chARM? CALM? Can someone help?

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our webinar, charm, calm, can someone help? My name is Maria Robinson, and I work at APUs Labs. And today with me, I have Chen Kennedy from RevTrack. So this webinar is really the last piece of the puzzle in our dev DevOps series that we've been, hosting for the past month and a half. We first started with a conversation about DevOps in SAP and how our companies can become more agile in developing and testing. Then we went into detail of a test automation, and we spoke about test automation and the right data test data, in our previous webinar. And today, we're gonna see all about change management and transfer management, which is also a key, part of this process and really, help us, make the entire process more agile. So a few, housekeeping items be before we continue. The webinar is being recorded, so we're gonna send you, the recording after the event so you can watch it again or share it with your colleagues. The lines will be muted, but you have a question box on your screen. So if at any point you wanna answer any questions, you're more than welcome to do so. Today, we only have half an hour, so we might not be able to, do the live q and a, but we will make sure to follow-up with you after the webinar via email. So now I'm just going to say a few words about who is Epis Labs just, because I've seen there are a few, new names in the audience. So at Epis Labs, we really, we love challenges, and we love helping solving problems. So this is what we like to do for our clients. We love to solve business challenges. We have a wide range of solutions and services from, day to day s SAP HCM reporting to sunset legacy data. And, of course, one of the main topics of this, webinar series is provisioning quality test data. So this is us. We have a ninety seven percent client renewal rate, which we're really proud of because it shows that we partner with our clients to it's a partnership to solve the whatever challenges they might have in their SAP space. And we have a multilingual in house global support that is there twenty four seven for, to support our clients throughout any challenges and their journey in SAP. We're a proud member of Group Elephant. This is a group of companies we're part of, and we all commit to donate one percent of our annual revenue to ERP, which is our nonprofit organization that helps elephant rhinos and people in Africa. Right. So without further ado, I'm just gonna hand over to my colleague, Shane. Thank you very much for being here with us today. Please ask questions. And, yeah, I hope you enjoy. Thanks a lot. Shane, over to you. Thank you, Maria. Thanks for that, introduction, to FU Slabs. I'd like to do something similar for RevTrack, for the attendees on the call who aren't quite familiar, with RevTrack, who we are or what we do. So, essentially, RevTrack is an SAP technical change automation and DevOps orchestration platform. We help some of the world's largest and most complex SAP using organizations deliver more SAP change faster and safer. We were founded in nineteen ninety seven, and we're based out of Melbourne, Australia, which is where I'm recording for, from this evening. We are a SAP partner, software partner since, two thousand and two. We do have that long standing relationship, with SAP that's continuing to grow, which is very exciting for us. And we do have that deep expertise in the space of SAP change management. In our twenty seven years, we have grown to, over two hundred and twenty customers around the world. Like I said, some of the most complex, high compliance, mission critical, SAP environments across the globe, and we are currently used by over sixty thousand users. As you can see, by the g two banners on the top of the screen, our customers consistently, rate us highly for, things like, you know, we remove manual effort, we reduce risk, and we ensure that SAP changes are delivered, yeah, faster and safer, for many years now. So, that's who RevTrack are. For people on the call that do know us, thank you so much for joining, and excited to chat about today's topic, which is charm and calm. Before we get into that, I would like to just set a bit of the scene about SAP, from our perspective and the current state of play in the year twenty five. So, the one that's top of mind for the team at RevTrack is, of course, ECC and solution manager, arriving at their end of life. No longer being supported, from twenty seven. A recent announcement says twenty thirty. What that looks like is still to be seen. But, that is a very top of mind issue that we are, experiencing with our customers. And, it's not only, you know, a changing in technology. It means that a lot of organization that we deal with have to redefine their entire SAP change management strategy, not just from a technical standpoint, but from an operational compliance and a business risk, perspective. We're talking SAP leaders, you know, CIOs and SAP operations, managers and the like. They've gotta ask themselves questions such as, you know, how do we maintain a competitive advantage while we are migrating through these systems? How do we ensure business continuity during these major IT shifts? And if we fail to act early, what risks do we face? So these are conversations that are happening a lot amongst our customer base, and we're helping a lot of our customers through that. In conjunction with that, it is the move to the cloud and S4HANA. As we know, there are a lot of flavors, of cloud adoption, whether it be, you know, on premise, hopscaler, rise, which is probably the most common, GROW for the public cloud space. Like I said, these are fundamental business transformations. Moving from these legacy systems, organizations have to find ways to, you know, consolidate their customizations and their legacy code. You know? How do they transition to these new platforms without losing decades of innovation? Those are heavy, IT resource cost, you know, from a time and, budget perspective. So the challenge for, CROs and SAP operations leaders is how do we ensure that we can migrate, effectively, but also, maintain daily business operations. And, of course, with that, there's, you know, compliance and security risks, ensuring that, you know, change process change processes, they remain controlled and auditable over these timelines. So these are some of the conversations that we're having with IT leaders aligning with, of course, you know, Clean Call, we think that Clean Call is the way to go. We know that there are benefits for as well updates and the like moving forward. We wanna move our innovation into the BTP and other platforms like that. But, you know, in reality, many organizations do struggle to, I guess, unwind from decades of, customization, custom code, and processes built around ECC, and solution manager, as well. So, to try to mitigate some of those challenges and to move forward, DevOps is a fantastic solution that we're trying to help, a lot of our customers along that journey. For customers that, you know, aren't quite as mature, they're dealing, you know, with siloed tools, manual processes, and complexity that we'll get to shortly, it makes achieving those objectives that much harder. And for CIOs and SAP leaders, you know, they're trying to do these things while aligning with their KPIs. You know, a migration to S4HANA or to RISE, you know, it isn't it isn't cheap. They've gotta do it within budget. They've gotta manage the costs and, of course, be, compliant and, reduce risk all along the way. So, just wanted to set the scene a little bit as to what we see, in the SAP market at the moment. But move more towards more our space, which is, SAP landscapes and managing change across those landscapes. So now more than ever, of course, businesses want to deliver more change, more innovation, and align with these new technologies. But in doing so, they do have to manage change across a bunch of different complex landscapes, which I've highlighted. Here we can see on the screen, we have, a few examples that we are experiencing with our customers, which might be, common for people on this call depending on, you know, their, their SAP environment. But things like, n plus one, n plus two, the most we've experienced is n plus seven, which is, you know, the dual triple landscape management. Reason organizations are going through these vary, but, you know, essentially, customers cannot afford to have, or experience conflicts while working in parallel. So, running multiple landscapes and retrofitting changes throughout those landscapes, be it an s four project or, ACC consolidation project, which is another one that we have, seen there, managing that change is can is very difficult. When we're talking things like global templates, that's something that we're seeing a lot more. In our customer base, operations run out of the HQ, but then trying to manage change across the local regions and the like, that can be difficult. You know, the landscapes is no longer just dev, quads, and prod anymore. Organizations wanna have, staging or pre prod, even temporary and conditional systems. You know, you can't have a performance testing, system up three hundred and sixty five days a year because that is costly. So the ability to turn those off, but then also, you know, turn things to sorry. Turn things on, but then also turn things off. Through system refreshes like a preproduction system or the like. And don't get us started on air gaps. You know, these challenges that, you know, a lot of our, government organizations, deal with. It is super complex. That's the point that I'm trying to get across here. So while managing change across these complex landscapes, organizations and SAP leaders are still required to, deliver these changes on time and on budget and being compliant. A lot of our customers now across industries like finance, health care, government, they, you know, compliance and being, in line with regulatory, you know, compliances, it's a nonnegotiable. And, you know, they face, enormous risks if they fail to maintain audit trails or abide by segregation of duties, don't align with data integrity requirements. So, for SAP using organizations, the current landscape and the current environment, for lack of better word, is very complex for a lot of our customers, and it is something that, you know, it's a complexity that organizations have to deal with on the day to day while also trying to, manage, you know, these massive export migration projects and the like. So very difficult to be an SAP leader at the moment. What about solution manager? And what about Cloud ALM? The reason we're here for, on this call today. So it's no surprise that SAP has been moving towards, you know, a cloud first approach over the past decade plus. And I guess solution manager was never built to be the tool to handle the scale or complexity of modern cloud based SAP environments. So new innovations like the BTP, you know, solution manager was, built, I guess, going through fruition in the early two thousands. So, all these new innovations, that SAP have come out with, it makes sense that a new solution like Cloud ALM comes along with that. And it's a natural progression. So, you know, long before I was born, but in the seventies, changes were made to SAP systems using the command line. Then in the nineties, it was, STMS, and then in the early two thousands, like I said, solution manager came along. So Cloud ALM is that natural progression and it is the future. That being said, though, it does require a fundamental shift in how organizations manage change and, enforce governance across, their change processes. Again, while, you know, while it's all good and well, a lot of large organizations and our customers, they have really unique situations. You know, they have those complex landscapes, the n plus ones and the, you know, the retrofitting of those changes and the additional systems, the cross landscape distribution, those, you know, the global templates. It's it's not easy. So it's very, there's a lot of complexity that needs to be handled across those different environments. And, of course, we won't get too much into the details because of this time of the recording, this is the case, but, capabilities available in solution manager to handle those capability, to handle those complexities rather, they were there, you know, retrofitting, cross system object locking, downgrade protection. They were available for customers. And other heavy customizations that were available, or enabled by, organizations themselves, they were you know, that was a possibility with solution manager. Cloud ALM is not quite the case since in the road map. I don't wanna get into too much of the details of what's available and what's not, because it's always changing. It's on the road map, and we wanna make sure that we're following along with, SAP's direction for, those capabilities when they'll become available to customers. So like I say, it's very difficult, time, I guess, in this migration period, and it does come along with some challenges. So for organizations that are making the move from solution manager to Cloud l m, there are another number of challenges they face. Number one, first and foremost, of course, is business continuity. So delivering innovation and delivering change to the business cannot just stop because, the organization's moving, or migrating their you know, changing their ALM tool. Business operations must continue uninterrupted. Change has to be compliant and has to be continuous and has to be, you know, consistent across those legacy and the new, cloud solutions. So, that is probably the main challenge that we're hearing from customers who wanna make, that switch, make that journey. How do we migrate, all of our existing processes through this new technology without, without costing out, you know, our current release cycles or anything of the like? SAP themselves do say that I will mention I should have mentioned this that SAP does say that for the, service and operation side of CloudLM, they essentially say go for it. They say, it's available today. The monitoring and the reporting that comes out of, that sort of Cloud ALM is fantastic, and we agree. Absolutely. Go for it. It should be used today. However, the side of Cloud ALM for implementations, those, you know, the requirements and the features as part of that change management strategy, the direction from SAP is to do it at your own pace. What that looks like is still to be, still to be decided because there are some additional challenges that come with that. Of course, with the new system, it does take, extensive time, and that, of course, comes with cost and resource strain, for this new system, especially if we're bringing in, you know, third party providers and consulting organizations to help with that migration. And then, of course, when a company or training and enablement of existing staff, that is, you know, a pretty resource heavy effort. And then, of course, that does come with a cost as well. So that is another challenge that organizations are coming to us even though Cloud ALM, is a, yeah, is a free solution pending, memory that's being taken up by the organization. But, of course, you know, the configuration and the training and the onboarding does come up with a high, cost and resource training. So that's a consideration that we are, experiencing with our customers. And then, of course, like I said, solution manager could be customized, and the decades of, you know, the life cycle of, solution manager that organizations had with that tool, they did build in a lot of, you know, custom workflows, approval processes, automation scripts, and the like. That is a lot more difficult with Cloud ALM. Cloud ALM is a lot about standardization similar to what, you know, SAP S4HANA is doing with the clean core approach. That being said, a process engineering, exercise might have to take place, so that, you know, like I said, those processes do not stop. That business continuity, can be maintained. We need to ensure that we're not losing any of, you know, the capabilities, in our change processes. You know, even features that were available in solution manager like cross system object locking or downgrade protection or retrofitting, they're still being developed in cloud ALM. So organizations that do want to migrate, they need to find an alternative solution, for those capabilities, which I'll get to shortly. We may have a solution. And lastly, a challenge that, we're also, being made aware of is data migration and change logs. Organizations have to find a way for compliance, and audit purposes to maintain their change logs. So, you know, do they, you know, do they retain solution manager in a read only way so that they can maintain those logs? Do they archive them another way, or do they try to rebuild them in Cloud ALM? It's not currently, out of the box functionality. So that is something that organizations do have to address, how they handle that. So a few challenges, in the migration, a few challenges in the onboarding of this new tool, the feature parity and the like. There is a bit that goes into, a migration like this similar to, I'm sure, everyone on this call who is going through an s four migration or cloud migration is experiencing, Cloud l m. It doesn't seem to be, much for life there. So what is a solution? I might be a little bit biased, but I think a fantastic solution is RevTrack. So we see that RevTrack does, I guess, bridge the gap between the capabilities of solution manager and CloudLM, but we like to think that we take it to the next level. We have those advanced safety features. We have, you know, those automated automations, and, we are the platform to integrate and, orchestrate that DevOps stream, with other tools. We offer a fully governed and automated SAP change management solution. We do, ensure that we are unified as well. So our solution does work across ABAP, non ABAP, and Java and the like, and then also BTP, BTP technologies, ensuring that we are future proof. We are ready for any new technology that SAP comes out with and any technology that our customers onboard. At the moment, the general consensus is that solution manager works fantastically for ABAP, Cloud Island works fantastically for BCP, and the crossover is where, there is some additional attention required. Wherefore, RevTrack, that's not quite that's not, the reality. We can handle both. We can handle all. We unify workflows and processes regardless of the technology that is used. The good news is, of course, is that available today, we can integrate seamlessly with SAP Cloud ALM. So, we do ensure that for organizations that do make the move to Cloud ALM, they do have those retrofit capabilities. We can do that extended cross system object locking. We have the downgrade protection, safety checks in place so that if a migration were to happen, business can continue. Change processes can remain in place. They can remain compliant, fully governed, it while that transition happens. So, we do ensure that business critical, continuity can be, held in our regards. So, that's great news for our existing customers. For any customers wanting to join over Red Track, there's an added benefit for you. I will touch a bit on, our added code control governance and our advanced transport safety checks in a few moments because I would like to highlight our, our capabilities and our, fondness for shifting left, but we'll get there. We'll get there. I won't spend too much time on this slide. This is just a little bit more information about RevTrack and how we work. You know, we are flexible, and can be configured to existing change processes. But the good thing is that then we, can process processes cannot be bypassed. We use the term cowboy developers. We ensure that every single change to an, to an SFA system that goes through a transport has to go through a governed and compliant workflow through rev track. We also enforce, you know, other quality controls through the ATC, f l r t is clean core. We can enforce those best practices, and there's business critical approvals before any changes progress through our system, before any transport migrations happen. So from a change management and governance perspective, that's something we hold in really high regard. Our automated area protection and our advanced transport safety checks, some of the ones listed there. Oops, which is our overtake over our protection system. Our cross system extended object locking, our enablement for parallel development, our dependency and impact scoring checks. The list goes on. We make it so that organizations can take care of, security checks nice and early, ensure that, changes are going through that are higher quality, which again we'll get to in a few moments. And then lastly, with, our capabilities for traceability and order compliance regardless of the organization's, regulatory requirements, you know, whether it be sovereign sovereigns, Oxley, or, you know, they have segregation of duties requirements, we can enforce those and capture all those details, in a comprehensive documentation and or audit history process. Even for complex, scenarios like m plus one retrofits, m plus six retrofits, or anything of the like, we can, provide that traceability, which is a massive feature which comes out of Cloud ALM. So I didn't wanna take up too much time to talk about this slide because we're here to talk about Cloud ALM, and RevTrack a bit, which we'll get to, in the next slide. But if you have more questions, we'll be happy to answer them. So Maria mentioned at the top of this, webinar another panel conversation or webinar that was had, about DevOps in SAP. And, RevTrack does hold DevOps, pretty close to our hearts. We'd like to consider ourselves the SAP DevOps orchestration platform, which can be seen in this, diagram, that we can see here on the left hand side of our page. Particularly when we think of an integration between RevTrack and SAP Cloud LM, the value that we like to bring from a RevTrack standpoint is that CI as part of the CICD. So we ensure that, that continuous integration can happen and change can be continuously, you know, delivered to your organization through this integration. We can walk through this a little bit. So, what each of these steps look like and the roles of RevTrack, and Cloud ALM pay play respectively. So of course with the Cloud ALM requirement, this is where, fit to standard workshop, documentation is captured and all added to a requirement. That's where the change request starts. The code and building stages is, what rev track, really takes over then, which I'll get to shortly. But essentially, we just ensure that all SAP transports are correctly sequenced, they're compliant, they're risk free before moving forward to the testing stage. The testing is then or can then be taken, by the hands of Cloud Element through the integrations, you know, with likes of Worksoft or Tricentis and the like. That testing can take place there. From the release perspective, like I said, RevTrack can ensure that, all the, you know, sequencing and the dependencies are taken care of as part of that release. The deployment are all those changes through the Cloud ALM feature, is all traceable through integration. Operation obviously happens through the customer's lens, and then the monitoring that is, that is the current, I guess, ready to go and fantastic, capabilities through SAP Cloud Allium's, service and operation side, of that tool. So just wanted to talk a little bit about DevOps. It is something that we hold truly dear, and it really does along with that shift left methodology, which I will get into, in a short moment. So I'm a bit conscious of time, but I did wanna walk through, this diagram and this scenario for how, the integration with SAP Cloud ALM and RevTrack can happen. And I guess the main benefit of this and the main reason that we are bringing this to customers and we are talking about this even on this platform is that RevTrack is the tool that can manage the complexity and that can, bring those, bring those advanced features and those transport safety features to Cloud ALM. It is you know, it's inevitable that all organizations will have to go to SAP Cloud ALM, and the great news is that we're saying to customers, you can move to Cloud ALM today in a scenario like this where you can get the benefits out of both tools. So in this scenario, I'll quickly walk through it. So, a Cloud Island feature is their deployment change ticket, I guess you can call it. It starts in this in specification stage here. I'm trying to see where my mouse is. It goes in this in specification status where the documentation is captured and the change, ticket and the change information is collated. It then moves into the status of in implementation where the development for that change, begins. This is when the handover to rev track happens or rev track request is created, which is our own change ticket. And we really make the most of our capabilities with our code and developer controls. So, this is that little diagram, blown up a little bit more, but here is some of the value that rev track can bring, in that shift left methodology. We are doing all of these things in the development box. We are ensuring that we are highlighting any issues, and we are enforcing any governance right up front so it can be taken care of. So there aren't any downstream issues because as we all know, issues in production and qual fixing issues, especially in production, and in quality are a lot more expensive to fix, than issues that are found in the development box. So if we can allow the developers to self, find these issues, self remedy them, that is a great benefit. So just taking a look at some of these, like, we can make this available to any customers that want to or any attendees on the call to go through this a little bit, in a little bit more detail. But, as soon as, development happens, when the transport is created, RevTrack captures that and we can analyze, the contents of that transport to see if it is, you know, if it's critical and sensitive, doesn't need to go through an approval workflow with a few more approvals if it's touching something, say, for example, like payroll. Is it in conflict with any other work that's happening in the development system? That extended locking? We can enable parallel development if required, and we can, from a retrofitting perspective, take a look at if the transport is suitable for retrofit right up front. So, that progression of the change and the governance is taken care of right up front as soon as the transport is created. When it comes time, to, you know, to start to build this into the code, we look at the dependencies and the sequencing of these transports dependent, you know, depending upon the other transports that are in the system, as well. If there are requirements for, for our segregation of duties, code of peer review for any regulatory requirements, we can enforce those. Transport literally cannot move until it's received those appropriate approvals, using ref track, which is fantastic. We do also integrate, with other third party tools from a security standpoint, from a testing standpoint, and from a change in impact, code checking standpoint as well. Another fantastic integration is with SAP's native tools. So clean core checks, s forwardiness checks. The other test cockpit is something that is a fantastic, solution that SAP has developed, and we can enable customers to make the most of those checks, right in the development box. And then, of course, if a, if a transport, is able to be migrated, we have the checks to make sure that, if, you know, it has the right syntax and there's no other dependency issues, developers can self approve and self migrate their changes, and they need to get a base person involved. If it's successful, it moves the transports to the QA system and, you know, it can trigger automated testing. If it fails, it goes back with the developer and says, hey. You know, you need to fix this. So this is RevTrack's CI, capabilities in action. We ensure that, you know, the develop we're giving the developers as much power as possible so they can do, all the complex work that I've mentioned throughout this, throughout this webinar. They can do a lot of this and handle a lot of this complexity early on right up the at the start of the changes life cycle. Once all of that happens, once RedTraq works all its magic, you know, we hand the transports over to the quality system. Through our bidirectional integration, we ensure that we update the Cloud Ellen, feature status as well. So if it's in testing, or once it's past its testing stages, we ensure that the status is updated. We can also enforce something what we like to call approval dependencies. So let's say, for example, we wanna migrate a change to production, but there needs to be, let's say, for example, a change advisory board approval happen in CloudLM, we can gate that transport and say it cannot progress until, that approval has been given in CloudLM. So, there is that bidirectional capability through this integration. And like I said, that complexity and those requirements that, a lot of customers are experiencing from a regular, you know, from a, yeah, regulatory requirement perspective, RevTrack can handle that today, which is fantastic. Bringing in EPIUSE into the fold, there is that capability, to into, you know, to bring EPIUSE's, value into this life cycle as well. So, the provisioning of quality data in that development system so the testing can happen, through, if you use this object sync, capability is, you know, a fantastic value add. You know, that scrambled data for unit testing can be done right out of the development system. It's, you know, provisioning good data for testing, in at the right time, whenever it's required. So, FUs can provide fantastic value there even for things like the QA system refresh, as part of the data sync manager suite. I'm unfortunately not the biggest, if you use expert, so I can't talk about it as much as someone like Maria might be able to. But, this is where Vertrack come into play as that DevOps orchestration platform. We are that orchestrator of integrations with other tools, and we can bring the value out of an existing tool set, to really achieve that essentially, that DevOps way of doing things. You know, we are that, CI as part of the CD, to make sure we are helping organizations and customers deliver more change faster, safer, and of high quality. So like I said, in sort of in conclusion, we'll say that, as part of our integration with Cloud ALM and to an extent MPUs, the value is really in that shifting left. And as, Marie also mentioned at the top of the call, agile as well. So, through reducing, you know, through this integration, we can ensure that we're reducing risk and, you know, there's decreased, chance of code errors or transport risks through Cloud ALM's integrations. They can do, you know, the automatic testing and the tracking through the Cloud ML feature and the like. And then if you use, you know, they can come in with, providing that accurate and secure test data. When it comes to deployments, Roadtrek can be that change orchestration platform. SAP Cloud ALM can be the thing to capture and store those approvals, and then if you use can be, the provider of that, of those, you know, the test system refreshes at a faster pace. Compliance, and optimizing costs, all three of the tools, have a pretty important role, in the shift left methodology. And as this webinar series is all about agile and DevOps and the like, I think shifting left is one of the fantastic benefits that organizations can, achieve right out of the gate. It's a fantastic way to reduce the costs of fixing or finding and fixing errors. And the fact that you can bring testing right in that development system, bring it right up front at the start of a changes life cycle, fantastic way to save costs there. So I guess in conclusion, key takeaways, that I like to wrap with is that, it's inevitable, but, you know, charm is ending. Cloud l m is a developing tool, but the migration will have to happen. It's something that organizations just need to accept, and it should be top of mind and that migration planning should happen. If organizations do have that complexity, you know, that those governance requirements, the complexity around managing change or those, you know, those dual or triple landscapes or the consolidation projects or anything, a mature carry control software solution is required, which may be rev track. We like to think that we are future proof, where we've got our finger on the pulse with things like BTP and Cloud TMS. And, you know, we are an automated solution for all of these technologies. And the fantastic thing is that today, we do integrate with SAP Cloud ALM, and we can provide that additional value in those, shift left, ways of doing things to, of course, save costs and deliver change faster and safer and of high quality. Thank you. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Shane. I think, you share a lot of very valuable information in there, and, hopefully, everyone who's attending this webinar has a better understanding of what's happening with charm, calm, and all of these new terminologies and, dates and things like that. I guess, one of the reasons why I believe is labs really, wants to partner with the likes of Retract is because we really want to help our clients to become more agile and solve those challenges, that businesses are throwing at you, constantly as everything becomes faster and you have this need to become more agile and faster consistently. Right. So we will be sharing the recording of this webinar and all the other webinars in the next couple of days. So thank you so much, Shane, for your time today. Thank you everyone who's, joined us today. And, hopefully, you found all this information really helpful, and you have a better idea on how to approach, change management, going forward. So thank you very much. I hope you have a fantastic day, see you later. Thank you. Thank you.