SAP Solution Manager

Last updated September 03, 2024

SAP Solution Manager is a product developed by the software company SAP SE. It offers end-to-end application lifecycle management to streamline business processes and proactively address improvement options, increasing efficiency and decreasing risk within SAP customers' existing maintenance agreements and managing the application lifecycle.

Overview

SAP Solution Manager is a central support and system management suite provided to SAP's customers as part of their license agreement. As an SAP system landscape may include a large number of installed SAP and non-SAP systems, SAP Solution Manager is intended to reduce and centralize the management of these systems as well as end-to-end business processes. SAP Solution Manager covers the complete application lifecycle of an SAP customer's business processes running on-premise, hybrid, or in the cloud.

In an SAP customer's landscape, the SAP Solution Manager is the managing system, and the business suite applications (e.g. ERP, CRM, BI, EP) are the managed systems. Non-SAP systems in the landscape can also be covered as part of end-to-end business process lifecycle management. The managed customer landscape can consist of on-premise, cloud, or a combination of both. Business processes and changes can also be documented during major releases, minor releases, and bugfixes, making the platform an important business platform as well as an IT platform to provide a "single source of the truth" reference model for the customer.

The current release of SAP Solution Manager is 7.2, which provides features for both IT and business users for enhancing, automating, and improving the management of SAP and non-SAP systems:^[1]

Project Management
Process Management
Test Suite
Change Control Management
IT Service Management
Application Operations
Business Process Operations
Landscape Management
Data Volume Management
Custom Code Management.

The current version of SAP Solution Manager is SAP Solution Manager 7.2, available since August 2016.

Support Package Stack 17 for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 was released in July 2023, delivering innovations based on customer innovation requests. Accordingly, the product’s documentation was updated with new release information.

Some of the claimed benefits of using SAP Solution Manager 7.2 are that it helps:[2]

Support the orchestration of the entire end-to-end customer business scenarios, processes, and steps via business process modeling, change control, IT service management, and a robust monitoring and alerting infrastructure
Is the value companion for implementing and operating all of SAP's next-generation products, such as SAP S/4HANA
Provides simple, web-based user interfaces and management dashboards, and embedded graphical modeling capability
Increases efficiency with both Application and Business Process Operations for central control of critical operations support tasks
Support the business with business process modeling, automated business blueprint generation, and business process usage analysis and analytics
Reduces risk from changes to the environment with risk-based testing applications such as the Business Process Change Analyzer and Scope and Effort Analyzer
Streamlines and reduces the custom code footprint of the customer's SAP systems through Custom Code Management
Provide customers with generous usage rights for support of non-SAP components and without the need for named system users, included in the customer's SAP Enterprise Support contract
Includes the powerful Focused Build requirements-to-deploy process, and Focused Insights analytical dashboards at no additional charge as of January 1, 2020

SAP Solution Manager 7.2 also features improved support for hybrid (on-premises and on-cloud) landscapes, as well as new user interfaces based on SAP Fiori. 7.2 can also run on the SAP HANA database as an option. The SAP Solution Manager Product Roadmap has been updated with more details.

Related Research Articles

Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology company headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. In 2023, the company’s seat in Forbes Global 2000 was 80. The company sells database software and cloud computing. Oracle's core application software is a suite of enterprise software products, such as enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, human capital management (HCM) software, customer relationship management (CRM) software, enterprise performance management (EPM) software, Customer Experience Commerce and supply chain management (SCM) software.

SAP R/3 is the former name of the enterprise resource planning software produced by the German corporation SAP AG. It is an enterprise-wide information system designed to coordinate all the resources, information, and activities needed to complete business processes such as order fulfillment, billing, human resource management, and production planning.

SAP SE is a German multinational software company based in Walldorf, Baden-Württemberg. It develops enterprise software to manage business operation and customer relations. The company is the world's leading enterprise resource planning (ERP) software vendor.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Systems development life cycle</span> Systems engineering terms

In systems engineering, information systems and software engineering, the systems development life cycle (SDLC), also referred to as the application development life cycle, is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying an information system. The SDLC concept applies to a range of hardware and software configurations, as a system can be composed of hardware only, software only, or a combination of both. There are usually six stages in this cycle: requirement analysis, design, development and testing, implementation, documentation, and evaluation.

HP OpenView is the former name for a Hewlett-Packard product family that consisted of network and systems management products. In 2007, HP OpenView was rebranded as HP BTO Software when it became part of the HP Software Division. The products were available as various HP products, marketed through the HP Software Division. HP Software became part of HPE after the HP/HPE split and HPE Software was eventually sold to MicroFocus.

Business software is any software or set of computer programs used by business users to perform various business functions. These business applications are used to increase productivity, measure productivity, and perform other business functions accurately.

SAP NetWeaver is a software stack for many of SAP SE's applications. The SAP NetWeaver Application Server, sometimes referred to as WebAS, is the runtime environment for the SAP applications and all of the mySAP Business Suite runs on SAP WebAS: supplier relationship management (SRM), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM), product lifecycle management (PLM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), transportation management system (TMS).

Enterprise software, also known as enterprise application software (EAS), is computer software used to satisfy the needs of an organization rather than its individual users. Enterprise software is an integral part of a computer-based information system, handling a number of business operations, for example to enhance business and management reporting tasks, or support production operations and back office functions. Enterprise systems must process information at a relatively high speed.

SAP NetWeaver Process Integration (SAP PI) is SAP's enterprise application integration (EAI) software, a component of the NetWeaver product group used to facilitate the exchange of information among a company's internal software and systems and those of external parties. Before the current version, SAP PI was called SAP Exchange Infrastructure (SAP XI). Like other NetWeaver components, SAP PI is compatible with software products of other companies.

Procurement software refers to a range of business software designed to streamline and automate purchasing processes for businesses and organizations. By managing information flows and transactions between procuring entities, suppliers, and partners, procurement software aims to cut costs, improve efficiency, and boost organizational performance.

SAP ERP is an enterprise resource planning software developed by the German company SAP SE. SAP ERP incorporates the key business functions of an organization. The latest version of SAP ERP (V.6.0) was made available in 2006. The most recent SAP enhancement package 8 for SAP ERP 6.0 was released in 2016. It is now considered legacy technology, having been superseded by SAP S/4HANA.

Aldon is a business unit of Rocket Software. It develops, manufactures, licenses and supports software change management products for the enterprise application lifecycle management (ALM) and software change management (SCM) markets.

The SAP CRM applications were initially integrated on-premises customer relationship management (CRM) software manufactured by SAP SE which targeted business software requirements for marketing, sales and service for midsize and large organizations in all industries and sectors. The first SAP CRM release 2.0 has been made generally available in November 2000. The current release 7.0 has been updated with quarterly enhancement packs (EHPs) since 2009.

User provisioning software is software intended to help organizations more quickly, cheaply, reliably and securely manage information about users on multiple systems and applications.

HP Network Management Center (NMC) is a suite of integrated HP software used by network managers in information technology departments. The suite allows network operators to see, catalog and monitor the routers, switches, and other devices on their network. IT staff is alerted when a network device fails, and it predicts when a network node or connection point may go down. The suite was designed to address operational efficiency.

BRFplus is a business rule management system (BRMS) offered by SAP AG. BRFplus is part of the SAP NetWeaver ABAP stack. Therefore, all SAP applications that are based on SAP NetWeaver can access BRFplus within the boundaries of an SAP system. However, it is also possible to generate web services so that BRFplus rules can also be offered as a service in a SOA landscape, regardless of the software platform used by the service consumers.

SAP HANA is an in-memory, column-oriented, relational database management system developed and marketed by SAP SE. Its primary function as the software running a database server is to store and retrieve data as requested by the applications. In addition, it performs advanced analytics and includes extract, transform, load (ETL) capabilities as well as an application server.

SAP S/4HANA is an enterprise resource planning software for large enterprises developed by SAP SE. It is the successor to both SAP R/3 and SAP ERP, and is optimized for SAP's in-memory database SAP HANA.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 is an integrated suite of enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications offered by Microsoft. Combines various functions such as sales, customer service, field service, operations, finance, marketing, and project service automation into a single platform.

References

↑ Melich, Matthias (2016). SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA (1st ed.). SAP Press.
↑ Melich, Matthias (2016). SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA (1st ed.). SAP Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-4932-1414-3.

Pontus Borgstrom, Michal Krawczyk, Korneliusz Kordus: Testing SAP APIs: Strategy and Execution SAP Press, 2020, ISBN 978-1-4932-1998-8
Marc Schäfer, Matthias Melich: SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA (1st Edition) SAP Press, 2016, ISBN 978-1-4932-1414-3
Nathan Williams: IT Service Management in SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2013, ISBN 978-1-59229-440-4
Lars Teuber, Corina Weidmann, and Liane Will: Monitoring and Operations with SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2014, ISBN 978-1-59229-884-6
Michael Kloffer, Marc Thier: Performing End-to-end Root Cause Analysis Using SAP Solution Manager SAP Press, 2008, ISBN 1-59229-189-9, ISBN 978-1-59229-189-2

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.

[1] Melich, Matthias (2016). SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA (1st ed.). SAP Press.

[2] Melich, Matthias (2016). SAP Solution Manager for SAP S/4HANA (1st ed.). SAP Press. p. 25. ISBN 978-1-4932-1414-3.

[1]