Beyond SAP ChaRM: Future-Proofing SAP Change Management as Solution Manager Retires
Introduction
As SAP Solution Manager approaches its end-of-life milestone, organizations face a critical inflection point in their SAP Application Lifecycle Management strategy. SAP has established a clear retirement timeline, with Solution Manager 7.2 reaching end of mainstream maintenance in 2027. This timeline creates urgency for organizations heavily invested in Solution Manager, particularly those relying on its Change Request Management (ChaRM) component for SAP transport management.
ChaRM has been the cornerstone of SAP change management for many organizations, providing structured workflows for managing transports across SAP landscapes while ensuring proper approvals, documentation, and compliance. Its retirement presents significant challenges around maintaining robust governance, ensuring compliance, and protecting business continuity while transitioning to new solutions.
Organizations now face important decisions about their future SAP transport management approach. Will they follow SAP’s recommended path to Cloud ALM, consolidate on enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps, or pursue hybrid strategies? The clock is ticking, and developing a thoughtful transition strategy has become an urgent priority.
The End of an Era: Solution Manager Retirement Timeline
With SAP Solution Manager maintenance ending in 2027, organizations must act now to develop a strategic transition plan for their SAP transport management processes.
SAP Solution Manager has been the foundation of SAP Application Lifecycle Management since its introduction. But with mainstream maintenance for SAP Solution Manager 7.2 ending in 2027, organizations must now consider a replacement.
This timeline affects several critical functionalities that organizations have come to rely on, including Change Request Management (ChaRM) for transport governance, Test Management for structured testing processes, Process Management for documentation and modeling, Technical Monitoring for system performance, and Incident Management for problem resolution.
Among these components, ChaRM is often the most challenging to replace due to its deep integration with SAP’s transport management system. Organizations have built mature processes around ChaRM workflows, approval gates, and documentation requirements. Finding suitable alternatives that maintain governance while enabling efficiency requires careful planning.
Common concerns from SAP customers include how to maintain compliance and audit trails during and after migration, whether new solutions will provide equivalent functionality, and how to manage the transition while maintaining business continuity. These concerns underscore the importance of starting migration planning now.
With SAP Solution Manager maintenance ending in 2027, organizations must act now to develop a strategic transition plan for their SAP transport management processes.
The SAP Transport Management Challenge
SAP transport management is the critical foundation of any replacement solution – without it, organizations risk compromised governance, reduced visibility, and potential system inconsistencies.
Transport management forms the core of SAP change control, governing how code, configuration, and data changes flow through your SAP landscape. Any successful migration from Solution Manager must preserve this essential capability.
Without an effective migration strategy for transport management, organizations face:
- Governance gaps leading to compliance risks
- Lack of visibility into transport status
- Import sequencing issues that can destabilize systems
- Disconnect between transports and business requirements
- Inefficient manual processes prone to human error
These risks are particularly concerning for security and compliance, as transports often contain sensitive configurations affecting financial controls and business-critical processes. The right replacement solution must maintain rigorous transport governance while improving visibility and efficiency across the change lifecycle.
SAP transport management is the critical foundation of any replacement solution – without it, organizations risk compromised governance, reduced visibility, and potential system inconsistencies.
Evaluating Migration Paths
Organizations have multiple migration options, from SAP Cloud ALM to enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, and Azure DevOps – the key is finding the right fit for your specific requirements.
Organizations have several viable paths forward as they transition away from Solution Manager and ChaRM:
SAP Cloud ALM: SAP has positioned Cloud ALM as the strategic successor to Solution Manager. As a cloud-native solution, Cloud ALM offers a modern user interface, continuous delivery of new features without upgrade projects, tight integration with SAP’s cloud offerings, and native handling of SAP transports. However, Cloud ALM continues to evolve and doesn’t yet offer full parity with Solution Manager’s mature capabilities. Its cloud-only deployment model may not fit organizations with a strict requirement for on-premises applications only, or the need for customization or deep integration with other ALM tools.
Enterprise Platforms as Alternatives: Many organizations are considering consolidating on enterprise platforms they already use for non-SAP change management:
- ServiceNow offers advantages for IT Service Management-centric organizations, including comprehensive change management workflows, strong governance capabilities, and integration with CMDB and other ITSM processes.
- Jira provides benefits for development-centric organizations with strong support for agile methodologies, an extensive ecosystem of plugins, and excellent traceability from requirements to code.
- Azure DevOps delivers advantages for Microsoft-aligned organizations through end-to-end DevOps pipeline capabilities, strong integration with Microsoft ecosystem, and built-in CI/CD capabilities.
The key challenge with all these platforms is establishing robust integration with SAP transport management—the technical mechanism for moving SAP changes between systems.
Hybrid Approaches: Some organizations are adopting hybrid strategies, using different tools for different aspects of the ALM process. This might include using Jira for development planning, leveraging ServiceNow for change governance, and managing SAP transports with specialized applications. This approach can provide “best of breed” capabilities but introduces integration challenges around data consistency and visibility across systems.
Organizations have multiple migration options, from SAP Cloud ALM to enterprise platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, and Azure DevOps – the key is finding the right fit for your specific requirements.
Selecting Your Target Platform
Most organizations choose to leverage existing investments in enterprise platforms, adding integrations with SAP Cloud ALM for additional capabilities where needed.
When selecting the optimal approach for your organization, consider your long-term digital transformation strategy beyond just replacing Solution Manager. For most enterprises, leveraging existing investments in platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps offers compelling advantages in terms of unified governance, standardized processes, and reduced training needs. These enterprise platforms, when properly integrated with SAP transport management, provide the most comprehensive solution for organizations seeking to break down silos between SAP and non-SAP change management.
In addition to transport and change management, some organizations also integrate with SAP Cloud ALM to further extend their enterprise platforms with SAP-specific capabilities, such as:
- Easy access to SAP best practices content for rapid implementation
- Business process design and management, including integration with Signavio
- Test management and automation, including integration with Tricentis Tosca Cloud
Although each organization may have unique requirements, it makes sense to leverage existing investments in enterprise platforms, adding integrations with SAP Cloud ALM for additional capabilities where needed.
Most organizations choose to leverage existing investments in enterprise platforms, adding integrations with SAP Cloud ALM for additional capabilities where needed.
Platform-Specific Considerations
Each enterprise platform has distinct strengths and integration challenges – the right choice depends on your organization’s existing ecosystem and strategic priorities.
Each enterprise platform offers different integration capabilities and challenges when connecting to SAP transport management:
ServiceNow Integration Considerations: ServiceNow provides robust change management workflows but lacks native integration with SAP transport management. Its CMDB and Discovery functionality can identify SAP systems but doesn’t manage the transport process itself. Integration options include API-based integration with SAP transport web services and event-driven architecture for real-time synchronization. Process alignment requires mapping SAP transport states to ServiceNow change states and integrating transport documentation within ServiceNow’s knowledge management.
Jira Integration Considerations: Jira excels at managing development tasks but requires extensions to handle SAP-specific transport processes. This includes linking Jira issues to SAP transports and reflecting transport status in Jira workflows. DevOps pipeline considerations include integration with CI/CD tools, automated testing triggers based on transport events, and deployment automation across SAP landscapes. Jira often needs enhancement of its native change management capabilities to provide the governance required for SAP changes.
Azure DevOps Integration Considerations: Azure DevOps offers strong CI/CD capabilities that can be extended to SAP, including triggering builds based on transport events, automated testing of SAP functionality, and controlled deployment of transports using release pipelines. Microsoft ecosystem advantages include integration with Azure monitoring, PowerBI reporting on transport metrics, and integration with Microsoft security. Enterprise-scale organizations benefit from Azure DevOps’ ability to handle complex approval hierarchies and support global development teams.
Each enterprise platform has distinct strengths and integration challenges – the right choice depends on your organization’s existing ecosystem and strategic priorities.
Integration Solutions and Approaches
Pre-built solutions typically deliver faster time-to-value, lower maintenance costs, and greater functionality than custom-built integrations.
Organizations first must decide whether they are going to buy an integration solution or build it themselves. Even if starting with integrations that come with SAP Integration Suite, building custom integrations bring challenges including significant development and maintenance costs, extended implementation timelines, and ongoing upgrade compatibility issues.
Pre-built solutions offer advantages including faster implementation, maintained compatibility with platform updates, proven functionality, and lower total cost of ownership over time.
When assessing integration solutions, consider several critical factors:
- Is the solution configurable so it can easily evolve along with continuous improvements in the change management process?
- How deep is the integration, and will it support a consistent process for SAP and non-SAP?
- How seamless is the user experience, and will users need to use different systems to support different parts of the process?
Many solutions require the introduction of a new user interface into the change management process. CoreALM takes a fundamentally different approach by directly extending your existing enterprise platforms. The CoreALM Enterprise Transport Management Suite is installed directly into ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps, bringing comprehensive SAP transport management capabilities directly into the platforms your teams already use. This extension approach means users continue working in their familiar environment while gaining the full capabilities previously available in ChaRM. This native integration eliminates the context switching, duplicative documentation, and training challenges common with other approaches.
Implementing the CoreALM solution typically takes just days rather than months. This reduces project risk and accelerates time-to-value compared to custom development approaches or solutions requiring separate applications.
Pre-built solutions typically deliver faster time-to-value, lower maintenance costs, and greater functionality than custom-built integrations.
Conclusion and Next Steps
The retirement of Solution Manager creates an opportunity to unify enterprise change management, lower risks, and accelerate innovation.
The retirement of Solution Manager represents a pivotal moment in SAP’s evolution—and yours. Leading organizations are taking this opportunity to transform their enterprise change processes, rather than simply replacing technology. This unlocks the potential to have unified governance across all enterprise changes, breaking down the barriers between SAP and non-SAP processes. Teams gain visibility they’ve never had before. Development cycles accelerate without sacrificing stability or compliance.
The future of SAP change management is converging with enterprise DevOps practices and SAP’s “clean core” strategy. By integrating SAP transport management directly into platforms like ServiceNow, Jira, or Azure DevOps, organizations can maintain the governance they’ve built in ChaRM while gaining the power of modern enterprise platforms. This intersection of SAP expertise and enterprise change management creates something greater than either approach could achieve alone.
Here are some key insights that we’ve observed from successful organizations:
Process before Technology: Ensure that the focus remains on building an efficient and reliable change process that covers SAP and non-SAP changes. Once you have a vision for your future process, it’s easier to find the right technical solution.
User Adoption is Paramount: Prioritize user experience as a primary objective. Where possible, minimize disruption to workflows that are operating successfully, and minimize the complexity of user interactions.
Build for the Future: Leverage your existing investments in enterprise tools ensuring that your solution is strategically positioned to capitalize on platform enhancements and emerging SAP technologies.
By treating the retirement of SAP ChaRM as an opportunity to unify enterprise change management, organizations can eliminate process silos and truly achieve digital agility across their entire application landscape. Those who approach this transition strategically will emerge with not just a replacement for ChaRM, but a significantly improved foundation for delivering change faster, with less risk, and greater business alignment.
