SAP Change Control ROI - How to Project Economic Benefits Your CIO, CEO and CFO Can Believe: Discipline with Flexibility - Part III of IV

[Former Member]

Maintaining control is costly if you haven’t embraced automation and strategized seriously around your change processes. The cost to manage particular aspects of change varies but the greater your current manual cost, the more room you have to automate.

Automation allows you to do a range of things differently. It enables continuous delivery, agile development and successful management of multiple projects, and provides complete documentation enforced with every change request. Audits become effortless.

Last month, exploring automation’s benefits, we calculated ROI for Accident Prevention delivered through Rev-Trac OOPS and Object Locking. That speaks directly to the importance of process enforcement. Remember – you can automate any process, even less than perfect processes. That’s why any change control tool needs to deliver discipline AND flexibility. Your process configurations can then be easily fine-tuned as processes evolve and become more refined.

We’ve just seen a new customer who has 100 different projects going concurrently at any given time. Keeping a handle on this is very difficult. When one has N, N+1 change coordination on a large scale including things like retrofit, regression testing error rectification, go live windows and the like, automation very quickly became the solution that provided for these requirements quite reliably.

Let’s drill down into how to calculate projected value of flexible, configurable workflow and transport automation. First, establish the figures before automation, as a baseline for your Projected ROI:

GATHER YOUR INFO

Transport Activity

Basis:

___	Number of new standard transports per week entering the landscape (#)
___	Number of non-standard transports presented per week (rush transports) (#)
___	Number of complex transport migrations per week (migration configuration required) (#)
___	Number of migrations to move a transport from DEV to PRD (#)
___	Number of return code problems / total transport migrations (%)

Time:

___	Extra time required to perform non-standard transports (rush transports) (Minutes)
___	Extra time required to perform each extra complex transport migration (Minutes)
___	Normal time required to perform transport migrations and check return codes (Minutes)
___	Manual identification of return code problems (Minutes)
___	Rectification of return code problems (Minutes)

Functional:

___	Functional wait time for non-standard transports to be performed (Minutes)

CALCULATIONS

Basis Team time:

___	Standard transport migration tasks (Standard transport load x time (Minutes) x rate)
___	Non-standard migration tasks (rush transport load x time (Minutes) x rate)
___	Complex migration tasks (Complex transport load x time (Minutes) x rate)
___	Return code problem identification and rectification (return code load x time (Minutes) x rate)

Functional Team:

___	Time spent waiting for basis to perform non-standard transport migrations (Minutes)

Add up the values and multiply your findings by 50%. The result will be the savings our consultants estimate you can expect, just in the area of configurable workflow and transport automation.