SAP Solution Manager vs Active Control

[former_member563268]

Hello,

I have been doing a comparison study to identify the difference between Solution manager and Active Control offerings. What are the advantages of each over the other one. Any information based on the comparison between the two would be highly appreciated. Could you please share your inputs.

Regards

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

My company implemented Active Control last October after using CHARM for 7 years to manage transports. The only positive thing I can say about CHARM was that it is free and comes with your Solution Manager implementation. The consulting costs to set it up is another story.

We were doing a global implementation of SAP in regional phases using the swap and roll methodology with 2 Development and 2 QA landscapes with a 3^rd QA landscape for Dress Rehearsals. We would frequently refresh our systems and CHARM wouldn’t work until we either disabled all the RFCs or reconfigured all the RFCs for those refreshed systems. CHARM would stop working if we had any system down, even if we were not actively using it for transports.

We brought in a vendor and even an SAP consultant to help clean-up our CHARM implementation and get it fully configured and they couldn’t get it done. Our only solution was to upgrade CHARM and do a complete re-implementation. We found it was going be expensive due to all the consulting hours and would have less functionality then Active Control and other tools we also evaluated.

We went with Active Control as it was easier to setup and configure the landscapes and approval workflows and was much more user friendly. We could create new projects in seconds and add/drop landscapes in just a few minutes. It had merge (retrofit) functionality built into it that allowed us to manage moving PRD transports from our N landscape to our N+1 seamlessly and the conflict analyzer helps us manage overtake/overwrite conflicts with code and configuration.

Customizations are also easier to make in Active Control and to maintain. We have custom fields on our Transport forms to manage all our documentation centrally as well as a custom tab for managing change control information. These custom fields were immediately available in the Active Control reports. We also have skip rules, user-exits, transport naming convention script, and various security roles setup to maintain who can update the different workflow queues. The GUI is clean and easy to find what you are looking for and I use the reports every day to filter and query project cutover lists and transport documentation for change requests. Basis Technologies is also very responsive to questions and troubleshooting issues. We’ve been very happy with them and the tool.

[bruenu · Accepted solution]

Thank you for the helpful information

[dammerto · Accepted solution]

Hi Miranda,

that sounds strange.

We brought in a vendor and even an SAP consultant to help clean-up our CHARM implementation and get it fully configured and they couldn’t get it done. Our only solution was to upgrade CHARM and do a complete re-implementation. We found it was going be expensive due to all the consulting hours and would have less functionality then Active Control and other tools we also evaluated.

For this Problem SAP have a great tool.

Test System Refresh

Link

Regards

Tom

[johnston-andrew · Accepted solution]

Hi Dean,

We are currently considering Charm or Active Control from Basis Technologies. Can you let us know what other products you evaluated.

Thanks in advance

Andrew

[former_member707297]

Hello

I've used Active Control in multiple environments and have similar feedback as Spence in terms of the robustness of the tool, especially with regards to its analyzers that help check both technical and process risk areas. As we know SAP change management requires attention and my suspicion no tool is perfect and/or can make everything just a 'push of a button' --- it is often up to the team (developers, config, basis, security, testers, project management, scrum masters, etc) to embrace automation to use it effectively.

My only exposure to ChaRM was an older version (7.1 SP12) where we attempted to integrate it with a 3rd party ticket/work management tool (Jira). That proved to be far more cumbersome and combined with some UX challenges back then, we opted for AC which had much more flexible integration architecture and overall product support capability.

Eric

[SS_BC]

Hi,

Hope all is well.

I have worked at a couple of different companies where we implemented Active Control and can say the toolset proved to be extremely successful in enabling us to manage transports within a complex SAP landscape.

Active Control proved invaluable supporting dual development landscapes as well as helping align systems as part of system refresh process.

I have been involved in multiple SAP projects and based on my experiences would recommend Active Control as the tool of choice to manage the associated changes in your landscape, thanks.

Cheers,

Spence

[PeterMonaghan]

Can you clarify what you mean by Active Control?

[DavidLees]

Peter, I assume he is referring to ActiveControl from Basis Technologies (full disclosure, I am the CTO) - https://www.basistechnologies.com/products/activecontrol/

If anyone would like to understand more about ActiveControl or our other DevOps related solutions for SAP, please check-out our website or message me.