One of our long-standing customers, the largest forklift manufacturer in Europe, uses the SAST SUITE for its SAP authorization management alongside a variety of IT services from akquinet AG. As part of a compliance project, the SAST Consulting team was commissioned to redesign and re-engineer all SAP authorizations for nearly 900 users in Germany. In this guest commentary from Sascha Heckmann, together with external SAP consultant Bernhard Radermacher, he tells how the “Ticket Monitor” a custom-developed add-on for the tried and tested SAST Safe Go-Live Management helped the project become a full success.

 

What goals did the customer hope to achieve with the redesign of their SAP authorizations?

• Adherence to compliance regulations
• Reduction of separation-of-duties conflicts and the individual critical authorizations
• Implementation of responsibilities and mitigation handling for roles and SoD definitions
• Creation of new roles and authorizations, including ease of maintenance
• Automatic user/role provisioning workflow with different approval levels

The project was carried out using a workplace-based approach, in several phases for each department, area, and group. A major factor of its success was our use of the SAST SUITE. Thanks to the software, it was possible to execute the project quickly, efficiently, and with a very high quality level. We used several solutions from the Access Governance area of the SAST SUITE, including the real-time analysis of authorizations and separation of duties, the automated generation of SAP roles, and – in particular – SAST Safe Go-Live Management for trouble-free conversion of authorizations without any impairments to day-to-day operations during the rollout.

What makes SAST Safe Go-Live Management so special?

If the rollout of new roles and authorizations causes unplanned “constraints” on an SAP user, this feature of the SAST SUITE enables that user to fully up and running again as a self-service. In turn, this minimizes potential interruptions and wait times for SAP users during an authorization redesign of this type. As soon a user activates this self-service, the software generates an internal ticket automatically. In addition, the SAP role and authorization administrator receives all the relevant information needed to correct the specific authorizations quickly. It is an ideal solution with high internal acceptance that lets you implement changes to SAP roles and authorizations seamlessly, with a minimum of system interruptions.

Ticket Monitor: a visual enhancement to the SAST SUITE

The project stakeholders requested a current daily overview of all new, open, and already completed tickets from SAP users during the rollout. Since the SAST SUITE does not offer such abstracted information on the project status, the SAST Consulting team sought a solution together with an external consultant who was involved in the project, Bernhard Radermacher. And they found it in the “Ticket Monitor” he developed.

To enable authorization problems to be handled as quickly as possible, SAST Safe Go-Live Management was used in both the production and quality assurance systems in this project. The abstracted view of all tickets was realized as a list in the project SharePoint, where the sessions of both systems were consolidated. The stakeholders were then given direct read access to this list:

The daily changes were then formatted automatically, using SharePoint Chart web part, to visualize ticket volume:

The technical implementation

To enable analysis of all status changes to the tickets, the project team chose to set up a SharePoint list with version management. To extract and prepare the data, they developed two Python scripts that ran periodically on a Windows server:

• Extraction: Read from the SAP systems and insert the data in SharePoint every 20 minutes
• Formatting: Extract the status changes and generate the report list at 3:00 a.m. daily

Customer benefits

The custom development of the Ticket Monitor by Bernhard Radermacher made it possible to establish a highly transparent reporting system, building on the detailed data already available in the SAST SUITE – to the great satisfaction of all the stakeholders.

If you’re looking for more tips on successful SAP authorization management, whether specifically for redesign projects or for conversion to SAP S/4HANA, we recommend our Webinars on demand.

Or are you interested specifically in the Ticket Monitor? In that case, please feel free to contact Bernhard Radermacher at any time.

Sascha Heckmann (SAP Authorization Consultant, SAST SOLUTIONS)

 

About Bernhard Radermacher

Bernhard Radermacher has worked in commercial data processing for more than 30 years and is an SAP Certified Technical Consultant. Starting with DCW on AS/400 and continuing with SAP R/3 on AS/400 and other platforms, he also worked for mid-sized and large consulting firms in the U.S. for 16 years. He is currently working in Germany, supporting customers in projects that focus on the SAP Core and SAP authorizations.

Contact: bernhard.radermacher@netlink-consulting.com

 

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