SAP landscapes are more complex than ever. Between RISE with SAP, hyperscaler cloud deployments, and hybrid or on-premises systems, IT teams are juggling dozens of moving parts. Yet, as we recently learned, too many organizations are still running critical operations manually. If you missed our previous webinar, "Why SAP Technical Teams Need Automation Now: Lessons from RISE, Cloud, and Hybrid Landscapes" on August 20th, this recap blog post contains all the key insights from it. We’ll take a look at the pain points that our CEO, Linh Nguyen, highlighted, the real customer stories that bring those pain points to life, and discover why automation is no longer optional, but a necessity when tackling day-to-day SAP operations.
Running SAP landscapes manually might feel manageable in the short term, but as environments grow more complex (especially with RISE, cloud, and hybrid environments), it quickly becomes unsustainable. What starts as a few routine checklists or ad-hoc fixes turns into recurring challenges that drain resources, introduce errors, and put critical business processes at risk. These are some of the pain points of manually operating SAP environments that Linh identified during the webinar:
Unreliable Job Management – Thousands of batch jobs run daily across enterprise systems. Failures or delays ripple downstream into payroll, retail orders, or manufacturing processes.
Backup and Recovery Blind Spots – Teams assume backups are happening, but don’t often verify successful completion. Failures can sit undetected for weeks or months.
Error-Prone System Refreshes – Refreshes are complex, cross-team efforts. Missing even a small step can result in broken connections, compliance issues, or systems being left in an unusable state.
Data Pipeline Failures – Replication processes like SLT or BODS (Business Object Data Services) can introduce latency or errors, leaving business teams with outdated or untrustworthy data.
Human Error in Operations – From mistyped commands to restarting the wrong system, manual execution introduces serious risk, especially in large multi-cloud environments.
These challenges aren’t abstract concepts. They’re happening every day in real SAP environments. During the webinar, Linh shared customer stories that illustrate how manual operations translate into concrete business problems. Each story represents how fragile manual processes can be when stretched across today’s complex SAP landscapes.
We’ll be sharing a snippet of each story, but stay tuned for the recording in the upcoming days!
One customer experienced duplicate retail orders when critical background jobs slowed down or failed silently. With thousands of jobs to monitor daily, manual checks simply couldn’t keep up. The result: delays in order processing and inventory updates, creating a poor customer experience.
In another case, a hyperscaler-hosted S/4HANA system showed scheduled backups, but an audit revealed they hadn’t successfully run for months. When QA needed a restore for testing, it wasn’t possible, creating compliance gaps and potentially weeks of downtime.
During a refresh, one customer didn’t fully reconfigure connections from production to QA. Residual production links created a hidden security risk. Incomplete runbooks and manual handovers left the system unstable and forced the team to delay future refreshes.
A customer using SLT for replication faced mismatched inventory data in their reporting portal. Because data wasn’t flowing consistently, store teams lost trust and began re-entering orders, leading to duplicates, wasted effort, and confusion.
Multiple customers reported incidents where a simple QA restart request accidentally brought down production instead. With dozens of similarly named VMs and no automation guardrails, a single wrong command caused hours of unplanned downtime.
Through these stories, the lesson is the same: manual operations aren’t just inefficient, but just plain dangerous.
Learn more in our success stories
The customer stories make it clear: manual operations don’t just create headaches for technical teams, they expose the entire business to unnecessary risk. What might look like a small oversight in a spreadsheet or a mistyped command can snowball into outages or weeks of recovery work. Continuing down the manual path is essentially betting your SAP stability on human error not happening. That’s simply not a safe bet in 2025.
The risks show up in many ways. Unplanned outages are perhaps the most visible, as manual mistakes often take down critical systems and interrupt business continuity. Compliance gaps are another silent danger: backups, security notes, and change tracking frequently fall through the cracks, leaving teams scrambling when auditors come knocking. Operational overhead also skyrockets when teams are stuck performing daily checklists and business-ready checks by hand, leaving little time for higher-value work. Meanwhile, cloud environments become a breeding ground for waste, with oversized systems left running for months simply because no one has time to optimize them. Finally, visibility becomes fragmented, and with each team monitoring its own layer (OS, database, SAP), it makes root cause analysis slow and often devolves into finger-pointing rather than resolution.
In summary, in 2025, relying on spreadsheets and emails to coordinate SAP operations is a recipe for risk and inefficiency.
The future of SAP operations is automation-first.
IT-Conductor addresses this head-on by combining observability, orchestration, and automation into a single cloud-based platform. Instead of depending on spreadsheets or email chains, SAP teams gain standardized workflows, real-time dashboards, and intelligent automation that eliminate human error and bring consistency across even the most complex hybrid environments. What does this entail?
IT-Conductor features a single dashboard that integrates SAP, databases, OS, and cloud layers. Instead of siloed tools, teams get a shared “source of truth” for root cause analysis.
Pre-built, templatized runbooks eliminate human error in repetitive, complex tasks like:
System refreshes (end-to-end or PCA-based for RISE)
Stop/start workflows that prevent production downtime mistakes
Kernel patching and OS updates
Automated business-ready checks at the start of every day
Transports, patches, and configuration changes flow through automated approvals and execution. Every step is tracked for compliance, reducing audit risk and avoiding “lost in email” change requests.
SLT and BODS replication monitoring ensures no hidden delays or replication errors. Teams can trust the data flowing into analytics and storefront applications.
Automated SAP Note downloads and patching workflows centralize updates, ensuring consistency and audit readiness. Backup dashboards provide visibility into successful (or failed) runs across all systems.
IT-Conductor’s Service Orchestration and Automation Platform (SOAP) consolidates observability, automation, and recovery into one catalog of services, scalable for both individual enterprises and managed service providers.
The customer stories in this webinar drive home one truth: manual SAP operations create unnecessary risk, whether it’s outages, compliance failures, or wasted spend.
Automation isn’t just about efficiency. It’s about:
Reducing human error.
Ensuring business continuity.
Enabling teams to do more with less.
Building resilience in complex hybrid SAP environments.
Want to learn about how IT-Conductor can elevate your SAP operations? Let us know, and we’ll walk you through it on a free demo. This is your opportunity to elevate SAP operations and service delivery.