Introduction

Application Lifecycle Management

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) from SAP provides processes, tools, best practices, and services to manage SAP and non-SAP solutions throughout the complete application lifecycle, open to seamlessly integrate third party service management solutions.

Accelerating innovation while reducing risk and total cost of ownership requires a holistic approach of Application Lifecycle Management. You need a structured, comprehensive, and reliable collection of information about the state of your productive SAP applications as well as integrated non-SAP applications. This, in turn, provides the basis for informed and fact-based decisions and actions.

In an SAP TechEd 2010 Live clip, Marc Thier, SVP of Application Lifecycle Management and SAP Mentor Tony de Thomasis discuss SAP Solution Manager and the ALM Community.

Best Practice Processes

ALM is executed through processes that span the complete application lifecycle. They ensure stable operation of the IT solution while enabling accelerated innovation. Optimizing these processes reduces costs and ensures the highest quality of IT operation.

SAP provides 10 best practice processes for Application Lifecycle Management to support both projects and solutions throughout the entire lifecycle.

SAP Solution Manager and Tools

Application Lifecycle Management relies on efficient collaboration of multiple SAP and non-SAP tools. They provide the required functions for the different ALM processes.

SAP Solution Manager

The SAP Solution Manager plays a decisive role within the ALM tools. Besides providing ALM functionality itself, SAP Solution Manager integrates the other tools to ensure a comprehensive approach. It enables the central access to all required functions and central availability of all required information (single source of truth). In addition, SAP Solution Manager facilitates the efficient collaboration between your company and the SAP support organization to optimize the value of your support engagement with SAP.

SAP Solution Manager Overview for Dummies  

This blog provides an overview of SAP Solution Manager in laymen's language and provides pointers to additioinal introductory content written by other community members.

SAP and Third-Party Tools

Besides SAP Solution Manager, SAP offers other tools to complement the ALM offerings. And it is possible to integrate third-party ALM tools via available interfaces, as well.

Best Practices and Methodologies

Application Lifecycle Management provides standards, best-practice methodologies, and organizational recommendations which cover the most typical customer situations - implementation, operation, or upgrade. You can leverage these experiences to optimize the implementation and operation of ALM within your organization.

SAP Standards for Solution Operations describe the different processes of End-to-End solution operations. They address the tasks and needs of business process experts - the stakeholders responsible for designing and executing business processes - and IT departments - responsible for making the functionality of SAP applications available to business users.

SAP Roadmaps provide methodical frameworks for SAP projects. They give a structure to results and activities and provide the tools, services, and other methodical procedures that are recommended or required to help achieve the project objective. Special accelerators in the Roadmap structure help with certain project tasks, by providing templates, examples, standards, product information, or best practices, for example.

Establishing a Customer Center of Expertise (Customer COE) empowers an organization to manage its mission-critical operations effectively and efficiently. The Customer COE manages quality and collaboration between all parties involved in ALM activities.

Services

To support you in implementing ALM in your organization, SAP provides various services. SAP customers can get further information regarding these offerings on the ALM Services page (SMP login required).

Expert Guided Implementation (SMP login required) is a new optimized, short-term setup service to configure basic settings of SAP Solution Manager without long-term, in-house consulting. This service balances the combination of training, practical experience and expertise on demand and allows customers to create baseline functionality for implementation of end-to-end solution operations, ready-to-use. In mostly 5 days. Examples of activities are: Doing an update, building a customizing, or executing a service.

With the Consulting Services for SAP Solution Manager, SAP Consulting is covering your needs for SAP Solution Manager expertise. The various Services will help to plan the deployment of SAP Solution Manager, install the system, configure the mandatory and desired functions, and train users and administrators on how to handle SAP Solution Manager.

SAP offers several training courses and empowering workshops to facilitate knowledge transfer to your support organization. The training and certification of Run SAP provides companies, partners, and SAP consultants with the methodology to implement ALM.

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