What is the purpose of the SAP APO deployment profile? How important is it to deploy the SAP APO? These are the things we will tackle.
What Is SAP APO Deployment Profile?
The SAP APO deployment profile is a blueprint that describes how to deploy the SAP APO. It contains the detailed settings for all the APO components that are to be installed.
Including their location, their services, the databases they use, and so on. The settings are set up in a text file with a .asd extension.
The .asd file is then imported into SAP NetWeaver AS ABAP and used to install the APO components. By using the .asd file, we can easily repeat installations for multiple customers.
Also, as well as for different APO configurations for an individual customer. The deployment profile also contains information about what functional areas of SAP APO are to be deployed.
For example, if we only want to deploy planning and modeling. So we can configure our deployment profile so that everything else is deactivated or not installed at all.
So this is true both for the ABAP side and the Java side of SAP APO.
In Additional Information
In addition to defining the components of SAP APO to be installed. It also defines whether or not a particular component should be activated on startup.
For example, if a certain modeling module should be available in Modeling or not. This can save a lot of time during installation as otherwise several commands would have to be executed manually.
Or through scripts after installation before the system was fully functional. In addition, we can define here whether or not installation support packages (ISPs) should be installed.
And also activated with our installation profile. The ISPs are small programs that help us with initial configuration after we’ve successfully installed SAP APO.
This last point is especially useful when installing on a production system without access to the Internet. Therefore, we can’t check for updates to ISPs at that time and need to install them.
During initial installation, if we want to use them later as well. Otherwise, after completing the initial installation and configuring our system according to our requirements and standards.
So we can use all other standard utilities within the operating system such as FTP programs or Web browsers. Also, it’s possible to download updates or new versions of ISPs from an internal server.
After installing SAP APO first. In this way, we can easily update existing systems that are already in production without too much effort (see Figure 7.1).
What Are The Advantages Of Deploying SAP APO?
There are several advantages of deploying SAP APO. First of all, it helps the installation go faster and more smoothly.
For example, we can automatically deploy the SAP APO using the installation profiles provided by SAP. And then use the default settings to deploy our system.
We can also use a deployment profile to create a template for our SAP BI system for new customers.
It also allows us to make small deployments with minimal effort or to quickly change or add new components or functional areas. In addition, we can use our deployment profile on different systems in different environments and for different customers.