The cloud-based SAP Maintenance Planner helps plan all changes in your SAP system landscape. Planned Maintenance ensures efficiency and help save down-time for any organization’s systems. However, customers can experience issues when upgrading VIM with the Maintenance Planner during S/4HANA conversion.
Figure 1: Architecture of SAP Maintenance Planner
Our customers doing S/4HANA brown field implementation use the SAP Maintenance Planner to convert their ECC system to S/4HANA and in the process, they also convert their ECC VIM to S/4HANA VIM. In most cases, an upgrade of VIM 7.5/7.6 to VIM 20.4/21.4 is done during this conversion.
If the customer has purchased VIM through SAP and is performing the upgrade with SAP Maintenance Planner, the VIM package attributes will be adjusted automatically. However, this was not the case for some customers and they experienced that the SAP Maintenance Planner did not function properly.
One example that we encountered was a customer, who had VIM 7.5 and wanted to upgrade with S/4HANA. They had trouble figuring out, why the SAP tool did not do anything in relation to their conversion to S/4HANA. If functioning correctly, it should have suggested that the customer update to VIM 21.4. However, the maintenance planner did not even recognize that the customer had VIM installed.
What went wrong with the SAP Maintenance Planner?
This was not a unique case. After going over the details, our team found the license for VIM from SAP was sold as SAP Invoice Management by OpenText. But for S4/HANA the corresponding product name is SAP Invoice Management for SAP S/4HANA by OpenText. The problem was simply the name change, which resulted in the tool not recognizing the VIM system.
To solve this problem, we asked our customers who had license for SAP Invoice Management by OpenText, to speak to their SAP sales representative. The sales representatives then converted the licenses and this resolved the issue.
Moving forward we were sure to make our customers check that the correct VIM license has been assigned to their SAP S User for their organization. By having this problem out of the way, the customer will experience a smoother conversion of the customer’s ECC system and VIM upgrade using SAP Maintenance Planner.
OpenText VIM and SAP S4/HANA version compatibility.
Another interesting issue the Turnpikes team encountered at a customer, was that even though they had the correct VIM license assigned from SAP, the SAP Maintenance Planner was not able to find the correct VIM version to convert to.When looking into the problem, we realized the customer was trying to convert their sandbox ECC to S/4HANA 2021 and at that time only VIM 20.4 was available which was not supporting this version yet.
The new SAP S/4HANA versions will typically be supported by the VIM Update (Support Package) after release of the new SAP S/4HANA version. There will be a few weeks delay before the compatible VIM version is made available in SAP marketplace for the SAP Maintenance Planner to pick up.
