Today I want to share a tool that can be useful for SAP Solution Manager Consultants when they need to quickly get involved in a problem or situation analysis.
The standard practice of interaction between SAP Partner and SAP Customer, when it is necessary to quickly re-document the configured ChaRM (Change Request Management) or ITSM (IT Service Management) processes at the Customer’s site. The key word in this situation is “quickly”, since the cost of the services of an external consultant is quite high in contrast to internal resources.
How can I reduce the time for analyzing settings? You need a tool that, instead of a consultant, will analyze the necessary settings and display them in a convenient format for decision making.
The free utility SAPOMETER helps me here, which contains several basic utilities for SAP Solution Manager. For example, the first thing I do when I need to visually understand any configured process is to run the workflow redocumentation utility (in this tool it’s called – Transaction Process Visualizer). Simply two clicks and I get a visual picture of the configured workflow. Here I can also clarify which methods were used, which parameters for the method were entered, which checkboxes were set for working out this method:
The result of redocumenting the ChaRM process of the Urgent Change (SMHF)
If you look at the configured status of the process, in the context menu, you can see the actions assigned to this status, consistency checks, authorization objects, etc.:
Customization for highlighted status E0009 of Urgent Change (SMHF)
Of course, everything depends on the task of the Customer. Visualization in SAPOMETER tool can identify the problems and advise on actions to solve different problems in short time.
Let’s move on to the utilities for documenting the settings. For example, you need to collect a table in the context of the PPF of actions and the customizing associated with them: scheduling conditions, start conditions, the method attached to the action, and the method parameters. We can get the following picture:
PPF Actions for Urgent Change (SMHF)
Another utility “Transaction PPF Status” for context of statuses. In it you can group all events associated with statuses. For example, conditions hung on the status, status settings for predecessor, status setting for successor, etc.:
Status Settings for SMHF document
There are other utilities that I rarely use.
All this helps to solve tasks more quickly and, therefore, more efficiently.
As for the tool, all you need to start using it’s just download the tool (no installation required, it’s portable) and download the SAP NW RFC SDK library. And then it remains to make a connection and perform analysis.
With this article I start the series of posts which will include more tips and trics techniques how to speed up the work of a consultant, so stay tuned, and big THANK YOU for your interest in this short blog. I am looking forward to hearing from you feedback!
