In the today’s distributed environments, change control management plays a crucial role in business success. With standardized processes, methods and tools it ensures throughout for a high transparency and a continuous quality of the change processes during the entire application lifecycle. SAP Change Control Management coordinates how changes are introduced to a software landscape so that the changes do not conflict with each other and ensure that they are executed without disrupting the on-going business. This results in improved quality of the software landscape, higher availability of IT solutions, and lower total cost of ownership. Also important, change control management ensures that the changes performed remain transparent and traceable.

SAP Change Control Management in SAP Solution Manager comprises the following:

• Change and Transport System, Enhanced Change and Transport System Allows you to transport Java objects and SAP-specific non-ABAP objects and non-SAP applications in the system landscape, as well as ABAP objects.You can use the central Change and Transport System (central CTS) with Change Control Management. For each new project, you can decide whether you want to use CTS or central CTS.
• Quality Gate Management provides a phase-based overview of the status of your software change projects. The project phases end in quality gates. By releasing a quality gate, the import lock is removed and an import into subsequent systems is possible. As long as a project is in the initial status, no changes and transports can be created.
• Change Request Management (SAP ChaRM) allows you to process your projects universally in SAP Solution Manager: from change management and project planning, through resource management and cost control, to the physical transport of the changes from the development environment into the production environment.
• Change Diagnostics supports customers in identifying, controlling, maintaining and verifying the versions of configurations of the system landscape components to provide a heterogeneous system landscape.
• Configuration Validation offers the capability to compare and validate current values of configuration items of many systems against a defined target or standard configuration. It allows performing an interactive cross-system configuration audit as well as configuration reporting for a large number of compared systems. Validation of the configuration items is based on the E2E Diagnostics Infrastructure.

Change Control Management process in SAP Solution Manager controls changes in all projects, such as implementation, template or upgrade projects, in a comprehensive workflow. You create requests for change, can edit them, and implement changes. You can perform the change request management activities across technology stacks and application components:

• Provides full control & transparency over change execution
• Delivers predefined change management processes & workflows
• Supports all types of changes (SAP, non SAP, technical & non-technical)
• One source of truth to avoid and manage risks of application changes in a project
• Build in SAP transport best practices