beteo ALM Experts Blog

Category: Transport Management

  • Fresh from SAP TechEd Las Vegas: Panaya 3.2

    At SAP’s TechEd conference, the new releases of Panaya Support Automation 3.2 and Panaya Upgrade Automation 3.2 have been announced.

    Panaya 3.2 Overview

    Upgrade Automation is the fast and accurate way to control the impact of SAP projects and SAP changes in general. It automatically analyzes SAP systems and changes and provides online services to answer key questions such as:

    •    What errors will occur without intervention?
    •    How can they be prevented?
    •    What exactly needs be tested?
    •    What are the most important risks?

    Support Automation analyzes functional changes to SAP system before they are released. Using analysis technology based on a unique algoritm, Panaya evaluates changes in the context of the complex interdependencies of SAP systems. For every change, it automatically creates test plans, classifies changes based on risk, and alerts managers and other stakeholders and informs about risks.

    Upgraded and new Functions in Release 3.2

    Root Cause Analysis (New Feature for Support Automation)
    If all of a sudden something is not working well in your production system, your team could spend hours finding the culprit. Or, you could simply launch Panaya’s new Root Cause Analysis for SAP, enter the transaction that is misbehaving, and you’ll immediately see the primary suspects: all the recent changes that have actually impacted this transaction.

    Real time impact analysis of code changes (New Feature for Support Automation)
    Change any ABAP program, during an upgrade project or during maintenance, and Panaya immediately tells you what is the impact and what must be tested.

    Comprehensive Project Plan for SAP Upgrades (New Feature for Upgrade Automation)
    This is one of the most powerful features: Now Panaya generates a comprehensive project plan for your upgrade, including sensible defaults for effort and people allocation to tasks. The plan can be exported into Microsoft Project

    Completely Redesigned User Interface (Enhanced Feature for Both Products)
    Since we added so many new features, they needed a new home.
    The application is now logically divided into SAP Upgrade, Impact Analysis, Root Cause Analysis, and Transport History

    Code Highlighting (New Feature for Upgrade Automation)
    When opening a program source from reports, Panaya will automatically highlight the upgrade problems in your code. For example: In the “Obsolete Functions” report – Click a program name to view its code and Panaya will highlight all the places in the code that use this function.

    Transport History (New Feature for Support Automation)
    If you need to track changes to your SAP system for compliance, analysis, or other reasons, Panaya keeps the complete transport information.

    Usage of User Exits (New Feature for Both Products)
    Now it is easy to see all the transactions that are using a user exit using a new “Drill Down” report

    Impact Overview Page (Enhanced Feature for Support Automation)
    Now the impact overview page displays the custom transactions and all the Batch or Interface transactions. This replaces the previous functionality

    Cloned Program Analysis (Enhanced Feature for Upgrade Automation)
    An improved algorithm now finds even more cloned programs that were especially difficult to track.

    Availability (Both Products)
    Since Panaya is software as a service, there’s no need to upgrade any software. The capabilities are available immediately to all customers.

    Conclusion

    Changes to SAP systems often entail substantial additional expense and undesirable effects for SAP organizations. Reference upgrade projects show that consistent, pragmatic impact analysis in a SAP Change and Transport Management process can reduce efforts by more than 30%. Risk gets massively reduced and surprises after change implementation eliminated. And beteo partner Panaya’s SaaS solutions can be implemented with little effort and with no or limited adjustments to the system.

  • SAP Solution Manager – More Than Just SAP Marketing?

    As its name suggests, the SAP Solution Manager is designed to provide support for the management of SAP customer implementations. Does it perform this task? Or is it just one of SAP´s marketing instruments?

    Missing Functions for Complex System Landscapes
    When discussing the pros and cons of SAP Solution Manager, we must first of all give SAP credit for being one of the few vendors providing a solution management platform at all.

    But taking a closer look at the various components of SAP Solution Manager, what you see is rather some kind of patch work. It seems that many functions have been integrated just pro forma to comply with qualifications typically demanded by the market in RFPs (request for proposal)?

    Some of the  components, though existing, are only in parts or insufficiently integrated. In order to efficiently manage customer implementations, additional office solutions are needed. This, however, seems to be useful only for small-scale SAP implementations. More complex organizational structures or heterogenous SAP landscapes imply additional dependencies that prevent these solutions from answering the purpose.

    Unfortunately, in many SAP Solution Manager implementations the focus is not on what the customer actually requires, but on those functions offered by SAP Solution Manager by default.

    Expectation towards an Efficiently Working SAP Solution Management Platform
    Much of what we expect from a SAP solution management is comparable to what a comprehensive application lifecycle platform would offer. It is particularly important that the complete service lifecycle of the SAP implementation can be managed, including all documentary, organizational and technical interdependences, covering all phases from the generation of the first process implementations to extensions and error recovery, and up to process deactivation.

    Also, the complete cost and activity accounting (integrated financial management) should be made transparent all across the lifecycle of the solution. This is the only way to set up a cost-benefit equation for a customer implementation.

    The structure of the solution should provide subdivisions according to the Business Services (BS) it supports so that these services can be aligned with the overall goal of the enterprise. This results in an effective service portfolio management (SPM) and ensures the targeted value of the implementation. A working service portfolio management makes evident that in the context of a consistent service orientation, IT service management (ITSM) and project portfolio management (PPM) can no longer be regarded as isolated elements.

    In addition, advanced solution management applications should integrate consistency-ensuring measures directly into the processes in order to minimize risks. Wherever possible, automation should be favored, particularly for performing organizational tasks. This can be reached by digitization or coding.

    The following example clarifies above statement. Digitization prevents overtaker problems during transports (consistency-ensuring measures), because the transports are directly carried out (automation) upon release (organizational task).

    By the way: consistency-ensuring measures are particularly important for SAP customers using company templates when changes are transported: Applying Business Configuration Sets (BC Sets) or generally transporting SAP customizing changes can result in inconsistencies between templates and distributed implementations, because customizing of the involved systems can be changed at any time. Offering customizing synchronization and locking mechanisms, SAP Solution Manager provides a solution for this problem which unfortunately is not very well known.

    Summary
    It is crucial to success that the customer has a clear picture of all relevant IT processes involved in SAP solution management. This means that the focus must not be on the solution management tool, but on the risks that are addressed and minimized by Solution Manager. From this, we can directly derive the demands that should be placed on solution management.

  • HP BTO Software Centers – Overview

    HP offers a number of BTO Centers. These software packages support in the context of a BTO strategy specific phases of the application lifecycle. The following overview is meant to shed light on the HP BTO jungle.

    HP BTO Centers

    IT STRATEGY

    • Project and Portfolio Management Center (CIO Office)
      The IT management solution enables control and documentation of the enterprise processes, particularly with regard to an optimization of priorities, staff members and processes in IT organizations. For this purpose, modules for the management of portfolio, demand, time, changes, projects, resources, finances and programs are available. Upon coordination with business processes and enterprise requirements, the distribution and use of resources are optimized and processes are standardized (IT Governance).
    • SOA Center (CTO Office)
      The HP BTO solutions for governance, quality and management of service-oriented architectures (SOA) are designed to help customers to minimize economical risks in SOA project phases and to create a comprehensively controlled, business-oriented SOA basis. HP SOA Center enables registry/repository, policy management, consumer management, policy enforcement, performance monitoring und problem solving.

    APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT

    • Quality Center
      With HP Quality Center, a cross-enterprise exchange of information about test requirements, test planning, test execution and error reporting is possible, as well as checking for web security issues covering the entire testing and development team. Through functional test runs, GUI interfaces are automatically tested in applications and various release cycles.
    • Performance Center
      HP Performance Center features a real-time simulation of the maximum access demanded by customer requests using active virtual user input of the applications. This enables system optimization before „going live“ and ensures the desired steady availability. A required optimization can be controlled and accomplished under system load by help of an analysis program. Thus, new web or SAP applications are made secure before going into production.
    • Application Security Center
      By using the technologies of HP Applications Security Center, security gaps in web applications can be identified and judged all across the lifecycle: from development and quality control up to operation. Also applications that are already running in a productive system, can be checked for security gaps. In addition, audit and compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, HIP AA or PCI can be met.

    (IT) OPERATIONS

    • HP Universal CMDB
      HP Universal CMDB is a configuration management database for IT organizations planning to implement business service management and ITIL-based initiatives. This software allows you to take up, document and store – in addition to physical configuration elements – logical elements. It also provides extended functionality such as an effects analysis and access control for building up and maintaining CMDB.

    Business Service Management

    • Business Availability Center
      This solution allows you to monitor the availability and performance of applications in operation for 24 hours a day and 7 days a week. Business processes, service levels, applications an the underlying infrastructure are coordinated to one another. The infrastructure is visualized by a graphical view with the traffic light set of colors red, orange and green showing the state of operation. A drill down is available for detailed view and error analysis. BAC is used to ensure the active operation of all business-relevant applications and to verify internal or external SLA agreements.
    • Operations Center
      This solution features a comprehensive, service-oriented access to IT management. Information is integrated and synchronized across management silos, IT and business are connected to one another. This distributed, scalable management solution which also includes security features allows you to monitor, control and record the status and performance of different IT environments, covering network, system, databases, applications, services and Internet.
    • Network Management Center
      This network management solution is considered a strategic and particularly important investment. In the last few years it has been established as an indispensible component of error and event management as well as visualization of network topologies. Network configuration, network events, application performance, and network analysis are the main areas involved.

    Service Automation

    • Data Center Automation Center
      Process automation in IT centers can be effectively supported by HP Data Center Automation Center allowing IT organizations to easily increase cost efficiency and to better meet quality and compliance requirements.
    • Client Automation Center
      More and more security risks, increasing availability requirements, and the rapidly growing number of mobile and remote staff members make it more difficult to effectively and efficiently manage client computers – a requirement, however, which every modern success-oriented enterprise should focus upon. HP Client Automation Center allows you to automate relevant IT processes across the lifecycle of the client computers, no matter where their physical locations are.

    IT Service Management

    • Service Management Center
      HP Service Manager is a comprehensive, fully integrated IT service desk solution targeted to reduce the time spent on problem solving. Thanks to ITIL-based best practice processes and a scalable, service-oriented architecture, consistent, integrated processes can be rolled out all across IT organizations. Event, problem, change, and release management processes can be automated. Service level management and catalog-based service requests are supported. All processes are coordinated by means of configuration management.

  • SAP Change Impact Management – PHW Business School and beteo study

    In collaboration with the PHW Business School, Zurich, Switzerland we are conducting  a study in the IT Change Impact Management area.

    We are analyzing a specific challenges of international corporations using SAP as their corporate software globally and specifically the challenges of their IT development organization because of impacts given by system consolidaton centralization efforts.

    Fundamentally we will focus on the following issues:
    – what benefits were and are to expect from these consolidation projects?
    – What are the (intermediate)  results?
    – What new challenges are there for further developments in the centralized SAP system and development world?

    The goal of the research is to analyze trends, identify possible sources of trouble and generate possible solutions for the new challenges.

    In order to accomplish this, we will conduct expert interviews with selected contacts in person and/or on the phone. The results will be available to all interview partners. We want to actively increase the interaction between client, partners and experts in this study.

    Interested? Leave a comment in the blog or get in touch with us, studie@beteo.ch.

  • Configuration Management for SAP Customizing?

    A comprehensive configuration management is the most important basis of SAP Change and Transport Management. For ABAP code, this is accepted as general practice and supported by suitable tools. But how about configuration management for SAP customizing?

    From our experience, the major part of changes transported across a SAP system landscape are customizing changes. Not surprisingly, the persons responsible for change and transport management often keep struggling with problems after roll-outs for lack of consistently applied configuration management for_these objects. A consistent change and distribution of customizing requires stringent configuration management.
    Crucial to a cross-enterprise use and protection of SAP templates is that central and local objects are well documented, comprising all versions of their lifecycle up to the newest version.

    Comprehensive SAP configuration management all across the SAP landscape is meant to ensure overall integrity of the objects involved in SAP development, including ABAP as well as non-ABAP objects:

    • The use of well-defined standardized naming conventions clearly reveals to which organizations, areas and projects the objects belong.
    • All changes to objects, including individual customizing settings, are documented. At any time, it is obvious who is – and at which times – the owner of settings, who is entitled to make and has made changes and for which reason. This allows the changes to be tracked afterwards, which is an equivalent to versioning.
    • The documentation also includes the information as to who and what and who depends from a defined customizing setting. This is an integral factor of reasonable impact management.

    In the context of each change to the SAP landscape systems, it must be made sure that the rules listed above for practicing a comprehensive SAP configuration management are observed. This, again, requires a strict organization of the change und transport management. Naming conventions for transport objects and transports must be established, transport packages must be grouped according to their content, organizational and technical processes must be clearly defined and adhered to.

    Some projects are highly dependent on a consistent comprehensive SAP configuration management. Without this, very often the challenges to enterprise SAP organizations can hardly be mastered, especially in the context of mergers and acquisitions, strategic outsourcing projects, insourcing, and regional or global consolidations of systems. This is also true for customizing changes. However, a solid foundation as outlined above allows such projects to planned and implemented with reasonable effort and fair success. Also customizing changes of several systems can be consolidated without a negative impact.

    In addition, a comprehensive SAP configuration management allows you to permanently record the data related to transports, to the transported objects and to the result of the transport, and to evaluate them. This is comparable to using suitable analyzing tools, such as the one offered by Prospero, which have been designed to disclose the causes of problems in SAP logistic processes, or even to give a prognosis concerning their results. The same is achieved by using SAP change management data for the transport of SAP changes. In any case, SAP change and transport management has still plenty of room for improvement in complex SAP landscapes.

    Summary
    Applying a wide-ranging SAP configuration management has turned out to be the most effective method to ensure a consistent and efficient SAP change and transport management and a consistent customizing across the SAP system landscape.

    Unfortunately, the opportunity for global enterprises using large SAP systems to improve the quality and to save costs by investing in SAP change and transport management is very often not seized, because it is thought to be technically complex. But if the challenge is taken up it soon shows that the problems are more political or company-related than of a technical nature.

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