Transport issues, a thing of the past with these SAP ALM tools

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is a set of processes and tools that manages the entire lifecycle of an application, from an initial idea through development, testing, deployment and maintenance. One crucial aspect of ALM is Change and Deployment Management which focuses on handling and controlling changes and transporting them through the system landscape.

Change and Deployment Management enables you to monitor and manage changes within your SAP landscape in the most efficient way and it ensures that all modifications follow a change management process, including mandatory controls and documented procedures. It uses a workflow-based approval for transport management and extends the proven SAP Transport Management System (TMS) functionality by ensuring that all transport requests are included in regression and integration testing and that they are moved to production collectively. Transport-related checks, such as downgrade protection and critical object detection, prevent that objects are incorrectly overwritten and avoid dumps. It also covers cloud- and non-ABAP transports.

SAP offers its own suite of ALM tools:

• SAP Solution Manager and its robust ChaRM functionality is widely recognized as the proven tool for managing changes in SAP landscapes. It provides organizations with the functionalities and processes needed to ensure the stability, reliability and compliance of their SAP systems.
  
• SAP Cloud ALM is SAP’s new cloud-based solution that extends ALM capabilities to the cloud. It is designed to help organizations manage the complete lifecycle of SAP solutions in cloud and hybrid landscapes. It provides Deployment Management as functionality tailored to the challenges and opportunities presented by all types of deployments.

Do you need both tools to tackle your transport problems? Not in the least! SAP Solution Manager is currently the more mature product for ALM when it comes to on-premise landscapes. In terms of changes, it contains all the bells and whistles you can think of and it is fully customizable to the organization’s needs. However, SAP Solution Manager will reach end of life by the end of this decade, while SAP Cloud ALM is the out-of-the-box solution for the future.

SAP Cloud ALM includes a lot of standard features and is currently being speed-prepped to reach the same level of maturity as SAP Solution Manager as soon as possible. And if that is not enough for you, APIs are available to extend to your needs. SAP Cloud ALM can be integrated with SAP Solution Manager, allowing organizations to leverage their existing investments in SAP Solution Manager while taking advantage of additional cloud-based ALM capabilities at the same time.

Both tools reduce the risk of project failures, disruptions to business and best of all, they both come for free*! So, with just a few days of setup, you can count on an efficient management of all changes in your IT systems by enforcing standardized methods and procedures according to the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) methodology. It guarantees that change-related business breakdowns will be kept to the absolute minimum.

*Included in your ERP and cloud-licence

At Expertum, we firmly believe that SAP Solution Manager and SAP Cloud ALM play a crucial role in the lifecycle management of all SAP applications. We have a dedicated team at your disposal for the implementation and support of both the functional and technical ALM functionalities, including not only Change and Deployment Management but also IT Service Management, Business Process Management, Solution Documentation, Test Suite, Monitoring and so much more. Our Expertum specialists can help you build a release and transport management strategy that best fits your organization and covers all your needs. So do get rid of those spreadsheets and get in touch for more information!