SAP S/4HANA Cloud – Clean Core with and on SAP BTP

In today’s fast-paced business landscape, digital transformation has become a critical component of success. To stay competitive, companies must embark on this journey, whether by starting from scratch or building on their existing investments. However, a key consideration in future-proofing an organization is ensuring a clean core.

A clean core, in the context of an ERP system, is essential for ensuring stable and reliable operations while being agile and innovative. By maintaining a clean core, businesses can future-proof themselves and remain competitive in an ever-evolving business landscape.

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Why is it important to keep a clean core?

An ERP system is the central system responsible for running an organization’s day-to-day operations. Keeping this system clean core compliant is essential in ensuring that the organization remains future-proof. According to a report by McKinsey, between 10 and 20 percent of the technology budget dedicated to new products is often diverted to resolving issues related to technical debt. This debt accumulates over the years due to numerous modifications to the core ERP system, resulting in significant maintenance and testing efforts during patches and software upgrades. This constant technical debt can leave companies frozen in the past by delaying upgrades and patches, and can make them slow to innovate while being exposed to unforeseen risks.

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By prioritizing a clean core and implementing extensibility options to minimize modifications to the core ERP system, companies can avoid incurring technical debt and ensure that their technology budget is being spent on innovation and new product development. This approach can helps businesses to to stay ahead of the curve, remain competitive, and maintain the agility needed to thrive in today’s ever-changing business landscape.

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Unclean core could manifest itself in different forms:

? Code: Modifications to standard code, redundant enhancements to standard functionality.

? Data: Database tables abused, data structures and fields used for unintended purposes.

? Processes: Unnecessary use of custom processes, disregard to SAP-recommended best practices.

? Extensions/Integration: Use of non-approved add-ons, extensions built on non-upgrade-stable interfaces, integrations built using non-standard approaches.

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For SAP S/4HANA Cloud, SAP offers different approaches to extend the digital core depending on the use case at hand.

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Extensibility for SAP S/4HANA Cloud can be categorized into three sections:

??Key user extensibility.

??On-stack developer extensibility.

? Side-by-side extensibility on the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

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SAP S/4HANA Cloud key user extensibility is designed to allow simple adaptations of standard functionalities to user requirements by using no-code/low-code key user tools. Key user extensibility makes it possible to customize SAP S/4HANA even by non-developers, hence the customization process is shortened greatly.

On-stack developer extensibility follows a regular ABAP development process and is suited for extensions that need a tight coupling with SAP S/4HANA processes or require close proximity i.e., low latency or complex queries on the SAP HANA database.

Side-by-Side extensibility is a method that allows organizations to innovate and implement new capabilities and features in their existing SAP systems without disrupting the core processes. It enables developers to build and deploy applications and extensions that run side-by-side with existing SAP systems, utilizing data and functionality from those systems as needed.

Ricardo Silva , Brighten SAP Director