As current and new SAP customers develop business cases and project plans for SAP S/4HANA adoption—and for organizations already underway—it’s become clear that gaining full SAP S/4HANA Cloud investment value requires a laser focus on application lifecycle management (ALM).
And SAP Cloud ALM is the tool to deliver that focus and value, among other capabilities sure to be highlighted in the upcoming ASUG & SAP Application Lifecycle Management Summit NA 2022. Find more summit information here, https://www.asug.com/events/application-lifecycle-management.
Based on our experiences and observations, SAP Cloud ALM has proven to work intuitively and help streamline how customers and/or their partners implement and operate cloud and hybrid environments at peak efficiency without the need for hardware investments. Best of all, SAP Cloud ALM is included with an SAP cloud subscription.
When moving ahead with S/4HANA plans, SAP Cloud ALM for Implementation enables customers to manage their project teams, business processes, and integration with optimum efficiency. This means that during implementation planning, SAP Cloud ALM can specifically plan and design the project. It can identify what tasks need to be done in which timeframes and who should do them.
What are typically rigorous test phases and deployment activities can be centrally planned and executed according to onboarding checklists. For example, SAP Cloud ALM seamlessly integrates with the robust SAP S/4HANA Cloud Test Automation Tool (TAT), providing hundreds of pre-delivered automated test scripts that can be adapted to fulfill business testing requirements. It becomes the single source of truth for performing effective project management:
- Designing your to-be solution
- Managing all configuration activities
- Centrally managing all testing
- Ensuring consistent deployment to production.
Operations Are Critical, Too
In addition, SAP Cloud ALM for Operations helps build essential understanding about the productive solution and operations health, and can prevent disruptions, with a focus on these meaningful areas:
- Monitoring business processes proactively, including issue/problem alerts
- Reliable data exchange between cloud services and systems
- End-user performance and utilization
- Transparency around job execution and automated activities
- Easy display of the application health of cloud services and systems.
For example, SAP Integration and Exception Monitoring centrally manages complex solution landscapes composed of interconnected systems and cloud services with a unified user experience. This central handling platform closes the gap between IT and the business through end-to-end visibility (monitoring, alerting, tracking) for interface calls and message flows across all involved cloud services and systems.
John Krakowski and Evan Stoddard are SAP Senior Product Managers, ALM.