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 3rd 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.
You must be a registered user to add a comment. If you've already registered, sign in. Otherwise, register and sign in.