SolMan, ALM, Conversion, Licenses and Automation

The Customer Competence Center and the Customer Center of Expertise have a successful past and are still very important today. Only a stable basis and infrastructure guarantee the success of an SAP system.

In recent years, the SolMan has become the most important guarantor of innovative SAP operations. The SolMan was the Swiss army knife for SAP Basis employees and laid the foundation for further success.

SolMan was supplemented by numerous IT tools from SAP partners. From system copy to monitoring, job scheduling, security, etc., the offer ranges to administer and orchestrate the SAP basis with development environment, quality assurance and transport system.

ALM is to become the logical metamorphosis of SolMan in a hybrid system landscape of private and public cloud. The private cloud is the answer for existing SAP customers with current on-prem concepts, while the public cloud can be the starting point for greenfield projects.

But each type of SAP system landscape requires multiple management tools. SAP's answer is Cloud ALM. Partners complement this offering with tools for monitoring, automation, license measurement, data management and transport management, but also with the further development of Abap modifications.

The difficult situation on the personnel market is also making itself felt in SAP Basis. The Competence Center Summit can provide an answer here with the presentation of tools and methods. If the SAP Basis team is relieved by monitoring, test automation, automatic system copies and other automation tools, the critical personnel situation is also eased. Job scheduling, transport requests and testing, testing, testing will remain a focus in the future with Hana and S/4.

The tasks of SAP Basis also include planning the release upgrade, and this will not be possible in the direction of Hana and S/4 without a reassessment of the licenses. Of course, SAP offers several options, but existing SAP customers will only find the best way after a detailed analysis of their own situation. Without expert support, however, it is hardly possible to go any further. Success here is based on experience from many projects.

With the SAP PKL Q2/2023 (price and conditions list), a serious disadvantage has now arisen again for existing SAP customers. During a grace period of 90 days until July 16, 2023, companies can continue to purchase the SAP S/4HANA Enterprise Management for ERP Customers flat rate, although it is already no longer included on the SAP price list. This is the well-known €9,000 SAP S/4 flat rate that buys SAP existing customers the right to choose between Contract and Product Conversion. This item is no longer included in the SAP PKL Q2/2023, which is why SAP existing customers without a flat rate lose the right to Product Conversion. 

Without the 9000 euro S/4 flat rate, there will be no product conversion for existing SAP customers in the future.

The S/4 conversion requires sustainable concepts for data management from SAP Basis. Archiving concepts as well as data storage for operations must be planned. Knowledge on the subject of data management inside and outside SAP systems with transparent access to the history from S/4 will be necessary. SAP Basis is particularly challenged here when it comes to providing heterogeneous data.

In addition to the current topics such as BTP, Embedded Abap, SolMan and Cloud ALM, Signavio and test automation and many more, the CCC/CCoE as an organizational unit has an indispensable place in the SAP infrastructure.

In this E-3 Extra, there is discourse on all SAP Basis topics such as automation, monitoring, license management, data structures and archiving. With Cloud ALM and Steampunk (Embedded Abap at BTP), a new era is beginning in the area of Customer Competence Centers and Customer Centers of Expertise.