SAP Transport Management: Can SAP ALM Finally Fix It?

SAP Transport Management: Can SAP Application Lifecycle Management finally fix it?

Unfortunately, even with the recently released SAP cCTS (central Change and Transport System), SAP has not gotten SAP Transport Management under control. In my blog “SAP Change & Transport Management — Efficient and Secure,” I highlighted the requirements for effective SAP Transport Management.

SAP cCTS, like its predecessor SAP CTS+, is unfortunately again only a tool solution that ignores the real challenges and the resulting requirements. SAP Transport Management is, as is well known, within the Software Change Process. Note that in heterogeneous software system landscapes, the term “transport management” is unknown — there one speaks of “deployment management.” In other state-of-the-art software development environments, it is continuously known which software is contained in which deployment packages. In the area of SAP Transport Management, this is unfortunately no longer determinable due to the almost 20-year-old base architecture.

The SAP ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) process also offers no solution to the problem. The individual island solutions of SAP ALM in no way correspond to the standards of current state-of-the-art software development methods. An example: requirements for implementation in an ABAP system are to this day only sparsely documented (requirements specification is a process step within SAP Change Request Management, short SAP ChaRM), let alone finding a direct reference to SAP Customizing / SAP ABAP development objects in the SAP transport requests.

When examining SAP ALM critically, one must note that SAP cleverly orchestrates individual “modules” in the SAP Solution Manager into the SAP ALM process. The challenge is to bring the individual modules together through interfaces. The example above shows that too much information is lost over the interfaces of the individual software development steps within the software development process for SAP systems — resulting in a significant loss of quality.

Conclusion: In a sophisticated manner, SAP attempts to enthuse customers with the SAP Solution Manager platform. However, the SAP ALM procedure mapped in the SAP Solution Manager does not correspond to today’s software development standards. In my opinion, SAP should consider how they can provide customers with a Solution Management platform that genuinely addresses customer implementation lifecycle management.