Describing SAP Cloud ALM within Business Transformation.

SAP Cloud ALM is the foundation for transformation. It is available to all customers with an Enterprise Support Agreement or a Cloud Contract.

Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) is needed throughout the entire life cycle of an IT solution.

It covers the implementation 

• Design: Discuss with the lines of business (LOBs) how the business processes will be executed on SAP S/4 HANA Cloud and other integrated services and systems.
• Build: Ensure that all configuration activities are performed to realize the requirements derived from design. Besides the configuration of SAP S/4 HANA Cloud itself, these activities can also include the development of extensions and the setting up of integrations.
• Test: Check the quality of the settings before going productive. This service includes various types of testing, such as integration testing for business processes running across multiple components and user acceptance testing (UAT) to determine if stakeholder expectations are met.
• Deploy: Orchestrate the consistent deployment of your changes to production, ensuring comprehensive documentation of requirements, approvals, and follow-up activities.

and the operations  of e.g. SAP S/4HANA Cloud 

• Detect: Monitor your business processes to ensure they work E2E without abnormalities and disruptions.
• Analyze: Perform root-cause analysis to identify the origin of any errors that may occur.
• Correct: Trigger the required correction process.
• Automate: Execute operation flows automatically to avoid repeating tasks and increase overall operation quality.

Implementation and operations can run in parallel, changes will be requested from the LOBs continuously after go-live. You can implement these changes while operating your productive solution, and the number of change events will increase as implementations become more agile. A central ALM platform covering both implementation and operations helps avoid unwanted impacts.

The benefits of ALM are three-fold:  

1. Accelerate time-to-value by shortening the implementation project.
2. Safeguard business continuity, hence reduce cost of downtime.
3. Reduce cost of implementation and operations.

This section provides a high-level overview of the methodology for translating business strategies into actionable solutions using SAP LeanIX, SAP Signavio, and other tools. The process begins with the establishment of a company's business strategy, which can either be developed internally or with the assistance of consulting firms.

This strategy must then be mapped to specific business capabilities necessary to achieve the organization's goals. Within SAP LeanIX, these business capabilities are identified, and potential solutions are explored to meet these capabilities. This exploration can drill down into options such as S/4HANA public cloud or S/4HANA private cloud deployments, and further into specific solution processes that fulfill the business capability requirements. SAP LeanIX plays a crucial role in bridging the gap from business strategy to enterprise architecture by identifying the suitable solutions needed to realize a business capability.

Once the solution is identified, SAP Signavio comes into play, focusing on the details of business process implementation and management. SAP Signavio helps in understanding existing processes within the organization, which may either be documented in a process management tool or uncovered through analytical approaches. Organizations must differentiate between commodity processes, such as financial and logistic processes that can utilize SAP best practices, and differentiating processes that provide a competitive edge.

For commodity processes, a fit-to-standard approach is recommended, where best practices are used as a baseline, discussed, and adapted as necessary during workshops with stakeholders. The requirements gathered from these workshops feed into the implementation and realization phases, managed and orchestrated using tools like SAP Cloud Application Lifecycle Management (SAP Cloud ALM). Once the solution is developed and configured, testing is required. Initial manual testing ensures acceptance, while later regression testing is automated through partnerships with companies like Tricentis.

Following successful testing, user training is conducted using Walk Me and SAP Enable Now, to ensure smooth adoption of new processes. Post go-live, operational management is crucial to maintaining and improving the solution. The implemented processes go through continuous iterations of improvement based on process analysis and feedback. This cyclical process of evaluation, implementation, and optimization ensures that the organization continually enhances its processes to meet evolving business needs.

This methodology outlines a structured approach for leveraging SAP LeanIX and associated tools to implement business strategies effectively, ensuring alignment between strategic objectives and operational capabilities.

SAP Cloud ALM empowers you to build and run an intelligent enterprise in today's dynamic business landscape.

The essential role SAP Cloud ALM plays in effectively managing the entire lifecycle of SAP solutions. To streamline project implementation, saving time and resources and it enhances daily operations, ensuring efficiency and reliability. It's an ongoing, agile platform that supports all customer scenarios. It's designed to adapt and evolve with your changing needs, ensuring that you have the flexibility and support necessary to thrive in an ever-changing business environment. With SAP Cloud ALM, you're not just getting a product; you're getting a partner for continuous success.

• Start with SAP Standard Content (Best Practices & Intelligent Enterprise scenarios).
• Model custom solution processes.
• Manage Fit-to-Standard workshops.

• Start with the SAP Activate Methodology road maps.
• Define phases, sprints and milestones for agile projects.
• Break down requirements into user stories and tasks.

• Manage all tests from user acceptance to integration tests.
• Prepare test cases for manual testing.
• Integration of automatic test execution engines for SAP S/4HANA test automation tool.

• Integration of ABAP transport management.
• Orchestration across multiple deployment providers.
• Traceability for processes and requirements.

Accelerate GoLive ​

• Leverage pre-configuration.
• Follow agile implementation approach.
• Only test what matters.
• Accelerate test management and execution.
• Automate tasks.​
• Avoid custom code.

​Minimize Disruptions ​

• Identify problems by monitoring on business processes, integration, user, and application level.
• Accelerate problem resolution.
• Proactive problem detection.
• Automate corrective actions.

• Included in SAP cloud subscription and SAP Enterprise Support.
• Lower cost of implementation by accelerating project activities.
• Lower cost of operation by automating corrective actions.
• No maintenance cost.
• Avoid 3rd-party licenses.

Fast time-to-value through guidance and task-driven implementation

Harmonized implementation experience across SAP Cloud solutions

Instantaneously available, no deployment or configuration activities

Fast onboarding of your project team

Automated collection and assignment of tasks to the project team

Comprehensive workspace for fit-to-standard workshops

Built-in transparency about implementation progress

• Fit-2-standard workshops.
• Process scoping & viewer.
• Process authoring.
• Requirements collection.

• Rich text based documentation.
• Status & approval (Planned).
• Document management integration.

• Project planning.
• Task distribution.
• Task templates.
• Gantt chart.
• Landscape.

• Requirements Refinement.
• Configuration (Planned).
• Extension Management (Planned).
• Integration Management.

• Test Planning.
• Test Preparation.
• Test Case Creation.

• Manual testing.
• Integration of test automation providers.
• Defect management.

• Change documentation & reporting.
• Traceability & Audit Trail.

• Deployment Planning.
• Feature & Fix Delivery.
• Deployment Automation & Confirmation.

• SAP best practice content.
• SAP BTP document management service (Planned).
• SAP Enable Now.
• External 3rd party BPMN tools via API.
• External 3rd party ticket management tools for requirement via API.

• SAP Activate Methodology content.
• SAP readiness check.
• Data transformation.
• SAP central business configuration.
• Custom code migration.
• SAP Enable Now (Planned).
• External 3rd party task management tools (like Jira, DevOps, Service Now) via API.
• External 3rd party collaboration tools (like MS Teams) via API.

• Tricentis test automation for SAP Cloud ALM.
• SAP S/4HANA test automation tool.
• External 3rd party test automation tools via API.
• External 3rd party ticket management tools for defects via API.

• Transport management for ABAP TMS, Cloud TMS, ATO.
• Cloud Integration automation services.
• External transport providers via API (Planned).
• External CI/CD tools via API (Planned).

SAP Cloud ALM empowers customers to understand healthiness of SAP business solutions:

• By providing full stack monitoring and alerting covering business processes, integration, users, applications, and health of cloud services and systems.
• Allows to conduct root cause analysis on different levels.
• Acts as collaboration platform between LOBs and IT.

SAP Cloud ALM enables customer to increase operation efficiency by automating corrective actions.

SAP Cloud ALM helps to predict anomalies in business process and application operation by event correlation and learning out of the collected data (AIOPs).

SAP Cloud ALM provides transparency regarding availability of business services including business event calendar and business service reporting.

This is how SAP Cloud ALM for Operations work:

• Get observability data from different sources.

• Business process monitoring – Detect operational issues in business process execution.
• Integration & Exception Monitoring – Ensure reliable data exchange between cloud services and systems.
• Synthetic User Monitoring – Monitor performance and availability of web applications from user perspective via scripts.
• Real User Monitoring – Understand performance and utilization of actual execution from end user perspective.
• Job & Automation Monitoring – Provide transparency regarding job executions & automated activities.
• Configuration & Security Analysis – Validate configuration items and software levels automatically and regularly.
• Health Monitoring – Check application health of cloud services and systems.

• Detect events that require actions.

• Trigger follow-up actions.

• Streamline collaboration by involving all people end-to-end.
• Increase efficiency with shared access to all relevant information and assets at needed granularity level.
• Gain transparency on the service delivery by seeing all data; history, current and scheduled services.
• Receive standardized and digitized service results quickly for easy consumption.
• Simplify issue tracking and actions with integrated notifications.

This enables our customers to take advantage of SAP services to support and improve their production systems by minimizing risk, optimizing the solution, or providing knowledge transfer.

1. Service Delivery Center

   All roles (Customer Team, Partner involved by Customer and getting access, SAP Teams) will have the same access point, a shared view on the history and current services and one interactive user experience. A central point to navigate to all information, assets and applications which are needed to conduct a Service Delivery end-to-end.

2. Service Results

   Digital version of service report which provides more flexibility to the user to consume the service outcomes replacing pdfs which are shared today.

3. Issue & Action Management

   Create issues and actions as outcome of a service which allow the tracking and control of follow-up activities.