More ALM, less Solution Manager?

Based on the fact that this article appears in the SolMan column, you already know the answer: No, it will continue. Nevertheless, it is legitimate to ask whether SolMan is worthwhile at all now. After all, Solution Manager was designed at a time when SAP projects were still not very agile or mobile. S/4 Hana and the cloud were still a distant future. And the idea of having to maintain a separate system for application lifecycle management (ALM) also seems outdated nowadays.

The idea of SolMan was and is ingenious: a system for all ALM tasks. No matter whether process documentation or modeling, test management, change management, monitoring or much more. Everything from a single source and fully integrated. Business and IT finally communicate with each other. Wonderful! But it is precisely this exuberant diversity, coupled with marketing that is not always quite optimal and the notorious forced functionalities, that has deterred many SAP customers over the years from giving SolMan a chance. And it has also produced strange blossoms. We know quite a few companies that use SolMan exclusively in SAP Basis. Or - scandal! - have outsourced the operation of the basic functions, thus denying themselves access to further functionalities.

In our consulting practice, we have never viewed SolMan as a cumbersome monolith, but always as a construction kit. If the maturity level of an ALM process is to be increased in the company, we naturally look first at the methodology and then at the tool. However, as soon as tools come into play, SolMan is always a good choice - not least because it is optimally tailored to the SAP world and is already available in the company. This means that a single topic can be piloted in a targeted manner without a large tool investment. And without the need to use the entire SolMan right away. No task is too small or too large.

Lifting a mid-sized company's test management from scattered Excel spreadsheets to a sustainable foundation that reduces effort with each new test run? Simple. Organize test activities of a global medical device manufacturer with many thousands of test cases across twenty countries, including cloud product testing, signature requirements, test automation? Walk. Manage system changes and transports in a business and technically clean way, gladly also with Git or for non-SAP systems? A popular ChaRM offensive. Managing in-house developments and making them fit for S/4? Day-to-day business. Or manage and implement the entire S/4 project with agile methods and SAP practices? Not a problem either. Monitor and optimize business processes across (SAP) system boundaries? That's been possible for a long time. 

The right time to give SolMan a chance is now! Because with SolMan available today (and probably already in your company), SAP customers are optimally equipped for the "modern" SAP world. Unimpressed by trends and hypes, SAP has always further developed SolMan and made it fit for the cloud, S/4 and for the world beyond SAP products. Not least thanks to Focused Solutions and partner products, an individual ALM strategy can be implemented.

This means that the announced end of maintenance in 2027 will also lose its horror. Both in SAP's ALM strategy and among our customers, SolMan is too firmly anchored, its unique selling points are too clear. And if, in 2027, there is suddenly a magical AI assistant that transfers all customer processes and content established over years from SolMan to SAP Cloud ALM, we will be there. Because there the concept is the same - just for a different target group. But until that happens, we can enjoy the many possibilities of SolMan, partner products and integrations. And talk more about ALM and less about tools.