Today, with cut throat competition governing the industry and more and more competitors getting added to the list each day, agility in a business has become one of the driving forces for its growth and expansion. A slow pace of change in SAP automation can, however, become a hurdle in this process of businesses trying to stay ahead of the game. It’s time for tech visionaries and IT leaders to accelerate change and improve their business agility.
With varying customer expectations, technological development and digital transformation, businesses are under pressure to be faster, more customer-centric and innovative. How well your business responds to these changes will determine whether its future is bright or bland.
The Power of Transformation Lies with IT Leaders
IT leaders play a key role in empowering the business to keep up with the changes in technology. Cisco, PTC, National Bank of Canada, and Vistaprint are some examples which reduced their lead time up to 90%, critical defects up to 40% and gained up to 14% improvement in Defect Removal Efficiency, with strong leadership heading the agile transformation for these companies.
On the other hand, companies like Avon, Lidl and Levi Strauss faced disastrous failures in SAP projects resulting in hefty losses up to $125 million and charges up to $192.5M, which put a break in the companies’ ability to invest in innovation, expansion and growth.
As an IT leader heading the SAP landscape at your company, how can you ensure that your business swiftly adapts to the change?
Go With the SAP Flow
Though it’s essential for the business, the SAP transformation can be extremely slow due to its unique architecture. If the business aims to move faster, SAP automation can pose as a serious obstacle instead of being the enabling platform that it is supposed to be.
SAP Change Management can be improved by incorporating Native SAP DevOps tools into the SDLC.
Achieve What You Envision
As an IT leader, you must look beyond the simple efficiency gains and cost savings to determine how changes can make the SAP process more efficient and deliver better value to the company.
With added value from continuous improvements, SAP systems can result in significant rewards to both the finance department and the company as a whole.
1. Amplify Team Efficiency
Whenever a change in SAP is made, you have to manually move it to a QA environment first, and then into Pre-Production and Production. It can be difficult to keep this process working smoothly if teams work remotely or many basis admins are not available.
You can reduce the manual burden on your basis admins with the help of tools to automate SAP transport deployment and move changes through your SAP development environment faster, rapidly bringing new features to functional users.
2. Increase Quality Without Increasing Effort
It is vital that the changes supporting your strategic business goals do not disrupt the business during deployment. A high quality R2D process ensures that poor changes don’t make their way into production systems by incorporating automated checks at every step of the process. You can achieve high quality without increasing the efforts by analyzing each and every transport content in detail. A belt-and-braces R2D process ensures that true release quality is maintained by backing out any transports that don’t behave as per the plan, allowing you to minimize your mean time-to-recovery.
3. Speed Up Approvals Without Risks
SAP landscape witnesses thousands of changes each year making proper documentation, approval and impact assessments crucial. These processes reduce not only the risk of changes breaking vital systems but also come with their own set of drawbacks. They can considerably slow down the change process and sometimes even add a significant cost to the process.
It’s hard to safely remove any of these approval processes without suffering greater risk, but with the right automation in place, one can accelerate them to ensure faster change delivery.
4. Understand the True Cost of Change
It is quite improbable that a SAP change will make its way from Development to Production unscarred. Changes are bound to be sent back for revisions, sometimes at multiple instances, before landing in the hands of the user.
Revision is unavoidable during development, but if you cannot check and measure it, you can easily miss out on easy opportunities to improve the overall development processes and accelerate the pace of change in your SAP environment.
With the right SAP automation tools in place, businesses can transform their entire game. All you need as an IT leader is to adopt a ‘release when ready’ mindset and move to a system where changes can be safely deployed to attain your company’s strategic goals.
About ReleaseOwl
ReleaseOwl is the first cloud-native DevOps platform built for SAP. ReleaseOwl automates change and transport management with orchestrated workflows, CI/CD pipelines, and Immediate deployments to sub-accounts. ReleaseOwl is deployable both on Cloud and On-premises.
With ReleaseOwl, SAP Customers will be able to ship, collaborate and repeat.
SAP is basically a Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software that tracks the interaction of customers & businesses and companies use SAP as it provides the inventory management in a better way, decrease the cost of raw materials, increase the profit.
Basically, SAP manages the whole industry’s everyday operations in the system with the help of several SAP modules.
