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Leading up to Sapphire, its big annual user conference in Atlanta next month, SAP announced March 19 the April availability of more than a dozen standards designed to help both IT and business process experts wrangle the practice of designing and executing business processes.
At the same time, the company announced a new preconfigured support package to help companies navigate complex IT upgrades and system consolidations.
Both offerings are available as part of SAPs Solution Manager application management suite that acts as a collaboration hub of sorts, providing functional support to users through role-specific work centers where workflows, Web-based inboxes and launch pads are bundled, SAP officials said.
The idea behind the standards for solution operations, available April 22 during Sapphire, is that as companies implement SOA (service oriented architectures) and utilize services (from SAP and other vendors) to enable more agile processes, there should be some standards IT and business people can look to.
SAP plans to release a total of 16 standards really geared toward people on the business side who design processes, and those on the IT side who execute those processes. Each standard contains best-practice procedures on how to run in individual tasks, explanations on which tools inside SAP Solution Manager should be used, and the available training and services that support the standard, according to SAP officials.
“SAP standards for solution operations provide detailed information and guidance on implementing mission-critical operations,” said Uwe Hommel, executive vice president of SAP Active Global Support, in a statement. “The new standards for solution operations will automate, smoothen and accelerate processes to help further reduce the cost of operations.”
Separately, the SAP Solution Support Enablement release, available now as an extension to Solution Support Enablement, combines diagnostic tools and SAPs Test Data Migration Server software so users can create a test environment.