SAP Transport Management: Will SAP Application Lifecycle Management finally fix it? Unfortunately, with the recently released SAP cCTS (central Change and Transport System), SAP has still not brought SAP Transport Management under control.
In my earlier blog post on SAP Change & Transport Management, I highlighted the requirements for effective SAP Transport Management. Unfortunately, SAP cCTS — like its predecessor SAP CTS+ — is once again only a tool solution that ignores the real challenges and resulting requirements.
The Core Problem
SAP Transport Management is part of the Software Change Process. 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 ALM Process Offers No Solution
The individual island solutions of SAP ALM in no way correspond to the standards of current state-of-the-art software development procedures. For example: requirements for implementation in an ABAP system are to this day only sparsely documented. A direct reference to SAP Customizing/ABAP development objects in SAP Transport Requests is essentially absent.
Looking at SAP ALM critically, one must conclude that SAP has intelligently orchestrated individual “modules” in the SAP Solution Manager into an SAP ALM process. The challenge lies in bringing the individual modules together via interfaces — and this integration remains incomplete.
Conclusion
In a sophisticated way, SAP attempts to enthuse customers about the SAP Solution Manager platform. However, the SAP ALM approach mapped in the SAP Solution Manager does not correspond to today’s software development standards. In my opinion, SAP should consider how it can provide customers with a genuine Solution Management platform — one that delivers real end-to-end process integration rather than a collection of loosely connected modules.
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