Introduction
The clock is ticking on SAP S/4HANA 2021 and Solution Manager. This is your opportunity to accelerate your change cycles for all future SAP updates.
As the deadlines for SAP ECC (2027) and early versions of S/4HANA (2026) approach, operational leaders are facing mandatory upgrades. At the same time, teams relying on Solution Manager 7.2 are running out of time to put their new ALM operating model in place before support ends in 2027.
This convergence of deadlines presents a challenge, but also a significant opportunity. Historically, teams have delayed upgrades to avoid “freezing” innovation, fearing the disruption caused by manual change analysis and testing. By addressing these legacy processes now, you do more than just survive the upgrade. You replace the manual friction of the past with a modern, automated delivery engine that will accelerate every release from this point forward.
The clock is ticking on SAP S/4HANA 2021 and Solution Manager. This is your opportunity to accelerate your change cycles for all future SAP updates.
Operating Model: Building a Process for Speed and Safety
You cannot run a modern upgrade on a legacy operating model. The process must shift from “Gatekeeping” to “Continuous Delivery.”
To meet these deadlines, the change management process must evolve from a series of manual stops and starts into a continuous flow. This requires addressing the two biggest sources of friction in the SAP lifecycle: the logistics of moving code and the labor of validating it.
- Eliminate the “Freeze” via Automated Logistics: One common delay in an upgrade process is “drift,” where the project environment diverges from Production. Teams that use spreadsheets to manage this process will encounter another big slowdown prior to go-live for their upgrades. A robust change process must enforce automated retrofitting. If a fix hits Production, the system must immediately queue that fix for the upgrade landscape. This ensures the upgrade team is always building on top of the latest changes, not an outdated snapshot.
- Build Testing Assets, Not Testing Debt: A continuous process cannot function if validation takes weeks. Instead of viewing testing as a one-off project phase, treating it as an asset build is essential. Start “chipping away” at manual testing now by capturing business knowledge into automated scripts. Every time a business user validates a change today, that session should be captured to build an automated test case for tomorrow.
- Shift to Exception-Based Governance: In a continuous model, change managers should not be manually approving every single transport. Approvals should be system-driven, requested only when automated criteria, such as sequencing checks and dependency validation, are met. If the data isn’t there, the process halts automatically.
You cannot run a modern upgrade on a legacy operating model. The process must shift from “Gatekeeping” to “Continuous Delivery.”
Integrated Solution: The Architecture of Continuous Delivery
Speed is dangerous without brakes. You need a delivery pipeline that moves fast and a validation engine that ensures safety.
To operationalize this new process, you must physically link your planning, execution, and validation tools into a single pipeline. CoreALM’s strategy is to embed SAP controls directly into the modern toolchain.
1. The Agile Planning Stream (Azure DevOps or Jira) For the upgrade project itself, development teams need a frictionless way to move code. Using SAP Transport Management for Azure DevOps or SAP Transport Management for Jira, you can manage the high volume of upgrade transports directly from your project boards. This ensures that every user story is inextricably linked to its transport, allowing the pipeline to sequence and deploy changes automatically based on project status.
2. The Operations Control Plane (ServiceNow) While the upgrade team sprints, daily operations must continue without risk. Using SAP Transport Management for ServiceNow allows you to wrap your daily maintenance changes in a rigorous governance process; the same process used by the rest of the enterprise. Crucially, this integration handles the complex logic of parallel landscapes, triggering automated retrofits to the upgrade path whenever a production fix is deployed.
3. The Validation Engine (Tricentis Tosca) The change process is only as fast as its slowest step. If you rely on manual regression testing, your pipeline will stall. Tricentis Tosca integrates directly into this flow to provide the “Green Light” required for deployment. By automating regression and functional tests, you replace subjective sign-offs with empirical evidence, allowing the change process to move at the speed of the business.
Speed is dangerous without brakes. You need a delivery pipeline that moves fast and a validation engine that ensures safety.
Conclusion
The impending milestones are not just deadlines; they are a forcing function for operational maturity. If you attempt to meet them using the manual change processes of the past, the cost to the business will be ongoing.
To secure your landscape for the future, implement these three changes immediately:
- Acknowledge the Reality: Plan for the End of Mainstream Maintenance for S/4HANA 2021 and the transition off Solution Manager now.
- Unify the Process: Deploy SAP Transport Management Integration to automate the logistics of retrofitting and sequencing.
- Automate the Validation: Stop treating testing as a manual burden. Start building automated assets today so your change process can run safely at speed.
2026 will punish the hesitant and reward the agile. The technology to automate your delivery pipeline exists today; the only remaining variable is the operational will to adopt it.
