Rev-Trac S/4 HANA Case Study

1. Version Number 1
An Australian university made the decision
in 2015 to move its finance system into the
SAP HANA Enterprise Cloud (HEC). At the time,
the university was restructuring – consolidating
one institution with five faculties into two separate
colleges. The restructure resulted in massive
organizational change, impacting not only the roles
and responsibilities of all staff but also internal IT
support practices and legacy technologies.
The finance team viewed the consolidation of the
university as an opportunity to change its structure
and update the chartered accounts. Following a
feasibility study of re-implementing SAP FICO
on-premise, the university resolved to move its
finance system to SAP’s HEC.
The benefit of migrating to the Cloud for the
university was that moving forwards, it would not
have to invest resources and time to maintaining
servers and technology infrastructure.
Managing SAP change and
configuration transport requirements
is crucial to success
The challenge of implementing SimpleFinance on
HEC – SAP’s private managed Cloud – however,
was significant. It was a greenfield implementation
with a new Cloud solution, involving huge change
management and learning how to do everything in
a HANA environment. Making it quite difficult from a
technology standpoint.
The university implemented a 3-tiered architecture
– Dev/QAS/Prod – into the HANA Cloud, integrating
back into its HR and payroll systems, which were
still running on-premise. Managing the significant
number of S/4 HANA change requirements was key
to bringing this new world under control.
The integration between the S/4 HANA Cloud and
the university’s on-premise system alone generated
a massive amount of SAP transports, particularly
with writing new interfaces from scratch. For the
university, the transition to S/4 HANA Cloud was a
large project and it was essential that transports did
not get messed up.
To meet the challenge and enforce a pre-defined
sequence of transports across its SAP landscape,
the IT team used Rev-Trac from the very beginning
of the project. Rev-Trac provided the level of control
and transparency it required to manage and track
its S/4 HANA requirements and transports.
Enforced controls simplify
S/4 HANA transports
Rev-Trac keeps university’s transition
to S/4 HANA Cloud on track
“When we turn something on in
SAP, whether it’s in our
business objects environment or
SimpleFinance or HR, everything
goes through Rev-Trac.
There are no exceptions”
Director of enterprise applications
from an Australian university.

2. Automatically manage and track SAP
transport sequence to reduce risk
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Automate to easily manage
transports in the S/4 HANA systems
The university implemented SAP in 1998/99 and has
been using Rev-Trac – an SAP change management
automation platform – since early 2000, as a release
management and monitoring tool.
As its SAP landscape became more complex, the
volume of SAP change increased dramatically,
particularly in the HR and HTM space. Deploying
Rev-Trac enabled the university to manage the
sequence of transports in a consistent manner,
ensuring successful and safe production go-lives.
Rev-Trac enabled the university to ensure that
transports were in the right sequence and remained
so as they moved from development through to
production. The software automated the sequencing
of transport deployment which reduced the potential
for errors whether development work, upgrades,
patches or enhancements to existing applications.
Control SAP transports to
maintain S/4 HANA system integrity
Rev-Trac became indispensable to the university
during the transition of its finance system to the S/4
HANA Cloud. In using the software to manage and
track the sequencing of its transports, the university
was able to meet its goals without breaking the
system.
Since the university had been running Rev-Trac
on-premise without any problems it made sense to
move the SAP change management solution up into
the S/4 HANA Cloud at the same time. Utilizing
Rev-Trac from ‘day one’ enabled it to get transports
and release management under control, maintaining
the stability and integrity of its SAP environments.
The software automatically managed and tracked
all transports created from the outset, enabling
the university to use Rev-Trac as the approval
mechanism when moving data from client to client.
The last thing the university wanted was for
transports to be done incorrectly and to have its
different clients uneven. Whether running
on-premise or in the S/4 HANA Cloud, the software is
an important part of the university’s SAP ecosystem.
That is how it does transports, and how it does
release management.
e info@rev-trac.com
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