Hello community,
today I would like to describe some facts regarding the usage of SAP BPC (SAP Business Planning and Consolidation) together with ChaRM (Change Request Management) in SAP Solution Manager.
Background:
SAP BPC currently does not support the assignment of already created transport requests, when trying to deploy new configurations and content in your landscape. SAP BPC will create own transports, bypassing the standard user interface and thereby the ability to select a ChaRM transport. Some customers of BPC and ChaRM have been unsure, how they should react on this. SAP Note 1638440 describes this limitation more in detail.
In general, SAP BPC is working fine with the SAP transport management system (CTS) and I would like to show you some possibilities, how you can also integrate SAP BPC in your ChaRM change management process.
What is the solution?
The solution is pretty straight forward: The only possibility to assign the BPC created transport request to a ChaRM project and to a Change Document is before you release the transport request. The “Assign Transport” functionality within a Change Document is available with Solution Manager 7.1 SP5.
You can simply access it via the Transport Management assignment block in a change document:
General facts about transport management for SAP BPC 10:
- BPC NW 10.0 will support the transport of granular objects to move any given BPC object from development system to QA & Production systems. In 7.x, customers were required to transport whole AppSet every time.
- Customers and consultants will need to take into account dependencies to insure a logical sequence of transport imports when transporting an Environment's objects in multiple transports (negative dependency check will prompt a warning).
- BPC objects can be collected to a transport using the BW Administrative Workbench (transaction RSA1) which uses the standard transport process already familiar to BW users.
What is coming in the future?
With SP10 of SAP Solution Manager, we just released a new infrastructure (central CTS) that is also capable of handling "released" transports. This will give customers a maximum of flexibility for their change management process.
When you use the new infrastructure, also released transports can be atteched to a Change Document. This will bring you additional functionality when it comes to management of BPC transports with ChaRM.
If you would like to hear a bit more about SAP's strategy regarding Change Control Management and the new central CTS infrastructure, check out this video with product managers David Birkenbach and Tobias Hauk from SAP TechEd Live in Amsterdam. Also there is now the official online documentation available for the Central Change and Transport System.
Now I hope I could shed some light on the topic and you are able to handle your BPC related transports now also with Change Request Managemet!
- Tobias