Accelerating Flow across an SAP Pipeline

DevOps is about delivering measurable business results, and optimizing a pipeline through elimination of bottlenecks is a great way to achieve the business objectives that contribute to business success. So, as organizations embark on developing new features to embrace new technology there is always one question to be answered – is what we are doing going to contribute to the business and return some level of value?

Having spoken with many organizations around the world – SAP and non-SAP development shops – when I ask about their business value, desired business objectives, or technical initiatives underway the responses can be grouped into common themes:

• Faster and more frequent releases
• Improved quality to delight clients
• Increased security to reduce risk to the business
• Lower costs to increase profitability

The words they use to describe their objectives and how they define value may differ but the outcomes they are hoping to achieve typically fall into one, or more, of those four buckets.

For some, these objectives may be considered too simplistic or generic. I would suggest that they are generically worded to help define a mission or articulate a challenge – a challenge to continuously improve. And isn’t continuous improvement what DevOps is all about? When one considers that every system has at least one limitation, organizations should be working to find that limitation, remediate the problem, and seek the next challenge to be solved.

Process optimization and value stream mapping workshops are about finding the limitations and determining which action to take in eliminating the bottleneck. During the review of an end-to-end process, these limitations may surface as:

• Delays manifesting from manual process steps and/or lack of an integration across a pipeline’s tool chain
• Poor reporting capabilities to aide decision making as data is strewn across multiple tool repositories
• Lack of automation and gaps in the toolchain resulting in herculean manual effort to complete certain tasks
• Omission of quality checks because of time constraints unnecessarily increasing risk to the business

If we can agree on limitations, let’s first look at the solution and how one might eliminate them and the negative impact they have on our mission to deliver business value by achieving our objectives.

We will demonstrate this by showing a fully integrated DevOps pipeline for SAP development in action. Click to watch:

 

In summarizing the video, you should have seen how HCLSoftware DevOps solutions, integrated with Jira and SAP ChaRM, deliver an integrated end-to-end solution eliminating many of the common limitations organizations struggle with.

Integrations include:

1. Seamless tool chain integration across DevOps practice areas associated to planning, development, release orchestration, deployment automation and test automation.
2. Automatic Work item status updates synchronized across SAP ChaRM, Jira, and HCL Accelerate
3. Inclusion of SAP ChaRM ID and SAP Transport ID on the Jira work item and in the HCL Accelerate work item for improved auditability
4. Automated execution of integration, functional, performance, and security tests integrated in the process to verify changes and scan for security vulnerabilities with HCL OneTest and HCL AppScan orchestrated by HCL Launch
5. Quality metrics automatically presented on a single pain of glass for accurate decision making based on data using HCL Accelerate’s Insights view
6. Details of time spent across HCL Accelerate’s value stream phases and stages to pinpoint bottlenecks and isolate areas for improvement

To learn more about HCLSoftware’s DevOps Solution and how it can help your organization, click here.

And thanks for stopping by!