Bringing IT to the Business with SAP Solution Manager – by Delivering Two Value Releases per Year

SAP’s John Krakowski and his colleagues are  providing more information below about what to expect in the ASUG Pre-Conference session for Solution Manager which is being held on Monday, October 21st at SAP TechEd Las Vegas.  Please read below:

“What if you were able to deliver to the business two releases per year that help to run the business significantly better? You could actually prove your ability to adapt and change existing solutions quickly. Business departments directly benefit from these deployments. This article will briefly describe the key elements how SAP Solution Manager is helping you to deliver two value releases per year. Planned SAP Solution Manager capabilities will support the delivery of two value releases even better and will modernize the full solution documentation experience.  A new data architecture and lifecycle concept tremendously simplifies business process and solution documentation.  If you are interested to learn more about Two Value Releases per Year and if you want to get first hand insight to the SAP Solution Manager development lab join us in the “Bringing IT to the Business with SAP Solution Manager” Pre-Conference Seminar prior to SAP TechEd on October 21^st in Las Vegas.

We will discuss with the session attendees the current SAP Solution Manager developments and you  can shape the upcoming SAP Solution manager release regarding:

• Business Process Management

• Relevance for the business or End-Users

• Experience the whole new User Interface

• Learn about the new breakthrough Application Lifecycle Management concept

• Understand the developments in the area of process modeling within SAP Solution Manager

• See how SAP Solution Manager is integrating into other modeling tools

So that you can plan your Business Process Management initiatives accordingly.

You gain immediate value by learning what it takes to build an organization that is able to deliver two value releases per year to the business departments a few enabling procedures are required. The activities below are showing the main areas that you need to take into consideration.

#1 Requirement and Release Management to collect big and small ideas and to manage their implementation

Strategic business transformation is managed in major releases. At the beginning of a major releases, business and IT identify requirements for new development projects, prioritize them with the business relationship management, according to business cases, and manage their risks. A release is only approved when KPIs have been defined with business relationship management that allow to control and measure whether the business value proposed is actually met in the run phase.

Figure 1: Source: SAP

Once a major release goes live, value realization based on business KPIs is measured. In feedback loops with key users and business process owners, requirements for continuous improvement come up. Those typically move to minor releases and fixes. So we have two wheels of change turning at different speed: a major release wheel turning twice year and a minor release wheel turning monthly to weekly. Customer typically have a rule of thumb according to which requirements with an effort over 20-50 person days are managed in minor releases and if higher they move to a major release.

#2 Dual Track Landscape to organize highly automated synchronization of dual development landscapes to support parallel deployments of major and minor changes.

Which landscape is required to support best this Two Value release strategy?

The four key requirements for landscape design are:

• Flexible Emergency Changes: perform emergency fixes in a landscape where DEV is upgraded right at the release start.
• Pro-Active Innovation: ability to innovate on major releases while being able to deploy emergency fixes.
• Parallel Releases/Projects: ability to manage multiple projects and release in parallel – we need to separate minor release from major release track to be able to do continuous production support.
• Release Validation: perform a release validation for projects that might go across releases

Figure 2: Source: SAP

The answer is a dual track landscape. Which is only required only for your most innovative systems.

#3 Lean Custom Code Management to avoid, improve and reduce custom code.

Figure 3: Source: SAP

#4 Test Management and Solution Documentation to focus development and test on business-relevant changes and by automating tests.

To be able to benefit from test management in SAP Solution Manager, you need to setup four assets in SAP Solution Manager:

A process structure

• Applications/transactions used by the end user to execute process steps
• Test cases describing the end user activity either with manual or automated tests
• Impact info containing the technical objects that are executed by end users in this business process step.

Figure 4:Source: SAP

How you get there?

Import the structure that you have and like via XLS upload or ARIS import. When you have nothing, SAP helps to complement the structure from production – this is sufficient for standalone tests. Where tests require a process sequence, this needs to be massaged in by the customer. Once this is done, SAP will add impact info based on real usage via semi-dynamic TBOMs and from test automation.

#5 Near-Zero Downtime Updates to apply changes quickly without downtimes.

Zero Downtime is an in-place method, so it does not require an additional system. One application server is isolated for the upgrade procedure while all the other application servers are acting as bridge instances to support business users. The bridge instance accesses repository objects in an own database schema while the upgrade is already working to replace the repository in the existing DB schema. During that process, users can fully work on all functions that are not impacted by table structure changes.

Figure 5: Source: SAP

Zero Downtime Maintenance ensure continuous business availability for minimal additional cost.

Beside the 5 procedures we recommend you to implement SAP Solution Manager is consistently innovating. One of the key areas is the Solution Documentation experience which will fit much better to the business structures and behaviors. As you can see in the screenshots below SAP Solution Manager will be enabled to reflect the real business structures much better.

The given examples are only excerpts from the actual procedures. If you want to learn more about it and if you want to get insight to the fully revised Solution Documentation experience please join us.”

Register today

Photo by SAP TechEd Photographer – John Krakowski is on the left.

Could this be you, asking John your Solution Manager question during the ASUG pre-conference session break?