It is fair to say that many companies across industries and geographies have become digital. What I mean by that is their solution landscapes have substantially changed to meet present and future business requirements.
Whether they adopt one central IT solution or have a portfolio of IT solutions working in the background to run their business processes, these companies need a framework to help manage the life cycle of applications from beginning to end in order to maximize business value.
“Application lifecycle management and business value?” I can imagine the raised eyebrows. And yes, I insist it does. Holistic application lifecycle management (ALM) can substantially increase a company’s agility to apply business-driven changes, increase the rigidity of core business processes, allow for faster issue resolution, and so on.
Companies managing for today and planning for the future must therefore employ an effective ALM strategy to help ensure successful system implementation across applications, whereby they are equipped with the appropriate tools for their individual circumstances.
Complete ALM Portfolio to Support All Landscapes
Recognizing that all customers are on unique transformation journeys and run their businesses differently, SAP offers a range of ALM solutions to help govern, develop, and operate software applications no matter what a customer’s landscape looks like.
Whether customers remain on premise, are shifting to the cloud, or operate in a hybrid scenario, SAP is committed to helping them track and manage their environments through a portfolio that includes SAP Solution Manager, SAP Cloud ALM, and SAP Focused Run. Knowing how important ALM is to customers, SAP has included both SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM in customer maintenance agreements.
Supporting On-Premise-Centric Customers with a Swiss Army Knife
While SAP Cloud ALM supports cloud-centric customers that are fully embracing the move to cloud, customers that currently have an on-premise-centric solution, or largely focus on premise but deploy some cloud solutions, are fully supported by SAP Solution Manager. This ALM solution provides a “Swiss army knife” of options to customers that require flexibility and the ability to tailor to their individual needs.
SAP Solution Manager – started decades ago to fulfill the requirements that were brought about by customers – is a comprehensive ALM tool built on proven SAP technology and designed for SAP Business Suite. Providing end-to-end coverage and a vibrant partner ecosystem, SAP Solution Manager consequently supports SAP S/4HANA, SAP cloud applications, and SAP Cloud Platform.
With more than 15,000 active customers across all regions, SAP Solution Manager allows them to operate their SAP solutions, document, implement, test, deploy, and monitor business processes running across multiple systems, and manage changes and releases. Many customers use SAP Solution Manager to take advantage of the range of options available, flexible engines that can be tailored to their needs, generic content and methodologies, and managing their technologies, including larger customers with more complex environments and multi-track landscapes.
Empowering Customers for the Intelligent Enterprise
As an integrated application management platform, SAP Solution Manager empowers customers to build toward the future intelligent enterprise while supporting business innovation, business continuity, and efficient operations.
SAP Solution Manager has been increasingly used to aid in the transition to the intelligent enterprise resource planning (ERP) system SAP S/4HANA, integrating technical functionality with relevant content to provide customers with best practices on how to use it.
The Municipal Administration of the city of Medellin, Columbia, was looking to prepare for its move to SAP S/4HANA and leaned on SAP Enterprise Support services to provide insights into how SAP Solution Manager could help manage the conversion. With this support, they were able to streamline business processes, discover improvement options, develop strategies to reduce system errors, and minimize risk – helping create a strategic plan for the journey to becoming an intelligent enterprise.
Enhancing to Meet Customers’ Evolving Landscapes
While SAP Solution Manager is one of the company’s mature solutions, SAP is continuously leaning into customer feedback to further develop and improve the solution in order help ensure it continues to meet evolving needs. SAP makes regular enhancements based on customer feedback.
As we continue to enhance SAP Solution Manager to support new SAP products and technologies, we want to make sure that customers are not only able to manage their businesses today but can also plan for what lies ahead of them.
Andreas Heckmann is the executive vice president of Product Engineering and head of Customer Solution Support & Innovation at SAP.