Upgrade Management 
This process supports you during a release upgrade in the different project phases of an upgrade project, in which you plan and define the business processes and business scenarios of your solution.
The SAP Solution Manager provides you with a central point of access to tools that support you when performing an upgrade, such as the SAP Upgrade Roadmap or the SAP Upgrade services. SAP delivers up-to-date implementation contents (documentation, preconfiguration, business functions, test cases/business test requirements), regularly. To profit from these contents, you can select, adjust and use the contents appropriate to your company context.
During an upgrade, you pass through the following phases:
Create an upgrade project
In Project Administration, you create a new upgrade project and define the project scope and standards and the system landscape from the ground up.. Alternatively, you can use an existing implementation project as a bais and copy the relevant scenarios into the upgrade project (seeProject Administration).
You then create or edit the structure hierarchy for the business processes and scenarios by including your own or preconfigured content, and then configuring it.
Evaluation
Before the upgrade, you can evaluate the current business processes for your solution and the existing system landscape. You obtain information about country-specific and industry-specific business process standards. Various tools are available with which you can visually display the business processes, plan new solutions, and change existing solutions.
Typically, business processes run across multiple connected technical systems, on which different SAP applications (such as SAP ERP, SAP CRM, and SAP SCM) are used in combination. You can use the upgrade dependency analysis to check whether your current functions will still be available after an upgrade. For more information, see Dependency Analysis of Upgrades.
Planning
The planning phases encompasses the following steps:
Roadmap
You can use the SAP Upgrade Roadmap, which contains predefined project plans with a collection of activities and tasks as well as accelerators and tools, and which covers the most important aspects and phases of an upgrade. For more information, see http://www.service.sap.com/upgraderoadmap.
In the Business Blueprint, you create or enhance the project structure for your company-specific business processes. By separating your business scenarios, business processes, and process steps, you can assign transactions, business functions, and the relevant documentation to the structure items.
To identify and integrate possible changes and improvements, you can perform a comparison for the current version of structure objects in any phase of the lifecycle. In this way, you can, for example, copy changes or additions for your existing business processes from the Business Process Repository. For more information, see Comparing and Adjusting Structure Contents by Phases of the Lifecycle.
Custom Development Management Cockpit
You can use the Upgrade/Change Impact Analysis to determine whether an upgrade will affect customer developments in the system.
Create
This phase encompasses the following steps:
In technical configuration, you specify cross-scenario settings. Based on the process requirements from the project structure in the business blueprint, you configure the individual structure items for your business scenarios in the development systems and document these steps.
Starting from the release notes, you can determine all of the upgrade-evelant IMG activities and the corresponding documentation using the project structure, and perform the configuration in the upgrade project. For more information, see Performing an Upgrade of Managed Systems.
Business Configuration Sets (BC Sets)
SAP provides you with BC Sets with which you can configure your data.
Customizing distribution and synchronization
So that you can use business scenarios in different components of a system landscape at the same time, you must ensure that the Customizing settings for the underlying business processes are the same. This is achieved by Customizing distribution when Customizing changes are transported from a source system into the corresponding target systems.
You can provide end users with IT-supported self-training courses by creating role-specific learning maps with learning objects for the individual structure items. These are based on your project structure.
Testing
You can test your updated business processes based on the configuration and scenario structures. To do so, use the test cases provided for your solution and assign new test cases to the individual business processes and process steps. Once you have created the test plans, you can call the tester worklists and begin testing. For more information, see Test Management.
Prepare Production Start
The business scenarios and processes implemented in your upgrade project, as well as the corresponding system information, are transferred to a customer-specific storage location (Solution Directory). In the solution, you manage and monitor your business processes in operational use. For more information, see Solutions.
Evaluations
You can enter information in each project phase. On this basis, you can create cross-project, cross-phase, or phase-specific reports.