Introducing the SAP Application Lifecycle

The application lifecycle management (ALM) is a comprehensive approach to managing SAP applications throughout their lifecycle. From initial design and development to ongoing support and future enhancements, the application lifecycle provides a framework for ensuring the successful implementation and continuous improvement of SAP applications.

Please watch the following video to learn more about the development of ALM:

Building upon best practices from the Information Technology Infrastructure Library, or ITIL, SAP offers the Activate Methodology to support customers implementing SAP applications with ALM.

SAP Activate provides a roadmap and a set of best practices for implementing SAP solutions in a structured and efficient manner. It guides organizations through planning, building, and deploying SAP solutions and includes preconfigured templates, tools, and accelerators to streamline implementation.

With SAP Activate, implementation content is delivered in Phases.

1. Discover: This phase involves understanding the organization's business processes and requirements. It includes project preparation, defining project goals, and identifying project teams.
2. Prepare: In this phase, the project team prepares the technical landscape for the implementation. It involves system setup, configuration, and infrastructure planning.
3. Explore: The explore phase focuses on understanding the SAP solution and how it can meet the organization's requirements. It includes conducting workshops, defining the scope, and creating prototypes.
4. Realize: This phase involves implementing the SAP solution. It includes configuration, customization, data migration, testing, and training.
5. Deploy: When the solution is implemented, the deploy phase focuses on rolling it out across the organization. It includes preparing end-users for the new system, conducting user acceptance testing, and finalizing the system for production use.​
6. Run: The run phase involves ongoing support and maintenance of the SAP solution. It includes monitoring the system, resolving issues, and continuously improving the solution.

Each phase in SAP Activate has specific deliverables, tasks, and activities that need to be completed to ensure a successful implementation. The framework emphasizes iterative and agile methodologies to enable a faster and more efficient implementation process.

Watch the following short video introduction to learn more about the SAP Activate methodology:

SAP provides a specific Activate Methodology for each SAP product and offering, including SAP Cloud-specific solutions, such as SAP Concur or SAP Success Factors and on-premise solutions, such as SAP Business Suite, SAP S/4HANA, and SAP BW/4HANA. For each supported scenario, SAP delivers the methodology as a Roadmap.

All Activate Roadmaps can be accessed on the SAP Support Portal using a tool called the Roadmap Viewer.

The purpose of Roadmap Viewer is to provide access to SAP Activate methodology implementation roadmaps. Implementation roadmaps offer a comprehensive view of your project teams' associated activities, deliverables, and tasks with accompanying accelerator assets in document and hyperlink format.

SAP Activate roadmaps are organized by logical category or solution and help you keep track of all your improvement and innovation deliverables during all your SAP projects. Each Roadmap provides access to all enterprise project management resources and project phases for your SAP solution in an easy-to-consume format.

Each phase in SAP Activate has specific deliverables, tasks, and activities that must be completed to ensure a successful implementation. The framework emphasizes iterative and agile methodologies for faster and more efficient implementation.

Accelerators are provided in the form of project documentation, How-to resources, document templates, task lists, spreadsheets, project plans, and so forth. Access to these resources is supported for both SAP Cloud ALM and SAP Solution Manager.

For example, customers can upload a specific roadmap into SAP Solution Manager for project management. This presents a customized project plan as a work breakdown structure, which can be used as a starting point for project delivery.​

To learn more about Activate Roadmaps and how they can be used, please complete the following tutorial.

Additional information can be found at Roadmap Viewer (sap.com)