From the CEO

First you celebrate New Year, then you blink and it is Easter. The Easter holidays are heartily celebrated here in Australia and so let me wish you a happy Easter holiday on behalf of all of us at RSC.

In this newsletter we bring you SAP change control articles on the true costs of managing change across SAP environments and justifying change control, technology implementation and provide you some statistics around the new SAP CTS+ functionality. Also included is our Rev-Trac Tips and Tricks and Recently Asked Rev-Trac Question sections.

By the way, ASUG and SAPPHIRE® 2008 is approaching. Why not call in and see us at Booth #778 if you are attending.

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

Manual SAP Change Control – it is as hard as you think it is!

Recently, RSC has gathered SAP change control statistics from a number of its average sized customers and you may be interested in what has been revealed.

Keep in mind the following are averages for companies with 3 – 10 landscapes and so if your environment is at the upper end of the scale, or indeed larger, you need only extrapolate the statistics to begin to understand the potential number of manual tasks that are being completed annually and the potential number of associated human errors resulting your own change control process management.

Consider the following:

• The time taken to obtain each approval signature
• The time taken to perform each migration
• The time taken to maintain the associations between individual transports and the actual change request
• The time taken to ensure the proper sequencing of transports
• The time taken to train team members on the different change control processes
• The time taken to record change activities associated with each transport for audit purposes
• The potential for production events due to human error

Also, consider that these statistics do not include Java and other non-SAP transportable change packages or change requests. In some SAP environments, these numbers could almost double if XI, NetWeaver, MDM, SRM, CRM and Enterprise Portal Java stacks and non-SAP changes were taken into consideration.

SAP change control is indeed getting harder every day and perhaps it is time to consider a SAP change control technology to help reduce the risks and lower the costs associated with managing SAP change.

By the way... if you happen to be attending the SAP Administration and Infrastructure Conference in Orlando next week, you may want to hear RSC's Rick Porter speaking on the subject of SAP change control. Included will be tips on selecting the right tools for your organization and other options to consider.

NetWeaver 7 and CTS+

RSC conducted the first in its "Managing Change in Complex SAP Landscapes" webinar series in February '08 on managing SAP change in the mixed SAP ABAP and Java environment. During the webinar RSC discussed a number of the emerging complications associated with, and the kinds of risks inherent in, managing both Java and ABAP changes in dual or single stack scenarios. These complications included, among several others, the common situation where Java change requirements are supported by an ABAP change elsewhere and the significant increase in risks associated with the increased number of overall changes.

The webinar covered how the use of CTS+ can alleviate some of these complications and simplify the deployment and coordination of integrated mixed stack technology changes by providing a single method of deploying all SAP changes via one mechanism, CTS. The webinar also looked into some of the limitations of CTS+ such as not providing collision and sequence management, inability to fully synchronize all dependent ABAP and Java changes, and its shortcomings regarding dependency management and change request management. This indicates that in order to leverage the full benefits of CTS+, an SAP change control technology like Rev-Trac is required.

A webinar poll question revealed that over 60% of SAP user organizations are currently using SAP Java technology based applications with 56% planning on using CTS+ productively within the next 12 months. Unfortunately, the remaining 44% are not planning to for at least 12 – 24 months.

These results indicate that SAP users have embraced the use of mixed technology stacks into their traditionally ABAP only applications and many in the near future plan to introduce CTS+ as the method to simplify the deployment of objects from various workbenches.

For more information, download RSC's whitepaper on "Rev-Trac and CTS+: Extending Transport Management to the SAP Java Environment".

[ Download whitepaper >> ]

Rev-Trac Tips and Tricks

Backing up your Rev-Trac configuration prior to making changes

Are you concerned that when you make a change to the Rev-Trac configuration you may inadvertently corrupt the current configuration and not be able to recover back to a state prior to making the current change?

Prior to making any change you can backup your entire Rev-Trac configuration to a tab delimited text file by selecting:

     Configuration > Tools > Download / upload configuration

Accept all defaults and save the output file in case of emergency

If you should need to restore the configuration from this download file you can do so by, selecting:

     Configuration > Tools > Download / upload configuration

Action:

     Upload configuration (Presentation server)

Upload Configuration Option:

     Delete Existing and Add New Configuration Table entries

Please be aware that if you restore the settings from the backup file, all of your current settings will be overwritten with the settings stored in the downloaded file.

Downloading your configuration prior to making major configuration changes is a good habit to get into.

Rev-Trac Q and A

Is it possible to customise the Rev-Trac request details screen?

It is possible to customise the request details screen in various ways. For example:

• You can add custom Rev-Trac request fields to the request details screen and, if desired, display these fields on their own tabs
• You can control the behaviour of, and access to, individual fields on the request details screen, including custom Rev-Trac request fields

For more detail on this topic, see the section "Customising Rev-Trac screens" in the current version of the Rev-Trac Administrator guide available for download from the support area of the RSC website.