REALTECH’s software solutions are used by hundreds of SAP customers worldwide. TransportManager is REALTECH’s economical software for efficient and secure SAP Change Management. As SAP environments become more complex, centralized administration and reporting of all SAP changes is required for effectively aligning IT resources with business processes.
TransportManager is the optimal solution for increasing the productivity and reducing the costs associated with the day-to-day management of SAP transports. With TransportManager our customers are able to:
- Centralize SAP transport administration across complex landscapes
- Enable flexible approval workflows tailored to your business processes
- Simplify compliance reporting for change requests
- Improve system availability through automatic security checks
- Reduce time and costs associated with manual transport procedures
- Accelerate system refreshes and copies with integrated tools
TransportManager Overview
REALTECH’s TransportManager is easy-to-use software for the automated distribution of all program and datachanges within your SAP environment. TransportManager enables the efficient and secure management of transports in complex system landscapes. TransportManager enables centraliized administration and monitoring of all transport activities across multiple, geographically dispersed SAP landscapes.
TransportManager provides centralized administration
of transports across all landscapes.
Most SAP customers find that SAP’s Transaction Management System — TMS — is sufficient for a stand-alone, three-system landscape. However for SAP customers with multiple, non-standard system landscapes — such as the one shown below — transport management can prove to be a significant challenge in terms of daily management, security, approval workflow and compliance tracking.
Complex system landscape.
Build or Buy?
Many organizations invest a great deal of effort to build and support a customized transport approval infrastructure. Once built, this infrastructure must be supported and enhanced as the SAP environment evolves. Although often overlooked, the embedded costs to maintain these infrastructures are very significant. TransportManager delivers a significant ROI by eliminating costs associated with internally developed transport workflows. Additionally, TransportManager facilitates a “best practices” transport workflow which is based on years of SAP consulting experience.
TransportManager Benefits
Many people within an organization can benefit from TransportManager’s automated and secure transport management - not just the SAP Basis team. Developers, IT management, end users, project managers, functional team members and compliance officers become more productive with TransportManager’s advanced workflow capabilities. Inefficient procedures associated with manually tracking transports with spreadsheets, email workflows, and paper authorization forms can be eliminated. Avoid the significant challenges associated with implementing SAP’s workflow and the limitations of the Transport Management System-TMS.
Accomplish much more with less effort
TransportManager is a valuable productivity tool which eliminates the manual transport process, enables electronic approval of transports across departments, and provides comprehensive reporting to satisfy regulatory and audit requirements. Productivity improvements are amplified when TransportManager is utilized in complex, multi-landscape environments. Basis administrators are relieved of the repetitive, time-consuming procedures associated with traditional transport management.
Contained within SAP
Since TransportManager is written entirely in ABAP, it’s easy to install and maintain. No additional hardware is required and it is compatible with all versions of SAP. Its convenient operation within the familiar SAP environment guarantees rapid implementation and acceptance among users and administrators.
Centralized, flexible workflow
TransportManager utilizes its own pre-configured, centralized workflow - not based on SAP’s workflow. This workflow includes all approval steps that are necessary to release a request for the automatic import into other systems. The assignment of users to roles is based on SAP’s standard authorization concept and tools (profile generator, CUA, etc). The workflow enables electronic signatures which greatly reduce the administrative time and effort require for transport authorization. The workflow approval process is fully customizable, auditable, simple to modify, and compatible with major email packages.
TransportManager's centralized workflow monitor.
Simplify QA procedures and improve system availability
By automatically checking for user-defined critical objects and critical aspects, erroneous imports into the production systems can be virtually eliminated. For maximum transport security, TransportManager enables administrators to define system-specific or global critical objects. Automatic checking for object collisions is available to prevent "overtakers". Import dependencies can be defined to modify the import order of change requests. The appropriate parties are automatically notified when certain conditions are encountered.
Customized definition of critical objects.
Easy to produce reports provide IT managers with comprehensive change request details. A report on the entire "life cycle" of a change request can be easily created. Tracking of the entire approval process is provided along with request header data, object lists, workflow activities, documentation, additional notes, import information and additional attribute values. These reports can be easily attached to an email or published to an internal web site.
Sample change request lifecycle report.
Integration with existing Change Management solutions
TransportManager easily integrates with other change management solutions. With the Change Management Interface (CMI) module, TransportManager offers open interfaces for the integration in existing change and application lifecycle solutions thus enabling the seamless incorporation of the SAP environment into your central ITIL processes.
System copies and comparisons
Simplify the process of system refreshes and system/client copies with TransportManager's import tracking tools. Save time and effort by identifying transport requests that were imported to a target system after a certain point in time, and by comparing imports between two systems.
Import tracking tool.
TransportManager Features
REALTECH's TransportManager was developed to suit the requirements of software change management for SAP. It enables automatic, project-based management of software changes across complex system and client landscapes. Operating system and database independent, its user interface is identical even within larger system landscapes that are running several different versions of SAP R/3.
TransportManager is a pure ABAP/4 program, enabling it to be used on all platforms and databases that support SAP R/3. Remote Function Calls (RFCs) are used to start the transportation functions directly on the target systems. If several transport directories are used, all of the necessary data is automatically transferred.
Centralized Workflow Monitor
A very sophisticated, pre-configured workflow enables the targeted processing of authorization requests. Each of the workflow participants is informed of the tasks that need to be performed via SAP Office Mail or normal email. The workflow, however, does not finish with the completion of the import. The workflow automates more functions such as the ability to notify the appropriate people in the event of a transport failure.
TransportManager's centralized workflow monitor.
Transport Levels
Transport levels are unique to TransportManager. Systems and clients - which are considered to be equal from a transport technical view - are assigned to a transport level. In the workflow, an approval is always done for all systems of the current transport level and not only for a single system of the level. Any number of systems with any number of clients can be added to a transport level.
Adding and maintaining transport levels.
Destinations
A destination is the total number of systems (one or more) to which imports are transferred, upon proper approval. There is no restriction regarding the number of destinations or the number of systems and clients that can be assigned to a destination.
Projects
Projects are used to group change requests. They can be further used as a filter for the workflow monitor. Similar to transport level and destination, project is an authorization field of TransportManager's authorization workflow. Projects enable you to ensure that the import requests for a specific project never take the wrong transport path.
User Groups
User groups enable a very flexible and customizable workflow. Up to nine different approval steps for the content approval and/or the technical approval can be easily created. Only users with signature authorization can be assigned to a user group. The number of necessary signatures required for approval can be defined independently of each other and individually for each logical destination and transport level. Also the sequence of approvals with a user group can be controlled and easily modified.
Displaying the users within an assigned user group.
Quality Assurance
TransportManager's quality assurance procedures help minimize the downtime of your SAP systems. During authorization, an order's object list is automatically compared to critical objects and other quality and security-related factors. The check for special aspects considers among other things:
- XPRAs
- SAP-Objects
- Not original Objects
- Errors and warnings on transports
Import Tracking
TransportManager offers numerous functions to guarantee the alignment of the import databases. All transports in the TM System are recorded with their attributes such as import time, return code, importer, target system, destination client, etc. With the help of the import databases it is possible to setup systems after a backup or a system copy on the current status. TransportManager determines the delta between two systems (e.g. quality assurance and productive system) on the basis of the tracking information.
Reporting
Data on import requests and notes can be compiled into printable and exportable reports. Reports of all imports within specific date ranges can be created, with the ability to further limit the import list by the author and the request. More detailed reports can be created with REALTECH's TransportManagerCenter (TMC).
System and Personal Queues
The system queue is the standard means for importing change requests. For each system that is part of a destination, at least one system queue is managed. If a system is assigned to several transport levels, there exists a system queue for each of the transport levels. For emergency and special transports, you can use the personal queue. Each authorized user can manage his/her own personal queue. A user can feed this queue with any number of requests and for any number of systems (that belong to the destinations of these change requests). The only prerequisite is that these requests are completely approved for the affected systems. An import using the personal queue does not prevent a request from being imported again later with the next scheduled system queue. This principle should minimize the danger of mismatch problems.
TransportManager's personal queue.
(click to enlarge)
TransportManager System Requirements |
Hardware:
No additional hardware required because of implementation in the SAP system.
Operating System:
Independent because of implementation in the SAP system.
Database:
Independent because of implementation in the SAP system.
Network:
Independent because of implementation in the SAP system.
Security Concept:
Integrated in SAP user management.
SAP Release:
- TransportManager 4.4 requires a SAP Basis release of 4.0b.
- TransportManager 5.0 requires a SAP Basis release of 4.6c.
- TMC 2.1 requires a SAP Basis release of 4.6c.