bringing on many more in the coming year.

Earlier this year Rick Porter, Vice President Business Development, put together a session for the WIS SAP Insider SAP Administrator and Infrastructure Conference on third party SAP change control tools and their selection. Unfortunately he was unable to present and Joe Schenk of QA Edge stood in for him. By all reports it was a well received session and you can download a copy via the link below.

Be sure also to read our other articles and see the Rev-Trac tips and tricks for this month.

As always, we continue to lead innovation in SAP change control, developing software solutions to boost your competitive edge with SAP.

David Drake, CEO and Founder

Improve the way you communicate and manage change: A tool-based recipe for success

As mentioned, earlier this year Rick Porter, Vice President Business Development put together a session for the WIS SAP Insider SAP Administrator and Infrastructure Conference on third party SAP change control tools and their selection.

The session offered a brief review of the wide variety of change control tools available and specific guidelines to follow to implement new change control processes or improve existing ones. It also explored the latest change control tools and processes that are gaining acceptance and showed which third-party products are most helpful for managing change across global SAP systems.

Attendees also heard how to manage parallel change effectively to prevent conflicts and resulting production events and heard how a well-defined and well-managed change control process could assist with Sarbanes-Oxley and other regulatory compliance issues, as well as prevent change conflicts and reduce unwanted troubleshooting and system downtime.

Additionally, several tips on selecting the right change control product for your organization, and managing the ever-increasing volume of changes from change teams, were provided.

If you are considering a change control technology, then this presentation is a must read.

[ Download a copy of the presentation >> ]

Why Your Organisation Should Be Using An SAP Change Control Technology

The pressures on SAP change teams to turnover high volumes of change requests without risk of audit failure and production system damage are ever-increasing. These pressures are caused by:

• common support of multiple business entities and multiple SAP deployments across global regions
• growing numbers of new projects and major SAP change requests
• the need for compliance to internal and external change control processes
• increased use of SAP mixed stack technology

As a result, there is a reduction in confidence amongst change teams to deliver changes on time, on budget, and without incident, within an auditable process.

One response to these pressures is the use of SAP change control technology. Through the elimination of manual change control processes, SAP change teams will experience easier business process changes, higher levels of configuration and seamless integration with other systems.

[ More Reasons >> ]

Rev-Trac Tips and Tricks

Day to day admin

Since the release of Rev-Trac Support Package Stack 15 (SPS15) the Rev-Trac Administrator Guide has been modified to include a new section: Day to day admin.

This section of the guide is intended to assist a Rev-Trac administrator in keeping a tidy and smooth running system. It includes information on the following:

• Rev-Trac License Key Management
    - Requesting a license key
    - Loading a license key
    - Checking a license key
• The Rev-Trac health check report
    - Running the report
    - Reviewing the report output
• Running the Rev-Trac diagnostic utility
• Saving a copy of your current Rev-Trac configuration
• Archiving obsolete migration queue entries

A Rev-Trac administrator should familiarise themselves with the content of this section in the guide. It is worth ensuring that some of the procedures found under day to day admin are carried out on a regular basis.

The latest copy of the Rev-Trac 5.0 Administrator guide (SPS16) is available for download from the support area of the RSC website.

Rev-Trac Q and A

When I perform a check configuration in Rev-Trac why do I get the error 'Auto-Migration should not be alone in status'?

The Auto-Migration Approver is assigned to a post migration status to automate the confirmation of a successful migration e.g. 'In QA'.

If the approver is the only approver assigned to a status, the Check configuration utility will return an error.

Configuration > Check configuration > Check configuration

In this case it is required that an additional manual approver of the same approval type is assigned to the status.

The secondary approver will receive a workflow message advising that the post migration status requires manual approval in a case where the migration return code indicates errors or failure, causing the approval to fail. It will then be up to the manual approver to investigate any migration errors, and if necessary approve the post migration status.

The manual approver on a post migration status is also the only non-admin user who will have the authorisation to re-queue transports from a failed migration.

The manual approver on a post migration status is also the only non-admin user who will have the authorisation to re-queue transports from a failed migration.

For further information please consult the Rev-Trac Administrator Guide under the heading: Migration > Autoapproval

[ Ask a question >> ]