Introduction
Businesses today want to continually leverage innovations delivered by SAP at the lowest possible risk. The IT department‘s mission is to maintain and enhance the SAP software used to boost the efficiency and be the differentiator for the business. Need to change your landscape could be driven both from business as well as technical standpoint. IT department is expected to respond swiftly to help their organization adopt innovations as quickly as possible. It isn’t easy….
SAP Solution Manager offers the next generation customer experience for maintaining your landscape through the SAP Cloud-based Maintenance Planner.
Through Maintenance Planner, SAP Solution Manager drives simplicity for maintaining your system landscape, being perfect for new and upcoming SAP Solutions such as SAP S/4HANA. This simplification is automatically extended to all existing products. SAP Solution Manager continues to serve as the single platform for the delivery of SAP Service and Support including governance and documentation of the entire maintenance process.
Key Facts:
- Maintenance Planner is available now and allows planning changes in the landscape, based on SAP Solution Manager’s processes and data. It will enable customers using SAP Solution Manager 7.2 to plan and manage their SAP landscapes. Maintenance Planner can already be leveraged by SAP Solution Manager 7.1 customers as well.
- Maintenance Optimizer continues to fully support SAP Solution Manager 7.1 customers and will be replaced in SAP Solution Manager 7.2 by Maintenance Planner
- Landscape Planner is already replaced by Maintenance Planner.
Figure 1: Home screen of Maintenance Planner
Key Features of Maintenance Planner
Maintenance Planner
- is a solution hosted by SAP.
- simplifies the landscape maintenance process to update, upgrade and install new systems with much greater ease and efficiency.
- integrates correction of landscape data with the maintenance process in a dialog driven process.
- consolidates definition of maintenance dependencies.
- streamlines new system installations by eliminating superfluous activities.
- prevents inconsistency across systems in a multiple tier SAP customer landscape.
Benefits of Maintenance Planner
Figure 2: Key benefits of Maintenance Planner
Maintenance Planner Provides the Following Functions and Improvements to the Process
Planning landscape changes in a graphical UI
Showing overview and detailed system information in an intuitive way
Simplified modeling of maintenance dependencies replacing product systems
Maintenance Planner simplifies the complex process of modeling maintenance dependencies (for example the version dependencies between a portal and an ERP system in a self-service scenario) through an intuitive procedure.
Consolidated planning for system tracks managing all roles in one planning step
Currently, maintenance planning is focusing on individual system maintenance, which often requires multiple planning activities for a complete track. Maintenance planner offers planning for complete system tracks (like DEV – QAS – PRD) to lower overall planning efforts.
Integrated correction of erroneous system information in the planning process
Incorrect system information about installed products has been a frequent source of error while planning maintenance activities. Maintenance Planner validates the system information as a first step in the planning process. It guides you through a dialog based process to correct the system information as part of the maintenance activity if necessary.
Streamlined planning of new installations at desired target stack level
Maintenance Planner significantly simplifies the installation process by eliminating the steps of system registration and a separate system update planning during installation. With Maintenance Planner, the target state of a system can be planned and downloaded in one step so that the overall installation process will be simplified, accelerated and less error-prone.
Operational ease
Maintenance planner is hosted by SAP, it only requires a browser to access the tool.
Maintenance Process with Maintenance Planner
Figure 3– Maintenance process with Maintenance Planner
Getting started
- Ensure that you have an s-user for the SAP Service Marketplace (SMP).
- To ensure availability of landscape data in Maintenance Planner, follow the steps described in the blog Maintenance Planner – Prerequisites and Initial Setup.
- Access Maintenance Planner with your s-user.
Learn more
- The User Guide can be accessed from the home screen of Maintenance Planner.
- Please refer SAP Note 2174410 for the list of Maintenance Planner limitations.
- To get the big picture on the Maintenance Planner with related tools, see Landscape Management @ the SCN
- To see how to work with the Maintenance Planner in a concrete planning process end-to-end, see Planning Landscape Changes (incl. Maintenance Planner) - a Best Practices Guide
- To learn about handling data required by the Maintenance Planner, see Topology of SLD, LMDB, and Customer Profile – How to Get Reliable Landscape Data in SAP Support Portal as a Basis for Planning
- Uploading, Accessing, and Trouble-Shooting System Data in the Customer Profile Used for Planning Changes in Your IT Landscape
We’d like to hear from you
Propose new features or suggest enhancements to existing features by collaborating on ideas for new features in SAP Idea Place, the public channel to participate in innovation at SAP. Maintenance Planner belongs to the idea session Software Logistics, category: Maintenance and upgrade management. Submit new ideas, vote for existing ideas and connect directly with the team at SAP!!