Exploring How SAP Cloud ALM Supports the RISE with SAP Methodology

SAP Cloud ALM and Clean Core are discussed under five main topics:

• Business processes
• Extensibility
• Data
• Integration
• Operations

A clean core describes a system that is as close to standard as possible while running cloud-compliant extensions and integrations.

It allows you to adapt your system to changing business requirements to adopt new capabilities.

Strong governance is required for each technical dimension of clean core.

The main aspects are:

• Establish state-of-the-art business process governance, including proper requirement management and transparent organizational structures.
• Use recommended SAP Reference Solution Architecture to apply SAP solutions such as SAP S/4HANA and others.
• Implement respective SAP Best Practices where available and applicable.
• Tailor or enhance standard solutions from SAP only where competitive advantages can be created.
• Achieve business process management excellence by documenting processes and continuously monitoring process flow as well as process performance and efficiency.

SAP Cloud ALM provides:

• Capabilities to follow the 'RISE with SAP Methodology - clean core success plan' and to manage the corresponding Quality Gates.
• Activate implementation methodology ensuring a Fit-to-Standard approach (for system conversion, greenfield, selective data transition).
• SAP Best Practice processes as basis for Fit-to-Standard workshops (BPMNs, process documentation, test cases).
• Transparency with documentation capabilities for business processes (including implementation documentation and test cases).
• Tracking capabilities and Requirement Management for Fit-to-Standard workshops. This allows the identification of differentiating processes, which require extensions.
• Business process modeling capabilities to design customer-specific processes for differentiating business processes.
• Analytics and Traceability dashboards to track the adherence to clean core criteria throughout the project.
• Scope definition and instrumentation for Business Process Monitoring and Job and Automation Monitoring to get transparency regarding business process KPIs, most important jobs, and automation tasks:
  • Business Process Monitoring addresses the needs of LOB users and is based and business process KPIs.
  • Job and Automation addresses the needs of LOB and IT users to ensure the reliable execution of jobs and automation tasks.
• Integration with SAP Readiness Check to get full traceability on simplification items, required custom code adoption, and add-ons.

Main aspects:

• Avoid extensions when possible.
• Set up a strong governance to create decoupled extensions in a way that they would work in the cloud (three-tier model).
• Separate extensions by applying released APIs - custom extensions do not break an upgrade and upgrades do not break an extension*
• Use the full capabilities of extensibility on the stack as well as side by side with SAP BTP.
• Create technical debts only as informed decision.

SAP Cloud ALM provides:

• integration of Cloud TMS and BTP CI/CD DevOps services to consistently manage ABAP and BTP extensions.
• Capabilities for central documentation of extensions.
• Test Management capabilities for manual and automated testing of extensions.
• Integration with SAP Readiness Check to track the resolution of custom code findings in SAP Cloud ALM.
• Capabilities to manage an agile build process for extensions.
• iCCM service.
• Scope definition and instrumentation for different monitoring use cases to get transparency for BTP extensions:
  • Health Monitoring to monitor technical KPIs.
  • Real User Monitoring/Synthetic User Monitoring to monitor end user behavior from performance and the error perspective.
  • Exception Monitoring to monitor customer specific errors.
  • Job and Automation Monitoring to SAP Job Scheduling Service based jobs and SAP Build Process Automation based automations and processes.
  • Business Process Monitoring to monitor customer specific Business KPIs.
  • Setup of Integration Monitoring, Configuration, and Security Analysis and other use cases for standard BTP SaaS Services.

Main aspects:

• Data quality (Configuration, master, and transactional data):
  • Accuracy
  • Timeliness
  • Completeness
  • Validity
  • Consistency
  • Uniqueness
• Data volume efficiency (Master and transactional data):
  • Optimized memory and disk consumption.
  • No outdated, unused, or redundant information.
  • Data life cycle management (creation, updates, end of life).
• Data privacy compliance: Storing and processing personal master data only with justifiable purposes.
• *Configuration data: General data that defines the organization's structure and is of static nature (such as company code, plants, purchase organisations, controlling area, or sales area); Master data: Consistent and uniform set of identifiers and extended attributes that describe the core entities of the enterprise, such as customers, vendors, products, and general ledger accounts; Transactional data: Information directly derived as a result of transactions, this data always has a time dimension, a numerical value, and refers to one or more (master data) objects.

SAP Cloud ALM provides:

• Integration with SAP Readiness Check to track the resolution of data quality issues identified by the Readiness Check (for example, Financial Data Quality).
• Scope definition and instrumentation to get transparency regarding data consistency and data volumes:
  • Integration Monitoring to provide insights regarding status of the different involved business objects.
  • Data Volume Management to identify saving potentials in the data life cycles.

Main aspects:

• Base integrations on standard APIs (OData and SOAP).
• Aim for side-by-side extensibility with API integration or even SAP Cloud SDK by utilizing the tight coupling with SAP Integration Suite.
• Realize loosely coupled integrations in an event-driven design based on standard events*.
• Avoid traditional APIs (RFC and IDoc) and their related classical extension options.
• Ensure proper monitoring and error resolution capabilities using SAP Application Interface Framework.

*Event: A data record expressing a significant change in state (for example, the change of a business partner) and consisting of data representing the occurrence and context metadata. It is sent to an event provider such as the SAP Event Mesh capability, where consumers can subscribe to it. The business object data must be pulled by each consumer individually by using standard APIs.

SAP Cloud ALM provides:

• Scope definition and instrumentation for Integration Monitoring and Exception Monitoring to get transparency for the most important entities to be monitored:
  • Integration Monitoring addresses the needs of LOB and IT users to provide transparency regarding end-to-end processing of messages, events and business objects.
  • Exception Monitoring addresses the needs of LOB and IT users to discover and resolve the most relevant error situations.
• Capabilities for a central documentation of integrations.
• Capabilities for an integrated management of CPI transports.

Main aspects:

• The paradigm of keeping the core clean is integrated into the end-to-end concept for operations.
• Release management is an established foundation for a clean core; the latest release should always be targeted.
• Housekeeping activities that are in line with SAP Best Practices are pursued, and the distribution of roles and responsibilities that are agreed with SAP are followed.
• It is agreed that SAP performs maintenance for technology within the preapproved CMPs.

SAP Cloud ALM provides:

• Provide full stack monitoring based on the different observability use cases:
  • Processes: Business Process Monitoring and Job and Automation Monitoring.
  • Integration: Integration Monitoring and Exception Monitoring.
  • Extensions: BTP related monitoring: Health Monitoring, Real User Monitoring, and so on.
  • Data: Integration Monitoring and Data Volume Management.
• Business Service Management to align SAP managed activities (maintenance events, disruption events, and so on) with customer managed activities (business down times, customer specific unplanned down times, and so on) including Service Level Objective management.
• Automated regression testing in SAP Cloud ALM to efficiently manage change or upgrade events.
• Integration with SAP Readiness Check for S/4HANA Upgrades to get Integration to get full traceability on simplification items, required custom code adoption, and add-ons.
• Release Management to efficiently bundle and track all change and testing activities.