What's new in SAP ChaRM: Standard Change Document Type – How it works and it's benefits
In our previous blog, we discussed what is Quality Gate Management (QGM) and how we can use it to mitigate risks, bring transparency and enable control of your changes. QGM is one of the many tools that was improved upon with Solution Manager 7.2 but there has been many more enhancements to ChaRM in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 that has made it less painful and reduced the amount of work involved for landscape changes. With the latest Service Pack (SP06), SAP has also released a new change document type called Standard Changes.
Standard Changes Document Type
Standard change is used to perform low-risk changes that are uncritical and frequently used. Standard changes are executed on a regular basis by the change management organization and have no technical impact, such as adding a new currency or location. Standard changes are no-risk or low-risk changes and can therefore be processed without approval.
Standard Change Process
On the white list, you define the objects that are allowed to be saved to a transport request of a standard change. If you try to save objects that are not part of the white list to a transport request of a standard change, you will receive an error message. You cannot release the transport request. This is due to the fact that the errors and warnings are now binding. In this case, you either have to add the relevant objects to the white list, or you have to reassign the transport request to a normal change or to an urgent change.
“Pre-Approved” Objects must be maintained in the “Whitelist” in the Change Control Management Admin Cockpit, You can maintain the Workbench and Customizing objects, which are considered uncritical:
SAP Change Control Management – Administration Cockpit
In every corporation that runs SAP and use ChaRM as the tool to manage changes would definitely see the need and the benefit of having such a change document type which can accelerate deployment and still have control without having to customize a new Change Document type or having to deviate the regular flow from the Normal Change process to get it going faster into Productions systems.
One of the good features part Standard Change Type is that once the Actions Pass Standard Change (In Dev) to Test is executed the transport of copies is added to the import buffer of the next test system and is imported automatically into the test system. Different than the Normal Change type which would require an auto import job or execute the import via tasklist. This helps to speed up of the import process during the testing (QA).
Conclusion
Standard Type is beneficial for customers looking for a transaction type to allow pre approved changes move through the change landscape with more autonomy (Less Approvals) consequently a faster deployment. With the new SAP Solution Manager 7.2 features, Change and Release Management and Quality Gate Management can provide you with the much needed transparency to your Business and IT projects. We have a checklist that you can download to see if you are ready to take advantage of these new features.
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