SAP Solution: SolMan 7.2

SAP Activate is a new implementation framework for the S/4 Hana business suite. The new Activate method replaces two previous methods for S/4 - the Asap-on-premise method and the Launch-Cloud method.

In combination with historical license and contract knowledge, the "transparent“ SAP customer can, with the help of USMM and LAW, count their licenses and have them be assessed by experts - and save money! However, SAP can use said knowledge for evaluating Indirect Access. Virtually everything is possible. In this text, Stefan Autengruber, SAP Licensing Expert at License Ethics, and Peter Färbinger, E3 Editor-in-Chief, share their perspectives on SAM tools and Indirect Access.

The clock is ticking: on December 31, SAP discontinued support for NetWeaver 7.0 AS Java, and therefore for SolMan 7.1 also. If you want to continue to manage your architecture in a practical way, it is vital that you carry out the upgrade to 7.2, as the future will be about heterogeneity.

Requirements management with SolMan 7.2 enables the control of change management for innovations requested by the business departments in the company and thus forms an important interface between the business department and IT.

At Sapphire 2017, co-CEO and founder Bastian Nominacher presented the new machine learning capabilities of Celonis' process mining solution. In this exclusive E-3 interview, he talks about the opportunities that artificial intelligence opens up for process mining.

With the Business Process Change Analyzer, SolMan provides a tool that sheds light on the relevant scope of testing. This paves the way towards "smart testing".

SAP seems to want to suspend the laws of economics: You eliminate your own innovations and try to overtake yourself - to the detriment of existing customers and the community.

Stupidly, SAP's existing customers can't wait. Real life does not stand still. SAP and some partners prefer to discuss visions instead of offering viable roadmaps.

It's more than a release upgrade, and SAP knows that about digital transformation. Nevertheless, with the latest ERP version and an in-memory computing database, it is trying to convince the SAP community that Hana, Fiori, Cloud and S/4 are sufficient.

SolMan 7.2 has the blues and S/4 is not developing homogeneously. SAP's global markets are heterogeneous, making a consolidated product development and roadmap difficult. In Europe, S/4 business is tentatively starting, in the U.S. they are stuck with R/3 and fixing with cloud services, and in Asia many systems are not under maintenance. SAP has the blues.

As part of the SolMan upgrade strategy, solution documentation is one of the biggest issues. Although the effort of a conversion is considerable, it is a good investment in the future.

With version 7.2, ChaRM release management has been comprehensively expanded and renovated. But with new techniques, the challenges also lie in the organization.