SAP systems have become standard in all areas of business. And for system administration, there’s SAP Solution Manager. Application management is no trivial matter. But it’s very neglected. So, what does Solution Manager have in common with a steam engine? Until recently, many SAP support and system administration tasks were performed manually. But now they have been largely automated. SAP took a long time to make the tool available – released within the scope of the standard SAP R/3 and SAP Business Suite lifecycles. A further downside:  As in the age of the steam engine, users are confronted with instruments that have been tried and tested to differing degrees, and whose technological quality varies. This makes it difficult for users to effectively coordinate and leverage these new resources. Solution Manager was born of the necessity to centrally manage multiple SAP systems. This allowed both SAP (via Active Global Support) and SAP user organizations (via customer competence centers) to centralize their services. The same principles apply to tools for improving performance. In this case though, SAP’s objective was to put as many support tools as possible directly into the customer’s hands. It wasn’t until later that tools were created for change management and problem resolution. For Project Management too, SAP’s Solution Manager delivers a solution that supports effective execution of diverse projects. The most challenging projects are solution upgrades, including the integration of cProjects as a virtual collaboration platform.

Work centers for centralized application management

Solution Manager provides work centers (see graphic below) for centrally managing SAP system applications. Each work center supports specific roles or activities – which cover the entire application management cycle. The “Design” and “Build & Test” phases range from implementation to the testing of a new solution. The Change Management work center supports the “Deploy” phase, during which changes are enabled. The “Operate” phase is the model’s focus. It’s designed to aid administrators in work centers with their typical tasks: error analysis, solution monitoring and management of internal incident reports. The “Optimize” phase corresponds to SAP Services Delivery. And finally, there are work centers that assist in upgrading and documenting the solution.

Considerable benefits for administrators of large systems landscapes

The benefits of Solution Manager’s work center structure become apparent when multiple systems need to be coordinated. Having a central overview of downtimes and transportation management across all domains offers great advantages. Solution Manager works like a spider in its web, linking and coordinating diverse systems. The same is true of the System Administration work center, which grants central access to routine tasks and system administration tools. System Monitoring comprises an entire set of tools that enable centralized, standardized monitoring. Together, these system checks support proactive problem identification, assuming the corresponding tools have been enabled in the satellite systems. The Business Process Operation work center monitors interfaces and checks data consistency. Monitoring functions generate alerts or tasks. Predefined thresholds and automated responses enable user support to deal quickly with any problems. Even routine tasks such as job management, can prove difficult in complex landscapes. This is why SAP allows process-driven, documented job management across all systems. The Root Cause Analysis work center is used to resolve problems with ABAP and Java-based applications.
 
Our conclusion: All work centers that perform administrative tasks are valuable tools. They facilitate centralized application management – and the bigger and more complex your system landscape, the more beneficial centralized application management becomes.

ITIL-compliant processes in Application Management

Support teams and R&D departments, for example, use the enhanced Change Management work center to make ITIL-compliant, workflow-driven changes. Its main purpose is to ensure that maintenance and change requests are managed centrally. Incident Management simplifies the way customer support organizations deal with reported faults; the customer support professionals entering the reports work closely with SAP Service Marketplace and SAP Support. Essentially, Solution Manager provides CRM functions. As a result, the support team can not only process requests, but build and maintain a solution database too. SAP Support is also an integral part of the Service Delivery work center. Customers have access to the whole range of SAP support services – from descriptions of problems for self-diagnosis and DIY remedies, to requests for billable SAP services and experts. For the work center in Solution Manager to run smoothly, the business process structure must be maintained and updated regularly; the structure can be assembled with the aid of the Business Process Repository (BPR), included in the Solution Manager package. It can be constructed manually or customers can utilize the various services available, such as RBE Plus, to simplify and accelerate evaluation and customization. Conclusion: The processes described here are indispensable for trouble-free interaction with SAP Support. However it may be difficult to discern which of the many procedures, tools and cross-ITIL processes is causing a problem, as SAP is just one among several IT systems available.

Solution Manager in Action

Most Solution Manager projects involve upgrades. The second most common types are solution roll-outs and post-documentation of system usage. In contrast, first-time implementation projects play only a small role. So it isn’t at all surprising that testing is a central issue – since efficient testing is one of the major expenses of an upgrade. In addition to tests, these projects entail assessment of relevant upgrade activities and end-user training requirements. Most projects are limited to technical upgrades. Functional upgrades, in which new features are enabled or customer-specific modifications are replaced by standard functions, are sadly the exception. And strategic upgrades are more seldom still – projects initiated to establish completely new business scenarios and processes, or to improve processes by adding SAP applications and functions. Solution Manager very rarely includes implementation projects, so blueprints need to be built from the bottom up. Sometimes this means entering the system’s entire configuration settings and documentation, or developing these from scratch. Nor are there necessarily any test cases to reference. So to create the blueprint, it’s important to pursue two separate objectives: first, to activate the original Business Process Repository elements, since these contain references to upgrade data (SAP has added documentation and configuration data for processes and process steps). And second, SAP user organizations normally want to design a process model that’s tailored to their needs, so it’s important to assign all transactions used – customer-specific ones in particular – to the appropriate processes. This helps to reliably track transaction usage, providing insight that can significantly accelerate upgrade projects, since only relevant aspects, processes, document types and item categories must be tested. Conclusion: When Solution Manager is used to streamline entire projects, it is no longer a tool employed by IT experts only.

Field testing new Solution Manager functions

For technical upgrades and testing, SAP’s latest Solution Manager version offers two new developments: Custom Development Management Cockpit, for examining company-specific developments and aligning elements from another system that have been affected by the upgrade. And the Business Process Change Analyzer, which compares objects that have been altered by a change or support package with the technical parts list for specific objects (such as transactions or reports). When a new development changes a specific technical object, a table or a module, experts can pinpoint the transactions that are affected in the target system. Unfortunately, this functionality entails elaborate preparation; a technical parts list must be generated in the target system for each transaction in the process structure. Conclusion: Both of these tools require IT expertise. It would be helpful to consolidate these with other, similar tools and better analytical options and content. We recommend trying these tools out on a few familiar objects before implementing them in your production system. A large-scale trial is not feasible, since the reports yield extensive data of limited use. Besides, there’s no solid evidence to suggest that this could save testing time and resources.

Solution Manager and BPM tools

Modeling tools like ARIS are generally used in business process management projects. They are the basis for re-designing or managing key aspects of specific business processes. These tools are based on a process model that maintains SAP transactions as attributes and contains other organizational aspects that have little to do with Solution Manager. The most important task is to decide where you are going to maintain which data. It’s advisable to make process changes only in the BPM tool and transfer these to Solution Manager for use in the SAP system. This requires a BPM tool that can be easily integrated. Plus, it’s fairly pointless to upload every single detail of a new business process to Solution Manager. For instance, it’s not a good idea to model all process variants for various business cases or sites. It makes more sense to model a basic process structure and document individual process variants separately. Conclusion: Solution Manager in not a BPM environment. Ultimately, it has to model the process structure from the perspective of a support department – who regard processes as technical objects of an SAP application rather than as variants.

Key parameters and cost-effectiveness

Leveraging Solution Manager to achieve savings is a question of opportunity cost. What are the alternatives? The time and resources spent setting up and maintaining Solution Manager need to be weighed against the advantages potentially gained by centralizing tasks currently performed across multiple SAP systems. Plus, the tools can (but don’t have to) be used in several different ways. This means the resources required and benefits gained depend greatly on the customer landscape and the project at hand. In contrast, SAP is trying to enhance its top-of-the-line Enterprise Support by adding new tools like Custom Development Management Cockpit. The jury’s still out on whether their “premium” strategy will meet with success.

Our bottom line: focus on support tools

Solution Manager can be employed in its most basic form for centralized system administration. It can also be used to manage customer systems -- especially in tried-and-tested application areas. Ultimately, Solution Manager is the link between the SAP support organization and the customer system, which is precisely why user organizations need to focus on functions that facilitate support. This includes setting up a process structure based on the Business Process Repository. Solution Manager is SAP’s way of offering its customers access to a host of new functions. But the more recent tools have not been fully proven under real-world conditions. Since these functions require implementation and maintenance effort, SAP user organizations should wait until they’re sure the tool is robust. It’s a good idea to start slow, deploying Solution Manager in “small” projects, and using it to document processes. Or, employ it in your next upgrade or enhancement project. Whatever the situation, don’t overdo. Solution Manager remains a “steam engine” of application management. It is an invention that can only be deployed effectively when carefully phased in, and carefully monitored. The alternative is to potentially waste considerable time and money.