Abstract:
ABSTRACT
SAP CHANGE MANAGEMENT
by
Arvind Sureshchandran Nair
Master of Science in Computer Science
California State University, Chico
Spring 2009
SAP systems are used in organization to facilitate their business. It provides
seamless integration of business functions. SAP is configurable to suit the business
needs of the company. SAP customer can also develop programs, reports to mold SAP
to function per the business requirements. All the changes in terms of developments and
customizations create change requests, also known as transport requests. The transports
are essentially made in a development system and moved to the production system.
Since business requirements changes on a continual basis, there would be many
transport requests that go from development system to production system. The
regulation of the transport requests is known as change management.
Organization using SAP systems develop many processes and procedures to
manage changes. These often result in manual documentation of the changes, approvals
tracking and manual transport management. The auditors and organization’s
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management also need reports showing the amount of changes in the system. A huge
effort is spend every day on change management to document every step of the request.
In addition, all the approvals have to be maintained for audit reasons and proper review
and testing of the changes in the system should be performed.
The purpose of this project is to develop a system that can automate many
tasks in change management. It aims to simplify the process of tracking business
requirements, developments, configurations, testing and validation. The system ensures
that it has proper approval before a certain change is moved to production. The system
has the capability to make sure there is security at each stage of the change request. It
also provides reporting to the management as well as auditors.
The system incorporates various building blocks of SAP’s proprietary
language, ABAP, SAP tools like SAPconnect, Transport Management System and
Change and Transport Organizer. SAP standard workflow is triggered at various stages
for notification. SAP authorizations are used to secure the system so that changes do not
get into production without appropriate approval. This is key to change management
since auditors monitor proper segregation of duties. The system also gathers all the
documentation that should be associated with a change request. The system uses
standard function modules provided by SAP to ensure smooth transport management.
