
Full Traceability of Requirements
SAP added Business and IT Requirements Management functionality to the CRM layer of Solution Manager 7.2. Customers now have the ability to log a business requirement, evaluate and approve it, and submit it to IT. IT then evaluates the business requirement and commits to it, creating an IT requirement. Both the business requirement and the IT requirement are numbered transactions on the Solution Manager system.
The IT requirement can generate a Request for Change if ChaRM is implemented or be worked as an individual build item in the absence of ChaRM. Either way, the build of the functionality documented in the requirement is tested and deployed to Production with full tracking through document flow.
This functionality finally closes a gap on requirements documentation that has required workarounds in earlier releases of Solution Manager.

Integration with Project Management
Solution Manager 3.0, 3.1, and 7.0 included very rudimentary project management capabilities in the SOLAR_PROJECT_ADMIN, SOLAR01, and SOLAR02 transactions. Project teams could track statuses of business process hierarchy elements and associated documents. There was even some tracking of work remaining and project milestones, but these were rarely used.
With Solution Manager 7.2 (and later support levels of SolMan 7.1) an SAP Project and Portfolio Management component (component CPRXRPM) is delivered with the Solution Manager stack. This PPM component is not the separately licensed application, but its full functionality is available to Solution Manager users for project management.1
Full project management capabilities are available to manage projects, including resource management, task management, and time tracking. All PPM reporting is available as well.
Because the expectation is that the PPM component is used to manage IT projects, IT PPM in Solution Manager 7.2 includes integration to Change Request Management, Requirements Management, and Solution Documentation. The IT project manager can use the project as a launchpad to review or update change requests associated with a maintenance project and IT requirements that are built as part of an innovation project.
In addition, project templates can be leveraged so customer-specific methodology and project role assignments can be copied into new projects without having to start from scratch.
New Solution Landscape
The solution landscape has changed in Solution Manager 7.2, with a new architecture that leaves users with much more flexibility while maintaining the ability to leverage documentation across different types of projects.
Logical Component Groups
From a technical side, logical components now exist as part of logical component groups, so if you have to adjust the logical components within a group or the transport path connecting them, you no longer have to adjust the higher level group.

Libraries
Solutions are composed of a number of referenceable objects such as executables, documents, test cases, alert objects, programs, etc. These objects are stored in libraries and are easily searched for (especially when using Solution Manager 7.2 on HANA) and assigned to various branches. Like the documents in Solution Manager 7.1, they can be copied and updated, or simply linked to, depending on the use case. This allows us to do away with the onerous shortcuts from earlier versions.
Solution and Branches
For almost all customers, a single solution will suffice. This solution will contain a number of branches representing the different paths to Production. The primary branch is the Production branch, which is provided by default. This branch represents all the library objects and business processes they support in the Production environment.

Additional branches are maintained for the production support landscape (Maintenance branch) and for each innovation or development project (these branches can be named in any way, for example, Development branch or CRM Implementation branch). As the system build migrates into production, the branch information, including the supporting documentation, is released into the Production branch. This is a huge improvement over the use of solutions in Solution Manager 7.1 and earlier, and is a much more intuitive way to handle solution deployment.
Lori Sanders – Practice Lead – CoreALM
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