Mission Statement
The digital economy is fundamentally disrupting traditional business rules. Companies that have been leaders in their industry for many years are suddenly facing competitors who are emerging seemingly from nowhere. In addition, companies see that in many business areas early adopters are winning new customers very quickly and are challenging traditional industry boundaries. This has a significant impact on all players in the digital economy. Companies need to constantly rethink and reshape their business in order to remain successful or to become successful in the digital economy.
With the SAP HANA technology, the digital core SAP S/4HANA and the business networks, SAP provides a portfolio of products and solutions both on premise and on the cloud which allows customers to successfully master the challenges of the digital disruption and adopt new business models quickly. To harness SAP’s offerings, SAP provides SAP Solution Manager 7.2, which contains all tools, knowledge, and methodologies required for a successful business transformation with SAP.
SAP Solution Manager, however, not only guides customers through their transformation journey, but it also supports customer with managing the lifecycle of their business applications successfully, both for on premise as well as in the cloud.
Business Processes Drive IT
For existing SAP customers, one key goal is to ensure that today’s business runs efficiently without disruptions. In order to do so, the focus on business processes is crucial. This is where SAP Solution Manager 7.2 comes into play because the management of business processes through the complete lifecycle is at the core of SAP Solution Manager’s operating principles. Everything and every functionality in SAP Solution Manager centers around the customer’s business processes. With SAP Solution Manager, you can operate the involved business applications and handle incidents immediately whenever they occur. And you have the possibility to avoid incidents pro-actively before they happen.
Operating business processes is, however, not sufficient to strive in the digital economy. Proper planning, fast implementation of new business processes, and change control is as important for success. You can use SAP Solution Manager also for building what the business needs, whenever they need it. SAP Solution Manager drives both continuous improvements and business innovations.
Integration and Openness
Most of the individual functions of SAP Solution Manager can be offered by 3rd-party tools as well. But SAP Solution Manager has one significant advantage: the integration. All information of the individual functions is available in SAP Solution Manager (single source of truth). This ensures that the dependencies between different functions can be taken into account easily. Just to name a few examples: SAP Solution Manager ensures that changes in the system are also maintained in the documentation such that there is no deviation between documentation and reality. Requestors of a change might want to know about the status of the implementation. You want to know which business processes will be impacted by a change. Management reporting is easier and faster with one central dashboard than via handling and consolidating multiple spread sheets.
On the other side, you might have licensed other tools already for some functionality. Open interfaces of SAP Solution Manager allow you to continue using these tools and integrating them with SAP Solution Manager. This integration ensures that you still keep an overview of your entire solution.
For SAP and Non-SAP
An end-to-end business process does not run on a single system. In turn, it is important for SAP Solution Manager to support multiple systems. This may involve cloud services and non-SAP business applications, depending on how your end-to-end process is set up. Also, new technologies are supported, such as SAP S/4HANA and the SAP HANA Cloud Platform.
SAP Solution Manager delivers four key value scenarios to help you achieving the goals. They cover the entire lifecycle of your IT solution:
- Portfolio to Project (P2P) covers the management of implementation and change projects from the decision to start a project until the project completion. It provides a unified viewpoint across PMO, enterprise architecture, and service portfolio. It improves data quality for decision making and provides KPIs and roadmaps to improve business communication.
- Requirement to Deploy (R2D) builds what the business needs, when it needs it, with a measured business outcome. The scenario provides a framework for creating, modifying, or sourcing services. It spans from gathering demands of the lines of business, designing and developing the solution, testing it, up to the final deployment of the changes in the productive solution.
- Detect to Correct (D2C) controls the solution to anticipate and resolve production problems. It enables end-to-end visibility using a shared configuration model and brings together IT service operations to enhance results and efficiency. This is used to identify issues before they affect users and to reduce the mean time to repair
- Request to Fulfill (R2F) empowers you to catalog, request and fulfill IT services. With this your IT organization can transition to a service broker model. Items from multiple supplier catalogs are presented in a single catalog. You can manage and measure fulfillments across multiple suppliers. This leads to efficient control of subscriptions and total service costs.
Process management
With SAP Solution Manager 7.2, SAP took a new approach for managing processes. With this approach, you can now model your processes graphically, and you can manage their lifecycle holistically. The new SAP Solution Manager simplifies and optimizes the documentation of customer solutions. You can fast-track the definition of processes using libraries containing elements that are used typically for documenting a solution. These elements enable you to create artefacts that are shared between multiple processes efficiently.
This is especially important when a certain process is used in multiple variants across an organization. With the library concept, you are able to store all process components that are identical across all variants in a library and re-use these components later during the definition of variants.
SAP Solution Manager 7.2 also simplifies the documentation of system landscapes, the roles that the individual systems play and the definition of the routes that changes take while flowing from the development to the production environment. First of all, you can group all systems belonging to the same kind of product like ERP or CRM. As a next step, you can define the roles that the individual systems play like development, quality assurance, or production.
Once you enter a “to-be” business process in SAP Solution Manager, you can manage this process together with all assigned documentation all the way seamlessly into production hand-in-hand with the technical objects which represent the change in the code layer. SAP Solution Manager 7.2 thus not only supports the implementation of new business processes from ideation to production on the business layer, but also firmly connects the business with the technical layer. The result is that the business documentation and the system reality are always synchronized. SAP Solution Manager thus strengthens its position as central source of documentation for the whole customer solution.
The new concept brings two key applications: solution administration and solution documentation - both accessible via the central SAP Solution Manager Fiori Launchpad. While administrators use the solution administration to setup the documentation environment, the majority of users work with solution documentation that offers the actual functions to manage processes and to document the solution. These users are specialists like business analysts, process modelers and functional consultants.
Process Management allows to describe both business and IT perspective on processes, applications and system landscapes. The processes described in the Solution Documentation can be used by other processes in SAP Solution Manager, like Business Process Monitoring, or Project Management. You can control and manage the lifecycle of process content with change and request management. All aspects of the process lifecycle are tied together in the solution documented in SAP Solution Manager.