In today’s ever-changing business world, complex application landscapes have to be regularly maintained and extended. As a result, many companies face the challenge of change and transport management on an almost daily basis. In this situation, strict monitoring and control all software changes is essential to minimize the risk of unplanned system resets. Since deploying REALTECH’s TransportManager to automate software distribution within its SAP® systems, the major publishing group Bauer Verlagsgruppe has greatly enhanced the efficiency and quality of its change management. The state-of-the-art solution automatically manages distribution of change requests, and ensures transparency for all change management processes: electronic workflow enables seamless integration of all individual change and transport management processes.
Holger Böhn, head of the SAP Basis group at Bauer Verlagsgruppe
“The TransportManager delivers the cutting-edge functionality we require to model our entire authorization concept for daytoday change and transport management tasks. The REALTECH solution not only enables us to handle critical objects, such as reports containing personal data, separately; it also allows us to implement comprehensive dual control. This prevents the initiation of unchecked change requests, which can often result in system outages. Before the TransportManager distributes a change, it automatically requests approval from two authorized members of staff.”
TransportManager and theGuard! ApplicationManager in action With sales of 1.75 billion euros in fiscal 2001, Bauer Verlagsgruppe is an established player in the European media industry. In Germany, Bauer’s core market, where the group employs almost two thirds of its 6,300 employees, the company publishes 31 magazines, with a total circulation of 19.3 million copies.
The Bauer Verlagsgruppe comprises some 120 companies – a highly complex corporate structure, which is reflected in the IT landscape. However, SAP solutions enable the publishing group to model, support, and automate the many intertwining business processes of the individual units.
Staff at the group’s Hamburg and Magdeburg sites work with the SAP FI, CO, MM, HR and BW modules, and with the mySAP Media industry solution, which the publisher is currently extending, making it one of the largest installations of its kind worldwide. Bauer operates a total of 15 SAP systems, running under Sun® Solaris and in conjunction with Oracle® databases – six production systems, six development systems, and three test systems.
Change is the name of the game
“Of course, a system landscape of this type is constantly changing. We employ around 35 developers to handle ongoing enhancement and optimization of our SAP applications,” says Bauer Verlagsgruppe’s Holger Böhn. He also underlines the significant challenges posed by change management: “All modifications have to be checked and distributed distributed in a controlled manner. This is the only way of reducing the risk of databases being reset or of systems failing.” For a long time, the publishing group’s IT team executed application transport with the help of command-line scripts. However, it became evident that this largely manual method was tying up far too much manpower, and failed to deliver the necessary coordination and transparency. Moreover, an automatic tool was needed to check the source code of security-related and personal data.
Against this background, Bauer Verlagsgruppe decided to automate application transport by implementing a solution specially developed for complex SAP system landscapes. They opted for the TransportManager from REALTECH. This userfriendly software package is fully integrated into the SAP system, requires no additional hardware and clients, and works with any operating system and database.
TransportManager now distributes all the company’s change requests automatically. A standard overview provides 360° visibility of change and transport management processes - and electronic workflow ensures high speed and efficiency. The REALTECH solution automatically monitors all critical objects before distributing them. For example, the TransportManager checks for conflicts between change requests, and ensures requests are processed in the correct order.
Transparency, control, security
“One key benefit of the TransportManager is that it allows critical objects such as reports containing personal data to be handled separately. This enables us to apply all company security policies,” says Holger Böhn, and points out the strengths of the REALTECH solution: “The sophisticated authorization concept ensures that all modifications of our SAP systems are handled correctly and in line with internal and external auditing requirements. Today, our transport management is based on an automated dual control principle. Every transport has to be signed off by two people. This is particularly important with the HR module, which contains a large volume of highly sensitive data.”
The TransportManager plays an important role in ensuring that there are no disruptions to day-to-day operation of the SAP systems. The high performance of these systems is also backed by another userfriendly REALTECH solution: theGuard! ApplicationManager helps the publishing group’s IT department to centrally and proactively administer the entire application landscape. As Holger Böhn puts it: “An outage of one of our SAP systems would be very costly. Thanks to theGuard! ApplicationManager, we now only require three administrators to effectively minimize this risk.”
theGuard! ApplicationManager from REALTECH offers a wide range of components for monitoring Windows NT/2000® and Microsoft SQL Server, as well as for managing SAP R/3 and the SAP APO, SAP BW and mySAP CRM solutions.
