Take features live in record time

Regardless of your choice of favorite S/4 project color - blue, green, brown or orange - the global number of S/4 systems is growing every day. And as the number of completed projects increases, so does the experience. During the project phase, established processes are sustainably transformed. This task is not a pure IT project behind closed doors, but is based on dialog with the business unit. There is a close exchange of ideas about the requirements arising from the changes to the business processes. Together, you experience how requirements and changes are quickly responded to in the project. Agile collaboration becomes the modus operandi, and IT increasingly establishes itself as an important driver for the company.

As the drumbeat of go-live approaches, SAP teams have harnessed the power of S/4 transformation and are applying new DevOps operational concepts to the transformed SAP landscape. Time-to-production, increasingly important in a competitive environment, has been reduced from months to days. 

Let's look beyond the end of our noses into the supposedly much simpler world of cloud-native technology and agile methods - where the post-DevOps age can already be seen on the horizon today. But even there, certain rules apply, for example that software development today requires a multitude of interactions between many people and departments. The individual task requires little time by itself, but the setup times between the individual tasks lead to high expenses. Also to be considered: releases are further complicated by quality assurance and planned maintenance windows, dependencies of systems lead to the grouping of release groups. In addition, the individual systems are becoming increasingly complex.

The result of this is the release cycles of three to six months, which are also familiar in the SAP environment. Often, several functional changes have to be put into production at the same time. Even a different technology stack, often perceived as more modern, does not protect against having to deal with the many optimization options.

The past few years clearly show that the methods established in these ecosystems, such as Lean Software Development and the DevOps approach, can also be applied to SAP teams and SAP system landscapes. This is where Solutive comes in with Enterprise Software Management. 

Established methods such as value stream mapping can be used to analyze software development processes. From the recording of the requirement to its productive implementation is analyzed in detail. Sometimes it is necessary to understand in detail why a requirement is implemented in one to two weeks, but still takes months to go live. In addition, an understanding is created as to why this long lead time has other effects on efficiency and effectiveness. Special attention is paid to the "Seven Wastes of Software Development". On the other hand, the attitude of the SAP teams and the organization to the DevOps principles, such as "You build it, you run it", must be aligned. Experience has shown that such an analysis results in both organizational and technical points of contact. The goal is to realize the benefits of increased speed and quality of SAP adaptations and developments.

Depending on the situation, the integration of existing ticket or process tools can make just as much of a contribution as the complete automation of test management. The same also applies to the implementation of a complete DevOps operating concept. The earlier in the course of the project a complete picture of the operation and further development of the future S/4 landscape is designed, the earlier added value can be implemented.

DevOps (Development and IT Operations) is becoming increasingly important in software development - also in the SAP environment. DevOps enables companies to react agilely to the faster changing market requirements.