Streamlining SAP Transport Management with ServiceNow Integration
The Genesis of the Connector: Seamless Control Over SAP Transports
“The bottom line is it’s all about giving our customers options.”
SAP environments are complex, requiring sophisticated transport management routines. This goes far beyond the capabilities of most ITSM tools. Recognizing this complexity and the industry’s reliance on ServiceNow to manage IT changes, CoreALM has engineered a Connector that extends the capabilities of ServiceNow to include the management and tracking of SAP transports.
“We wanted to give customers an option where they could manage transports directly from ServiceNow.”
When designing the product, explained Donik, “we knew we needed to include the same features and controls as ChaRM, which prevent issues and errors in the transport process.”
Unmatched Features for Seamless SAP Change Management
“The basics are, we need to be able to create, release and import transports.”
According to Donik, the Connector provides essential features like creating, releasing, importing Transports and Transport of Copies (TOCs). There is also an ability to couple and decouple change requests with existing transports. When managing a large project, it’s not efficient to move individual transports. For this reason, explains Donik that in the new tool “we can do mass movement of transports based on statuses, at the project level.”
“We don’t want to sit around and move individual changes. We need to do mass movement of transports at the project level.”
Donik also highlighted the need for more advanced features, designed to reduce transport-related errors in the release process. These advanced features include cross-system object locking, downgrade protection, and cross-reference and sequence checks. These features streamline the change process and eliminate errors that can cause delays and wasted effort.
Also, according to Donik, many customers have more complex SAP landscapes that include a maintenance landscape for ongoing changes, and a parallel project landscape, often called the N+1 landscape to manage bigger changes. To keep these parallel landscapes in sync, the ServiceNow Connector for SAP Transport Management Services provides features that are commonly used in ChaRM, such as retrofit and repack.
Minimizing Impact to Existing Workflows: Seamless Adaptation to ServiceNow
Customers generally use ServiceNow to manage all of their changes across the enterprise. This process involves a lot of stakeholders, and most companies can’t afford to disrupt their existing change process. With this new Connector, customers can choose to manage transports manually using action buttons, or automatically, based on the status of the change request. This automatic management of transports could, for example, release or import transports based on a change in the status of the request. This automation can be further refined for each change type (e.g. urgent/emergency, normal, or standard changes).
“Customer can release and import SAP transports using the action buttons, or automatically based on status.”
“Of course,” explains Donik, “not every change will require an SAP change.” For this reason, the Connector installs a flag in the ServiceNow change request to indicate whether the change request requires a change in SAP. If the flag is set to ‘yes’, then a new tab will be displayed to capture the status of the transports, and to expose the action buttons to manage the transports. This can even be simplified further so that the SAP Transport tab is only displayed if the change request is assigned to a particular group, for example, the SAP Team.
“We’re not going to change the existing workflows and processes that you have. We’re just going to integrate them better.”
This approach simplifies customer adoption, as non-SAP changes are completely unaffected. For SAP changes, the process is simple, but the full power of transport management becomes available within the existing screens of ServiceNow.
Reinforcing Security and Segregation of Duties
“Most companies will prevent developers from approving and importing their own transports.”
According to Donik, “ServiceNow has a very robust security infrastructure.” He explained how this can be used to provide Segregation of Duties (SOD). For example, it’s common to restrict developers from approving and importing their own transports. To accomplish this using the Connector, it’s possible to remove certain options from the transport functions from the ServiceNow interface depending on the status of the change request. In this way, if the user’s role doesn’t allow them to release a transport, the option will not be visible.
"If the user is not authorized to make a specific change, they won’t even have the option."
The Benefits for Streamlined SAP Transport Management in ServiceNow
“Some customers still manage transports manually, which can lead to errors. In those situations, putting restrictions on promoting certain transports will actually save time.”
Donik explained that customers who manage SAP transports manually often encounter errors when transports are imported in the wrong order, or pre-requisites aren’t met. This takes time to investigate and resolve. Attempts to import inconsistent transports will be restricted by the ServiceNow Connector for SAP Transports, which saves time.
“For customer that use ChaRM and ServiceNow, there is a problem with data synchronization, which causes inconsistency and duplication of effort.”
Other companies are using ChaRM, which already has checks for inconsistent transports. If, however, those companies are using ServiceNow to manage their change process, they need to maintain the change using two different tools. This leads to inconsistencies and causes duplication of effort. The Connector automatically synchronizes the SAP transport status into the ServiceNow change request so there is no duplication of effort, and all of the data is consistent between SAP and ServiceNow.
Enhanced Compliance and Controls in ServiceNow
“With our ServiceNow extension in place, auditors can see everything in one place, and we ensure the data is synchronized.”
For a lot of companies, according to Donik, “the status and history of all the changes are captured in different systems.” This means that the change managers and auditors have to look at the reports and logs from multiple systems to understand what happened and when. With the Connector in place, all of the required data is available in ServiceNow.
“In this way, we’re actually speeding up the change cycle without compromising the integrity of the change process.”
By making all change records available in one place, say Donik, the change process can run faster, without adding risk.
We’ve Got a Connector for That!
At CoreALM, we’re always looking for options that will meet the diverse needs of our customers. We’re excited to be able to offer the ServiceNow Connector for SAP Transport Management Services (STMS). But many of our customers are using ChaRM and it works great for them. If you’re using ChaRM and ServiceNow, we’ve got a Connector for that!
“Really, every customer has different needs, so it’s all about providing options.”
For customers using SAP Cloud ALM, we have a Connector for ServiceNow ITSM to create ServiceNow incidents from Cloud ALM alerts. SAP Cloud ALM doesn’t currently support the change and release management features as ChaRM, but as soon as it does, we will build a Connector for that.
Some customers are using other tools to manage their change process, such as Jira and Azure DevOps. We’ve got a Connector for both of those tools, either to SAP ChaRM, or directly to SAP Transport Management Services (STMS).
Stay tuned for subsequent episodes exploring the entire application lifecycle management process for SAP.