Conigma™ CCM

Management, Control and Automation of the IT processes for SAP Change-, Release- and Transport Management.

Status quo:

	Savings by using Conigma™ CCM: Save up to 80% of the Change and Transport Management related Communication and Coordination effort Save up to 80% of reporting time to prove compliance Avoid up to 90% of change management related mistakes, i.e. transporting incomplete CR’s, transporting untested CR’s or transporting CR’s without completion of Non-SAP development tasks Gain a 50% higher chance to identify and prevent critical risks

Many companies still organize Change and Release Management of their SAP systems based on transport objects and manage complex issues like dependencies, serial ordering, approvals, etc. of changes and releases using paper lists, spreadsheets, project meetings and protocols.

Larger companies today have hundreds to thousands of transport objects every month – a current Conigma™ CCM user is even close to hundred thousand transport objects per year.

The most important disadvantage of manual Change and Release Management is these processes due to the sheer complexity to be highly error prone and risky. Managing change based on transport objects means dealing with single transport objects as if these would not have any relation to a originating Change Request (business request), which may include for complete implementation several (up to hundreds) of transport objects. In contrary, critical process steps in for the implementation of a Change Request like testing, approval, release for production do always relate to the Change Request and usually not to a single transport object.

To achieve a well defined, efficient and high quality SAP change process as well as fulfilling compliance requirements (complete audit-trail, approvals, segregation of duties) it is a must to control and manage the SAP Change process based on business requirements/change requests. Trying to implement this process control by using manual measures not only creates a significantly high additional work load, but still ends up frequently with errors, which typically are:

• Misunderstandings and errors due to communication mistakes (project and process participants gets wrong information, partial information or late information)
• Misunderstandings and errors due to classical project management failures (functional dependencies and timing constraints are not recognized correctly leading to the wrong actions)

For SAP customers, errors as mentioned before often results in a long lasting, expensive analysis phase (several days, several employees), negatively impüacting the daily SAP maintenance and operation activities (it takes hours up to days to rebuild a destroyed SAP system and get it back to regular operation). The worst case for many enterprises is a complete stop of the productive SAP system due to error caused by weak change management – this worst case may result in thousands of SAP users not being able to work for several hours.

Functionality:

Conigma™ CCM allows SAP customers to implement much more efficient IT processes at lower costs for changing, maintaining and operating their SAP systems. In parallel the quality of the SAP changes and availability of SAP systems increases. Conigma™ CCM integrates SAP change and release management seamlessly with the existing IT infrastructure - ticket-/helpdesk solutions as well as solutions for Software Change- and Configuration Management (SCCM) for client/server and host applications may be deeply integrated with the SAP software logistics and the SAP transport management system (TMS).

Focus areas of Conigma™ CCM are:

• Automation and Control of the Change-, Release- and Transport Management processes for SAP landscapes (in particular for complex, parallel landscapes) supporting any kind of compliance requirements
• Integration of the SAP Change-, Release- and Transport Management processes with enterprise solutions for Software Change- and Configuration-Management (SCCM) as well as helpdesk-/ticket solutions.

Conigma™ CCM controls and manages the IT processes for SAP Change-, Release- and Transport Management. Conigma™ CCM hereby overlooks all activities from creation of a change request (business requirement), controlling the development process, quality assurance, documentation obligations of single tasks to fully automated delivery to the specific SAP landscape (independent of complexity and configuration).

Change Requests and Releases are usually the objects, which are moving through the Conigma™ CCM workflow, representing rhs the change process of a SAP customer. This methodology ensures, that always all transport requests are distributed at the right time in the required quality and maturity to the right SAP systems. Herby, it does not matter, whether the transport requests relating to a single change request needs to be transported to several, different SAP landscapes, i.e. ERP, BI and Portal and whether a mix of different customizing technologies – table changes, ABAP programming, JAVA programming - have been used for implementation.

Conigma™ CCM enables the user:

• To implement and enforce highly automated ITIL-/CMMI-compliant, but also any other customer specific, IT processes for SAP Change-, Release- and Transport-Management
• To leverage the fully automated integration of SAP test tools into the workflow
• To audit-proof archive Change Requests and Releases including all metadata using the standard SAP ArchiveLink interface.
• To automate transport management and execution based on the level of releases, complex hierarchical change requests as well as single simple change requests.
• To generate, customize and access powerful reports for managing and monitoring projects, resources and compliance aspects.
• To seamlessly integrate with enterprise applications for Software Change-Management and Helpdesk solutions via a bidirectional, powerful API (API = Application Programming Interface).

Benefits:

Conigma™ CCM allows the user the following benefits:

Management of the overall life cycle of a Release and Change Request

Conigma™ CCM is a homogeneous solution, completely integrated with SAP. Conigma™ CCM provides a complete range of functionalities for managing the Change- Release- and Transport processes of SAP.

The Conigma™ Suite allows:

• the introduction of a standard SAP Change process, independent of the complexity of the SAP landscape and technologies used for customization
• achieving IT governance and compliance requirements with regard to the SAP Change process “Out-of-the-Box”;
• the reduction of IT costs and optimization of resource allocation by being able to geographically distribute SAP development and SAP operation (near-shoring, off-shoring);
• significantly increased quality and reliability of SAP changes

Productivity increase and cost reduction in the IT department

Conigma™ CCM enables the user to gain significant cost savings in the areas of customizing, maintaining and operating SAP by automating the related IT processes. Even in times of reduced IT budgets, it is now possible for the IT department to deliver more innovation, due to more streamlined development processes and reallocating budget and resources. So, the usual piling up of innovations and the number of new requirements waiting for implementation due to budget constraints will be drastically reduced (i.e. introduction of new SAP products and modules for automating additional critical business processes).

The Conigma™ suite besides the core product Conigma™ CCM™ includes the modules Module Conigma™ QCOPY and Conigma™ DEVSYNC, which also may be licensed and operated as independent products (stand-alone).