SAP Clean Core

A smart Approach to a Cleaner SAP Core

Boston/Mannheim, September 2024

Introduction

Everyone is talking about Clean Core. No keynote at Sapphire was without it, your system integrator does not stop talking about it, and even your CEO is asking you about it. No doubt, there is a lot of buzz around Clean Core in the SAP market. But, is this just another marketing campaign?from SAP or is there more behind it? What is Clean Core actually, and more importantly, how do I get there? This article tries to answer the most frequently asked questions around Clean Core and portraits a promising, pragmatic approach towards a cleaner SAP system utilizing automation.

What is the Problem with? Most? Legacy SAP ERP Systems?

A cloud-compatible ERP (like, for example, Salesforce) runs like a SaaS, is always close to the latest release so it constantly benefits from vendor innovations. This is possible through seamless upgrades with minimal impact to business users and IT, as extensions and integrations are maintained in a way that upgrades are relatively easy.?

On the other hand, most SAP ERP systems today are monolithic in nature, not compatible to cloud-standards, hard to upgrade and maintain,?multiple releases behind (average release cycle of 18 months), which means these systems are not consuming innovations from SAP. Upgrades are painful, as they have a high impact on extensions and integrations with high testing requirements and a high business and IT user impact.

What is Clean Core?

To address the challenges with current monolithic SAP systems, SAP came up with Clean Core, a concept for a flexible and cloud-compatible ERP. The concept is achieved through cloud compatible extensions and integrations and a focus on master data and business process governance. Clean Core is not about extensions (custom code) only, but also about clean integrations, effective and efficient operations, lean and well governed data and clean business processes. Clean extensions are an important part of the Clean Core concept. Extensions need to be well governed and only retained, if you really need them. They also need to be separated from the SAP Core by only using released interfaces from SAP.?

What are the Benefits of a Clean Core?

A cleaner SAP system enables accelerated innovations. SAP customers have faster access to new releases and benefit not only? from innovations from SAP, but also innovations from a broad ecosystem through networking effects. Implementation cycles in IT become faster, with faster response times to the business and a shift from “Lights-on tasks” to innovation. SAP systems following Clean Core principals will? benefit from lower costs of operations. Resources are shifted to value adding tasks, costs for upgrades and maintenance are reduced and new implementations become easier. Last, we also see an impact on risk, with better system stability, security and compliance. In a nutshell, Clean Core is a very good concept addressing the pains of SAP customers and, if followed correctly, will provide many benefits. Clean Core is something every SAP customer should look into!?

How does Clean Core Extensibility work?

With S/4HANA, SAP has laid a solid foundation and technical environment (ABAP Cloud Platform, BTP) for SAP customers to extend their S/4HANA systems in a clean way. For tightly coupled extensions, customers can enhance their S/4HANA Core Solution on-stack (for on prem, private, public systems) with Key User Extensions and Developer Extensions, the latter following ABAP Cloud development standards. Side note: For on prem systems they can even keep their classic extensions (this is not Clean Core!). On BTP, they can build loosely coupled, side-by-side extensions following the cloud development standards for ABAP, but also for other runtimes like Java / Node.js.

SAP also came up with a stringent 3-Tier Extensibility model, grouping these extensions into Tier 1 – green extensions from a clean core perspective, following the cloud extensibility standards. Tier 2 – yellow, Cloud API enablement which mostly mitigates the missing public APIs and extension points from SAP by allowing custom wrappers for non-released SAP objects (not clean core!). And Tier 3 – red, Classic ABAP Extensions, not Clean Core!?

Today, if you implement a new SAP S/4HANA system from scratch, you are able to extend your system fully following Clean Core standards! The platform and technology are available. The only limitation is on missing public APIs and extension points from SAP.? Make sure, your developers are trained, and you implement a strong governance on future developments.?

What is the Challenge with Legacy SAP Systems and Clean Core?

The concept makes sense, the technical foundation is there, the benefits are overwhelming, so let’s go Clean Core! Take your legacy SAP ERP, press a magic button and you are there! That’s the impression you sometimes get when you listen to some of SAP’s presentations. But why is this not as easy as it sounds??

One of the reasons is the way SAP-customers have extended their systems over the years and customized them to meet their business needs. With the experience of thousands of SAP transformations in the past 20 years, smartShift created a benchmark measuring SAP ERP systems from a custom code perspective. The average SAP ERP system was built 15 years ago, holding 22,000 custom objects with 2.7 million Lines of Code. For these objects, we see an average usage ratio of 40 – 60% in the past 12 months (quick win for getting to aleaner Core!). The required transformation and modernization change for these custom objects is huge. Customers must correct an average of 26,000 coding issues to achieve full HANA and S/4HANA compliance, plus 15,000 performance issues that need to be addressed for an optimal performance on S/4HANA. On top of all this,? they have accumulated an average technical debt of 350,000 coding issues related to security, stability, and maintainability. And, don’t blame your development teams for this – technologies have changed over the years and many external resources have probably touched your system. What this means is? – and SAP made it easy for all of us – the coding is usually written in a monolithic, tightly coupled way, where developers make hard modifications of the SAP standard and access any SAP API or database table they can get hold of. All this leads to systems which are hard to upgrade, maintain and extend, security, performance and stability problems and,finally, the already described slow innovation cycles and higher TCO.?

Why should I bother with Legacy Custom Code at all?

Isn’t it better to leave all this code behind, if it is that challenging? In this situation, people sometimes forget that custom code is also an asset.ompanies have made major investments to build differentiating business processes, to close gaps of the SAP standard for their industry or to fulfill regulatory requirements. This code holds a lot of company IP and process knowledge. I personally know many customers who have optimized their SAP ECC for their business needs over many years and don’t want to enter into the risk of a greenfield implementation. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that all the custom code out there is important. You should seek every opportunity to get rid of unused code or go back to standard, where standard is available. You need to find the right balance, safeguard your strategic assets and modernize them towards the new Clean Core concept so that you overcome the challenges of your current monoliths.?

What is the right approach for Clean Core??

“Don’t boil the ocean!” This phrase very well describes the challenge, SAP customers with legacy systems and hundreds of customizations are confronted with. Implementing Clean Core for the average, 15 year old, highly customized SAP ERP system is a huge endeavor and change. It's better to take a step by step, agile approach and not trying to achieve everything in one big step.

In the first step, transform your system to S/4HANA and secure the benefits of the new platform, including the new ABAP platform. Perform a thorough usage analysis of your custom processes and decommission what is not needed. Review your processes and identify areas where you can go back to standard or optimize your processes. Again, don’t boil the ocean. Make sure that the impact of the S/4HANA transition on your business is limited. For example, limit the freeze period on your old landscape and keep responsive to your business during the transformation. Address the technical debt in your custom code, implement the latest ABAP standards (e.g. ABAP Cloud), address security, performance and stability problems, and harmonize coding standards for better maintainability in the future.

Once you are on S/4HANA, continue to modernize your classical extensions. Separate them from the core by replacing existing APIs with whitelisted APIs from SAP where available and replace legacy SAP table access with CDS Views. Then make use of the new Key User Extensibility.? You can do this by migrating custom append structures to Key User Custom Fields and Logic. Adopt Clean Core principles for other Key User Extension use cases. Finally, and the hardest part of all, convert your existing classical extensions using developer extension tools and methodologies (e.g. converting to RAP artifacts).

Don’t forget to take your developers along the journey – make sure they are well trained, and implement a strong governance process on future developments. The key is establishing a continuous process - modernizing your code is not a one time event. Otherwise, after a couple of years of new development, you will end up where you started.

What is the Role of Automation in the Journey to a Clean Core?

Today, the typical approach to any sort of SAP transformation and modernization is still very manual and labor heavy. Ask your system integrator and the answer in nine out of ten cases will be: big (offshore) teams. We already see a huge resource crunch in the market, due to the thousands of S/4HANA transformations still pending. It is questionable if you will be able to find enough resources in the market - and you want the A-team, not B nor? C! Besides that, the manual approach is lengthy and imposes more risk, as the output quality is highly variable based on individual performance. People centric approaches also tend to have a big impact on your business and IT teams, occupying your teams with mundane manual tasks and imposing lengthy freeze periods for your business. Most important, the manual approach to SAP transformation also tends to take shortcuts. What I mean with this: Capacity, skills and opportunistic cost will always limit the scope of your manual transformation.? It should raise a red flag when your team or system integrator starts to talk about so-called priority fixes when it comes to code remediation. This is a shortcut you don’t want to take. It ignores the need to cover all priorities to avoid operational risks and bypasses the necessity for true code modernization for better performance, security, stability and modern Clean Core principles.?

True automation, deployed and delivered in the right way, helps to avoid all these shortfalls. You can accelerate your transformation massively, reduce the risk through consistent, automated and guaranteed outcomes, limit the business and IT impact to a minimum, and provide the optionality to truly modernize your strategic assets towards modern, secure, performant and stable custom processes, following Clean Core principles. For more than 20 years, smartShift has built and deployed patented automation and turn-key solutions for SAP transformations and modernizations.?

Our in-depth custom code analysis helps to build fact-based, automation-centric, agile roadmaps for your SAP transformation. Our latest solution in this area, our Clean Core X-Ray, helps to classify your strategic custom assets and build out a modernization path towards an SAP Clean Core.?

Our patented, meta-model-based Code Transformation Solution remediates the entire SAP application custom code repository for issues related to S/4HANA, HANA, Unicode compatibility, Carve-Out & Consolidation, Performance, Security, Stability and ABAP Cloud Standards – automated and with high precision. It is faster and not dependent on manual labor, which allows us to deliver higher quality solutions to customers and partners in weeks at less risk – without shortcuts!?

Our Dual-Maintenance solution automates the process of code comparison, merge, and remediation across divergent SAP landscape versions (e.g., ECC → S/4HANA). It reduces code freezes to a bare minimum and lets developers keep innovating instead of stagnating. It enables and drives business agility during your SAP transformation with little? impact to the performance of the business.?

Also, our Clean Core Solutions provide the capability to understand feasibility and opportunities for modernization of existing custom code to align with SAP Clean Core principles (e.g.? Classical Extensions to Clean Core Extensions, Move to SAP Cloud) and automates the tedious work of rewriting your APIs and further implementing new extensibility standards. We are doing this in a continuous process, to help you get and stay clean. As I said, this is not a one time event, but a continuous process.

Summary

Clean Core is more than another marketing buzz from SAP. Platform and technology are available. The benefits are worthwhile! Still, there is a lot of confusion in the market and it is hard to find unbiased advice. Most importantly, it is hard to find working implementation approaches that don’t paralyze your IT and Business teams for many years with questionable outcomes. smartShift has developed a prescriptive and operational methodology supported with highly automated technology for a successful path to get to a Clean Core and also stay there long-term.?

I’d love to discuss your SAP transformation challenges. Drop me an e-mail ([email protected]) or contact me on LinkedIn.? I’m happy to answer any questions and welcome your feedback.

About smartShift

smartShift is a global leader in SAP custom code transformation, leveraging AI to deliver secure, stable, and optimized code within weeks. Our industry-leading solutions are differentiated by the ability to address ALL custom code issues, not just those that are prioritized for manual remediation. Trusted by the world’s largest SAP customers, smartShift has a proven track record of modernizing over 3,300 SAP systems and converting more than 3.5 billion lines of code. Learn more at www.smartshift.com.