Rev-Trac Case Study
This case study of a global 500 retail company is based on a September 2016 survey of Rev-Trac customers by TechValidate, a 3rd-party research service. The profiled company asked to have their name blinded to protect their confidentiality.
“Change went from being the main function and point of concern at every cutover, to a complete after-thought. It’s now taken for granted because of how easy Rev-Trac has made it.”
For this global 500 retail company driven by over 300,000 employees in 20 countries worldwide and serving 180 million customers each year, managing changes to their core IT systems in response to business demands is absolutely critical to business success. Hoever, handling change process manually across its large, 100+ system SAP infrastructure was proving to be costly and IT recognized that not only would existing processes not scale to meet growing business demands, but gaps in their process meant quality began to suffer and impact the business.
When IT decided to implement an N+1 architecture and move towards a formal release management strategy, automation was investigated as a possible solution to both simplify the process and reduce the expected costs of managing a considerable increase in SAP change.
By adopting automation and implementing a strategic release management program, the company learned it would be able to strip out most manual change control tasks and activities, respond more quickly to business requested change, and ultimately deliver more projects sooner with fewer go-live errors. Plus, with the right tool selection they could guarantee change control compliance with automated tracking, process enforcement, and documentation of all changes.
Solution
Rev-Trac was selected ahead of several readily available solutions, including SAP Solution Manager ChaRM and two other notable third party SAP change control automation solutions. Once the selection process was completed and the decision was made to implement Rev-Trac, within 3 months the solution was in productive use.
As far as adoption of Agile/DevOps principals with regard to its SAP development process, the company considers itself “already there.” Having adopted Rev-Trac the company can continue to integrate and automate critical ALM tooling when needed as part of this effort, with ITSM already well established. IT considers Rev-Trac’s workflow automation, extended locking and OOPS to be extremely effective features in helping them achieve their SAP change management success.
Several years on from the selection and implementation of Rev-Trac, the initial goals of the project have been achieved:
In addition, the company has benefited from a significant increase (up to 90%) in the volumes of change managed by the team and a 70% reduction in time spent on audit tasks.
This data was sourced directly from verified users of Rev-Trac by TechValidate.
TechValidate verifies the identity and organizational affiliation of all participants that contribute to published research data. When research participants so desire, we also guarantee their anonymity so that they may share information honestly and freely.
