CCC/CCoE Automation for the SAP Community

Customer Competence Center and Customer Center of Expertise

This release upgrade is different: An experienced SAP existing customer knows the challenges of a release upgrade. However, the so-called conversion to Hana and S/4 is different from all previous ERP updates.

With Hana and S/4, many adjusting screws need to be adjusted at the same time, and these challenges are hitting the SAP community at a time of staff shortages, digital transformation, and economic uncertainty.

SAP has set the goal by the end of this decade, but has made little reference to the necessary groundwork. Among other things, SAP's existing customers have to deal with a new database that also obeys the SQL laws but, as an in-memory computing DB, brings with it much that is new in the operational area.

Extended challenges in combination with scarce human resources have to be solved by SAP Basis. One solution component is therefore the topic of automation. There are now numerous providers in the SAP community for this, who have recognized that despite technical innovation, the tasks under Hana and S/4 are not becoming less, but more.

One automation topic from the old and new SAP world is system copies. Bernhard Hutterer, Head of IT at the Spitz Group and Empirius customer, explains: "We had been looking at the issue of creating SAP system copies for some time. The manual creation of system copies according to SAP guidelines took between two and three weeks. In addition, daily rates were incurred in each case because we had outsourced this task to an IT service provider. We wanted to create a sophisticated tool for system copy creation that would enable us to perform SAP system copying ourselves. On the other hand, we wanted to significantly reduce the time and effort required for this." Spitz, an existing SAP customer, switched to an automation tool for SAP system copy creation. The benefits of using BlueCopy from Empirius are demonstrable.

Automation is independent of the provisioning model, explains Nikolas Roggenbauer from SAP partner Automatics in an interview with E-3 Magazine, but is important for reducing manual activities, increasing quality through standardization, and improving the security of IT systems through the timely import of notes and patches. Critically, Nikolas Roggenbauer also noted that he does not see the possibilities for automation with SolMan or ALM in connection with SAP Basis operations. Based on this, Automatics wants to be a supplement with the corresponding added value for the SAP Basis team.