Leveraging SAP Solution Manager’s ChaRM, Solvay was able to create a single central IT Change Management process that allowed them to monitor every single change throughout the company, harmonizing the governance of support services and simplifying the end-to-end change management process across the entire value chain of the “new Solvay”.
The Challenge
Following the acquisition of Rhodia, Solvay’s IT organization became responsible for the governance of a larger landscape, consisting of approximately 60 SAP and 150 non-SAP environments. In addition, Rhodia’s IT governance and change management processes were completely different from the ones in use at Solvay, creating an additional layer of complexity and risk. It was critical for Solvay to identify a single, common solution that would help them minimize the risk of IT services disruptions which, especially for mission critical systems, would have a direct impact on the continuity of Solvay’s business operations. Therefore, Solvay needed a platform that would allow them to simplify, centralize, and consolidate the governance process, while at the same time be robust and scalable enough to support an organization of that size. Solvay also required the ability to release a single change, developed centrally and approved once, to multiple production systems at the same time.
The Approach
After evaluating the different options available on the market, Solvay identified SAP Solution Manager as the optimal platform. Not only would SAP Solution Manager be able to address the short terms need of a mature, centralized Change and Release Management process with ChaRM, but it could also support Solvay’s journey towards the adoption of Information Technology Infrastructure Library practices. The initial weeks of the project were spent performing a FIT/GAP analysis between Solution Manager’s ChaRM process. Once the design of the common to-be process was finalized, the deployment of ChaRM took approximately 18 weeks to go-live on the main business critical landscapes. ChaRM was then gradually rolled-out to the rest of the landscapes in the 3 months following the first go-live.
The Impact
Leveraging SAP Solution Manager’s ChaRM, Solvay was able to create a single central IT Change Management process that allowed them to monitor every single change throughout the company, harmonizing the governance of support services and simplifying the end to end change management process across the entire value chain of the “new Solvay”. Given the complexity and criticality of the company’s IT landscape and the impact a single change could have on global business operations, this marks an important step towards the solution quality and availability objectives required.
Success case from Avvale (formerly TechEdge site) see link.