SAP Positioning: Solution Management

SAP Positioning: Solution Management

Instead of positioning solution management as a product for IT, it should be understood as business functionality to manage IT.

Business Impact Analyzer

What does beteo understand by SAP Impact Management? beteo has written numerous blog posts on this topic. beteo has committed itself to SAP Impact-Management as its core solution goal — we live for SAP Impact Management.

SAP’s Business Process Change Analyzer

With great fanfare, SAP co-CEO Leo Apotheker announced the SAP “Business Process Change Analyzer” (BPCA) at that year’s TechEd in Berlin. But what lies behind it — can the Business Process Change Analyzer actually fulfill the expectations its name raises? The very fact that SAP announces the BPCA shows the importance SAP is placing on impact analysis for the future.

In various blogs we have already written about impact analysis. SAP’s BPCA unfortunately only covers the technical analysis of transactions and programs. An analysis that goes into the logical areas is still left open by SAP. Based on available screenshots, it appears that BPCA is based on runtime analysis, which makes it impossible to perform direct impact analyses in the corresponding production system. This means that for BPCA, only predefined scenarios can be analyzed — honestly, who still works like that today?

It is truly questionable why SAP has not adopted standard analysis tools like RBE from IBIS, Panaya and/or Intellicorp, since these are based on “smarter” impact management methods and have already been proven many times in practice.

Conclusion: Once again, SAP gets the “checklist” points with the BPCA, but on closer inspection, the expectations for a BPCA are absolutely not met.

The Contradiction “SAP Lifecycle Management” SAP LCM

With great interest, I attended the various presentations on SAP Lifecycle Management (LCM) at that year’s TechEd in Berlin. My expectation that SAP would also address “customer” lifecycle management was only partially met. The TechEd unfortunately did not convince me that the SAP Solution Manager was created for the solution management of customer implementations. Rather, the Solution Manager exists so that SAP has a gateway into the customer infrastructure, in order to optimally ensure the lifecycle management of SAP standard software.

SAP cleverly packages the SAP “Standard Software Lifecycle Management” as SAP “Customer Lifecycle Management.” Fundamental requirements for software lifecycle management — namely versioning (there is still no customizing versioning in the standard) and dependency management between individual software components — are non-existent for SAP “Customer Lifecycle Management.” For SAP “Standard Software” Lifecycle Management, this is comprehensively contained in the CIM model.

Functionalities such as SAP ChaRM and SAP CTS+ are cleverly wrapped in marketing language, so that customers no longer notice the actual challenges of concurrent Change Request Management (SAP ChaRM) and heterogeneous deployment (SAP CTS+).

Conclusion: It is disappointing that SAP still does not focus the topic of SAP Lifecycle Management on 75,000 different customer implementations, but rather on the software logistics of their own standard software. Each of these customer implementations is unique and requires standard procedures for managing precisely this customer-individual SAP Lifecycle Management. In various customer implementations, we have already proven that SAP “customer implementation” Lifecycle Management is an achievable challenge.

The conventional transport management (now called CTS) could not keep pace in complex organizational and technical system environments and had to be supported by external tool support. Now that SAP NW Java development and configuration objects are added, the entire challenge becomes multi-dimensional. Thanks to SAP for leaving so much space for consulting!