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Searching for the right information in the SAP information jungle can be very time-consuming. This guide is intended to help SAP professionals quickly find answers to typical questions on the internet.

Important Search Sources for SAP Professionals

• General / Nomenclature: Wikipedia (SAP AG, SAP ERP), SAP Glossary (German/English), SAP Designguild (abbreviations)
• Training: SAP Education Catalog, SAP TechEd events, SDN eLearning
• Releases: Product Availability Matrix (PAM), Service Pack Schedule, ERP Solution Browser
• Troubleshooting: SAP Service Marketplace (OSS Notes / SAP Notes), SDN Forums, SAP Community
• Implementation: Best Practice Library, Implementation Guide (IMG), ASAP Methodology

This guide makes no claim to completeness and does not account for version-specific information needs. It serves as a pragmatic starting point for the most common search queries in the SAP environment.

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Project Portfolio and Project Portfolio Management (PPM) are established terms used intensively across many industries and by software vendors. There are standards and software solutions that support the planning and control of ideas, initiatives, and projects. But do these approaches and tools truly meet organizations’ actual needs?

Portfolio Prioritization Process

Due to the limited resources of an organization – particularly its IT department – a portfolio prioritization process is typically in place. Weighting criteria include: strategic alignment, costs, quantitative and qualitative benefits, risks, required resources, and organizational impact.

Impact Analysis – Critical Success Factor for Project Planning

How does an IT organization plan resources, assess risks, identify dependencies, and forecast future effort? The best process is useless if the relevant data is not available.

Without a proper impact analysis capability integrated into the PPM tool, portfolio prioritization becomes a mere alibi exercise – it looks structured on the surface but lacks the data foundation to drive genuine strategic decisions.

Conclusion: True PPM requires more than a prioritization framework. Organizations need impact analysis capabilities to understand dependencies and resource constraints before they can make informed portfolio decisions.

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Similar ambiguities as with the term “Portfolio Management” can be observed with the term “Project Portfolio Management.” Software vendors eager to ride trend waves do their best to amplify this confusion. Market participants don’t hesitate to label their solutions “Project & Portfolio Management” (PPM).

Gartner’s latest study uses PPM to categorize Project & Portfolio Management, bundling two disciplines: PPM (Project Portfolio Management) and PM (Project Management). This causes simple project management tools with minimal portfolio functionality to suddenly be labeled as PPM.

Project Portfolio Management, however, is clearly defined: it is the centralized management of one or more portfolios, encompassing the identification, prioritization, approval, management, and control of projects and programs to achieve specific strategic business objectives.

Conclusion: Project Portfolio Management deserves a precise definition. Conflating it with general project management tools dilutes its strategic value and misleads organizations seeking true portfolio governance capabilities.

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An organization’s project portfolio is the totality of all its planned initiatives, active projects and programs. At the latest upon approval of a project or program, it enters the project portfolio. After its official completion, it is removed.

What Is a Project Portfolio?

A project portfolio is structured by several criteria: budget, duration, subject area, responsible department. Key metrics are often the project’s strategic contribution, estimated risk, project resources, and financial KPIs such as net present value and return on investment.

HP PPM fulfills all these requirements through its project portfolio and demand management modules and offers significantly more functionality beyond that.

Conclusion: A project portfolio is more than a buzzword. It is an indispensable strategic management tool for IT organizations that – used correctly – ensures the alignment of all projects with business objectives.

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This article shows how Application Lifecycle Management can be implemented for large SAP installations – based on HP Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software.

Complex SAP System Landscapes

Large SAP Business Suites can be extraordinarily complex, with various system landscapes consisting of development, quality assurance, and production systems. Business processes run across different ABAP systems such as SAP CRM, SAP ERP, and SAP BW.

SAP Application Lifecycle Management with HP Products

A lifecycle management environment for large SAP landscapes, based on HP’s software products, integrates:

• HP Quality Center: Proactive quality assurance – test-related data is collected, modified, and validated at the right time
• HP BAC (Business Availability Center): Multi-dimensional impact analyses at the business service level across all development and test phases
• SAP Solution Manager: Ensuring that appropriate objects are included in the SAP system landscape and monitored throughout their lifecycle

This integrated approach enables organizations to manage the full lifecycle of their SAP landscape with greater efficiency, lower risk, and improved visibility across all change activities.

Inconsistent Customizing Settings – A Typical Problem of Decentralized SAP Systems

Large SAP installations with multiple decentralized system landscapes struggle to maintain SAP customizing settings consistently across the enterprise. Conventional approaches such as SAP template customizing inevitably lead to inconsistencies. Maintaining a consistent system requires enormous effort.

Conventional SAP Enterprise Template Rollout

In most SAP installations, central customizing ensures the integrity of the overall SAP enterprise structure. It is built and maintained on a central SAP template customizing client. From there, it is transported into various decentralized customizing development systems.

SAP enterprise templates transported in this way are activated on the decentralized customizing clients. Locally enriched by additional customizing templates, they are finally distributed further through transport management. This creates a one-way street: changes can only flow from the central template downward – corrections and local adaptations can rarely be reconciled back upward without considerable manual effort.

This architectural limitation makes SAP template distribution a significant challenge for organizations with complex, multi-system landscapes. Tooling that supports bidirectional synchronization and automated consistency checks is essential for keeping such environments under control.

Enterprise Resource Planning for Information Technology (ERP for IT, ERP4IT) describes the automation of information technology (IT) itself. ERP4IT focuses on the automated management of IT as a discipline – not on the automation of business processes through IT.

IT organizations define long-term strategies, integrate them into their business models, and provide the enterprise with appropriate IT services. Integrated systems that support lifecycle-oriented IT management form an ERP4IT.

By analogy with established ERP systems (Enterprise Resource Planning), which manage the deployment of critical resources, ERP4IT targets a process-oriented solution. In contrast to classic ERP software (money, productive capital, people, inventory or information), the new concept of ERP4IT places the information of IT itself at the center. ERP4IT therefore aims at managing complex data structures within databases and making them available in a consolidated form.

The concept has now found its way into Wikipedia, reflecting its growing recognition in the industry as a distinct and meaningful category for integrated IT management platforms.