8. Disconnected transport management tool

Symptoms: You are in production maintenance support mode and you have to regularly or at scheduled intervals transport objects from the testing environment into the production environment. Your company needs to generate reports, track and monitor the necessary approvals to transport an object.  

For audit and historical purposes you need to have the capability to generate on the fly reports to identify how an object was transported, how it was tested before it was transported, who approve the transport of the object, when the object was transported, etc but you cannot do so because your transport management tool was either built in house and is not integrated with SAP or you purchased an SAP implementation tool from an implementation partner that does not integrate directly with SAP, and is missing version control capabilities.  

Your internal processes and methods provide limited visibility into how objects were transported, is bogged down with ineffective approvals, and fails to facilitate your independent audits assessments.   

Suggestions: Obtain a tool that integrates directly with SAP and enhance or complement SAP’s internal transport management system. The tool that integrates with SAP should only allow the Basis administrator to transport an object when all necessary approvals have been granted and enforce your project’s business rules for transporting objects. In contrast, custom made tools or other commercial tools that do not integrate with Mercury allow the Basis administrator to transport an object even when the necessary approvals are missing. Furthermore the selected tool should allow the end user to generate ad-hoc and custom reports and provide version controls capabilities which most in-house created do not offer.  

A tool such as Mercury’s Change Management Extension for SAP Solutions helps you streamline the transport process and provide your project with Visibility, security, and auditability across multi-server SAP system landscapes