Transport Management - Tools comparision

[Former Member]

Hi All,

We are looking for Advance features for SAP Change management. Particularly in the area of automated transport Sequencing and conflict management between transports.

Though CHARM supports sequencing, we need to have automated sequencing.

Object level comparison between transports, flagging of transports..

Checked the following tools:

CHARM u2013 SAP SOLUTION MANAGER

REV-TRAC (http://www.xrsc.com/)

TRANSPORT EXPRESS (http://www.basistechnologies.com/products--services/transport-express.aspx)

IWAVE TRANSPORT MANAGER FOR SAP (http://www.enigmatec.net/products_iWaveTransportManager.html)

Can Somebody who have worked on these tools provide comparison of these tools to CHARM

Regards,

Ramesh Ramagowni

[rossmclanachan]

This message was moderated.

[Former Member]

Hi Ramesh,

Tools comparison on a feature by feature basis can be misleading and result in the wrong tool selection. We tend to advise our potential customers to initially creat a full list of features required weighted based on change control requirement and then weigh up the options accordingly.

The best place to get this information is from each tools vendor separately.

Rrgards, Rick

VP Business Development

Revelation Software Concepts

[Former Member]

Hi,

I think the post is in a wrong forum. this forum is for Transportation management, a module in the area of logistics..

[Former Member]

Hi Ramesh,

I think RealTech company's "Transport Manager" is the perfect tool for your requirement.I have been using the tool for a long time and find it's very useful.It has features like transport sequencing(dependancy creation),A pop can be generated during approval for Transports containing critical objects and for transports containing changes on same object lying in the transport queue,object collisioons will be displayed during approval etc and there many advanced features.CHARM has some basic features but if you are looking at automation of transports completely you can consider this one.Let me know if you need more information on this.

Thanks,

Varada Reddy.

[Former Member]

Hi Ramesh,

II have used some of these tools before or evaluated some of them at some point or other though not for 3 or 4 years. Which one you select depends on a mixture of your requirements and budget.

For me the biggest benefits of a transport tool are in project mode when you have a very high number of transports, as opposed to production support mode.

In project mode a tool can automate the actual transportation thereby removing the reliance on the Basis team members. You want to be able to build in an approval process and have email notifications. Then the whole thing can just run in the background. Another essential feature required is to be able to identify object dependency and sequencing errors.

In my view Rev-Trac is the Rolls Royce of the tools. It offers the functionality described above and much more but it VERY expensive. When I looked at it last they had a very inflexible and expensive licensing model so if you had a huge landscape it would cost a lot.

Transport Express is less sophisticated but does the job for a project and is much cheaper. It has a simple license model - you license the production instance and can have as many test systems as you like in front of it.

CHARM I didn't look at for a long time but when I did it had none of the features I wanted and was very basic.

I do not know IWAVE and I do know that Realtech also have a product called "Transport Manager".

Regards

Steve

[Former Member]

Another tool in the arena of transport mangement is ZTRA... Powerfull, quick to install and with a very fair price tag.

http://ztra.abap-experts.com/

Regards, Ivan

[Former Member]

Hi Steve,

I was pleased to read your take on Rev-Trac as the 'Rolls Royce' of SAP change control automation tools but would disagree that it is overly expensive. For very large infrastructures, yes Rev-Trac can be pricy but since Rev-Trac licensing is system based price varies greatly.

Regards, Rick

VP Business DEvelopment

Revelation Software

[former_member313439]

Hello Ramesh,

The transport sequence in ChaRM is very simple:

All transport requests are bundled on one CTS project. The request which is released before will also be imported in front of the others. So the import order will be exactly the same as the release order. Besides this, there is no other automatic way of sequence controlling. The object level comparison and flagging right now is not available in our standard functionality.

Best Regards,

Diego FIscher