Simplifying SAP Change Control – Release Management Advancements in Rev-Trac 7 (Part III of III)

This is an exciting week for all of us here at RSC because on November 30 we’ll start rolling out the highly anticipated Rev-Trac 7. So for my final article of the year, I’d like to offer an advance look by showing how it can cut release management overhead time by up to 80%. That’s not a typo; it really is an incredible change control advance, especially if your company uses a Release Management strategy to deliver SAP software changes to your business customers.

Here’s a typical example – Rev-Trac 7 streamlines release management from 11 clicks down to only 2.

You create a Rev-Trac 7 change request representing a large unit of work. Call it your release – it has a one-to-many relationship with individual project changes. This avoids manually creating a reference between Rev-Trac requests, something you might have had to do hundreds of times per release. Your change request has transports attached with individual changes to be approved, tested, etc. When all this work is finished, the changes are copied onto the single Rev-Trac request and they all move together into production or a pre-production system. In effect, a group of approved transports gets rolled out at once in the optimum order.

Clearly, there’s normally a lot of unavoidable manual work between a release and its changes. What Rev-Trac 7 does is further automate the process by introducing the formal release request type – requests with specified attributes will all be treated in a particular way. Further, a Rev-Trac request type determines what changes can be on a release.

Rev-Trac 7’s new Release Workbench utility provides drag-and-drop functionality that can display Rev-Trac requests on the left side and all the applicable changes on the right side. You can select change requests (like files) and drop them onto a release (the folder.) When you save your changes, Rev Trac automatically creates a reference link and syncs the transport onto the release, saving many manual steps. This also works bidirectionally, so you can remove a change from the release and know any links will be updated.

This all makes releases faster and safer. Improved release management gives you better visibility into the releases themselves. You can also lock down a release according to its status – Rev-Trac enforcement will not allow anyone to add to a release once it is marked for production, making multiple change packages secure with no individual lock downs needed.

If a release is out of sync or if the number of transports doesn’t equal the number expected in the release, Rev-Trac 7 notifies you via the release management workbench. There’s no need for manual synch verification.

The integrated Release Workbench lets you drill down to details by selecting one or more releases. You can perform Rev-Trac OOPS checks right from the workbench.

Release Management is but one transformative improvement in the new Rev-Trac 7 release. Rev-Trac 7 provides a Best Practice approach and standardizes how to manage releases.