When it comes to keeping up with ever-changing business operations, company requirements, and trends across the industry, optimized change management processes can be a make-or-break factor in your success over time.
But, without the right technical resources and personnel with the necessary skills to handle change management in the most efficient way possible, your organization could suffer from unoptimized organization processes and a lack of productivity across the board…
Fortunately, this is where SAP Change Management capabilities come in to help.
Read on to learn more about change request management processes in SAP and key capabilities and advantages of the SAP Management of Change (MOC) application, as well as where our team of SAP consultants can fit in your organization and SAP projects.
What is Change Management in SAP?
SAP Change Management refers to effectively managing and implementing changes within the SAP ecosystem, including implementing new functionalities, upgrading software versions, or integrating additional modules. Change management in SAP encompasses activities such as defining change requirements, assessing the impact of changes, creating change document requests, coordinating testing and training, and ensuring smooth transition and user adoption.
Understanding the Flow of a Change Process in SAP
With a lack of organizational change management, SAP projects could be delayed or paused, making corporate change management key. With effective change management in SAP, companies can minimize disruptions in the SAP system landscape, maintain data integrity, optimize system performance, and maximize their SAP investments over time.
The Management of Change (MOC) process provides flexibility and is easily customizable to meet the needs of even the most diverse change management processes for individual users and teams across the entire SAP system landscape.
Here are the main steps of the change request management process in SAP…
1) Create a Change Request
Users in the “Reporter” role create the change request. To do this, they will describe the change needed, add any related documents or attachments to the request, and complete questionnaires that are customizable for each user to ensure the change is requested correctly and all documentation is completed and stored in the right place.
2) Conduct Initial Review
For this step of the process, an “Approver,” or someone in a manager or supervisor role on the change management team, is required to carry out an initial review of the change processes. In the review process, approvers must ensure that all requirements for the change request are fulfilled, edit requests to improve the input and viability of the request, and approve change request submissions.
3) Approve Change Request
Once a change request has been submitted, employees in the “Approver” role are responsible for determining whether or not the requested change is relevant and necessary to the proposed business processes.
If relevant, the change request will be approved and sent to the next step of the change request management process. If not relevant, the request will be rejected and sent back to the drawing board for employees to come up with new change requests.
4) Drive Change Request
In this step, an employee in the “Coordinator” role facilitates the release of the change request, triggers the engagement of change agents, and drives the completion of activities outlined in the change request.
In this step, coordinators release the change request, define activity hierarchies, timelines, and owners, monitor the change request as activities are completed, and close the change request once all activities have been completed.
5) Execute Activities
In the last step of the process, approvers and reviewers in the “Activity Owner” role are responsible for executing activities related to the software changes and transport requests. This involves driving the completion of activities by teams or individual users, including reviews, questionnaires, or approvals using checklists.
How to Handle Management of Change in SAP
The SAP Management of Change (MOC) application is designed to help companies in any industry make operational changes to procedures, policies, and operating conditions with confidence and drive business growth without disruption to existing processes.
With the MOC SAP application, users are enabled to…
- Automate management of change processes to improve productivity and reduce wasted manual effort and risk of errors
- Implement projects and processes with accelerated delivery times to avoid delays and reduce the risk of bottlenecks
- Leverage rule-based creation of activities to perform and automate the release and status of change-request processes
- Improve auditing processes by establishing standard change management procedures and offering a more consistent SAP system landscape
- Reduce implementation and adoption costs by using configurable templates and parallel task-processing functions
- Assess and control risks to keep data secure and maintain safe operations throughout the digital transformation process and beyond
The SAP MOC application is available on-premise as a part of the S/4HANA platform, and it offers configurable solutions to meet system and software requirements dependent upon customer-specific scenarios and needs.
Management of change (MOC) processes in SAP makes it easier to request changes for technical and application components across the SAP landscape, access all the changes in a centralized work center, and drive better change management outcomes over time.
How Can We Help?
Whether you need help navigating the Central Change and Transport System to request and complete changes in SAP ABAP and non-ABAP objects, additional support helping users complete change request management processes in the SAP Solution Manager, or anything else SAP-related, Surety Systems is here to help.
Our team of senior-level SAP consultants has the skills and functional knowledge needed to help you with your SAP implementation and manage data, complete tasks, and optimize operations for any of your SAP projects, regardless of the complexity of your organizational structure or the nature of your project needs.
Getting Started with Our Team
Interested in learning where our team of expert SAP consultants fit in with your SAP projects?
Ready to get started on an SAP implementation project but don’t know where to begin?
Contact us today for more information about our SAP consulting services!
