Transport configuration in SAP Batch Release Hub f...

reema · ‎2024 Jul 10

Introduction

SAP Batch Release Hub for Life Sciences is an innovative solution for managing the release of drug products to market. This activity deserves high efforts to ensure that the drug's quality is properly evaluated to ensure compliance with the marketing authorization. Typically, customers need multiple tenant landscapes of the SAP Batch Release Hub application to ensure that the configuration and extensions can be tested fully before moving to the production tenant.

However, customers would not want to manually move the configurations to the production environment, which could lead to errors even after testing everything in the testing/QA setup. To enable this transport of configuration, customers can use the SAP Cloud Transport Management service to transport configuration settings from one tenant (Non-production Dev/QA) to another tenant (QA/Hotfix testing/Production).

SAP Cloud Transport Management

SAP Cloud Transport Management service is available on SAP BTP(Business Technology Platform) and is used to manage transports of development artifacts and application-specific content between different accounts. It has an audit trail of changes so that the information about who performed what changes in the production environment and when they did it. As shown in the picture below, a developer of an application or of SAP Cloud content artifacts can trigger the transport of changes from within the development environment, while the resulting import into the test, and production environment is handled by a central operations team.

SAP Batch Release Hub uses the SAP Cloud Transport Management Service to transport configurations from one tenant to another, avoiding manually maintaining the same configuration changes in multiple tenants. A transport includes all of the below configuration settings :

Release check statuses
Release checks
Release check messages
Quality batch statuses
Usage decisions
Release decisions
Stock posting types
Release types
Combined release types
Inspection types
Business roles
User responsibility templates
Material types
Location types
Organizational areas

Configuration required to set up the transport mechanism

Initial Setup

Subscribe to the SAP Cloud Transport Management service. Follow the steps provided in Subscribing to Cloud Transport Management.
Create the service instance that will be used for calling the export functionality of‚ SAP Cloud Transport Management. This is required to To make remote application programming interface (API) calls. Follow the steps provided in Creating a Service Instance and a Service Key.
Follow the steps in Setting Up Role collections to assign user roles and permissions in SAP Cloud Transport Management Service.

Configure Landscape

In SAP Cloud Transport Management service, transport destinations are used to address the target end point of a transport process. Transport destinations contain the address of the target end point as well as an authentication type for access control, for example, the user credentials of the platform user that you want to use for the destination. You create a transport destination in SAP BTP Cockpit of the subaccount in which you're subscribed to SAP Cloud Transport Management. Follow the steps provided in Create Transport Destinations, to create the required transport destinations by configuring all tenants for SAP Batch Release Hub for Life Sciences in SAP Cloud Transport Management.
Similar to the above step and as shown in figure, configure the relevant transport source destination for each environment (SAP Batch Release Hub tenant) for which you want to upload the configuration artifacts from SAP Batch Release Hub to SAP Cloud Transport Management, and configure the destination in the source tenant.

Follow the steps provided in Create Transport Nodes to create the transport nodes via the SAP Cloud Transport Management application. Enter the following settings:
- Node Name: Enter the node name that is configured in the SAP Batch Release Hub for Life Sciences application.
- Destination: Select the required destination from the drop-down list, which contains all the import destinations configured in SAP Cloud Transport Management.

Create the transport routes to define the source tenant and target tenant. Follow the steps provided in Create Transport Routes.

Recommended Transport Setup

With the latest subscription SKU for SAP Batch Release Hub for Life Sciences, customers would get 4 BRH subaccounts/tenants, of which 2 are for Non-Production use like Development, Testing, etc; 1 is for Non-Production Hotfix testing and 1 is for Production tenant as mentioned in the release strategy document. With any new feature releases or new setups of BRH in the organization, the configurations should be done in a Development environment, validated in Testing, and then moved to the Non-Production Hotfix testing and Production environment. Hence, the source tenant should be the Development tenant used for the initial configuration setup, and the rest should be the target tenants.

Setup during the 2-month Validation phase

As per our release strategy document, feature releases are planned and scheduled bi-yearly. First, they will be deployed in 2 Non-Production tenants at the “Release-to-Customer"-Date (RTC). And two months after the RTC, the same Feature Release will be deployed in Non-Production Hotfix testing and Production tenants at the “General Availability”-Date (GA). During the 2-month period when the Non-production tenants are on higher release vs the Non-production hotfix testing and Production tenant, we should block transport to the Non-production hotfix testing and Production tenant because they are on previous release.

Moreover, suppose a hotfix involving configuration changes is provided during this 2-month period. That fix should be tested in the Non-production hotfix testing tenant and then transported to the Production tenant. Hence, another recommended transport route is from the Non-production Hotfix testing tenant to the Production tenant.

The central operations team should control any transports to the production environment. During the two-month validation timeframe, it is recommended that all transports from the Non-production Dev/QA tenant to the Non-production Hotfix testing and production tenant be stopped.

Please note that the configuration changes done in Non-production Hotfix testing must be manually retrofitted in the Non-Production Dev tenant at the end of the validation phase.

Please refer to the help link for more information.