Keep the core clean with SAP BTP

In light of the S/4HANA transition, process optimization is crucial. You distinguish your organization by the processes that make a difference. In this article, we focus on why it’s important to keep the core clean and how SAP BTP and cloud solutions facilitate this.

Transition becomes more challenging when deviating from the standard and incorporating all these deviations into the same system. This makes upgrading your system to the latest version difficult, and a move from on-premise to public cloud becomes even more challenging. At that point, you must reconsider what to do with all the customization. In short, you don’t want to remain in the old world and build a lot of custom code again in your S/4HANA system. You want your organization to step into the new world to remain flexible. SAP itself compares migration to cloud solutions with a rising hot air balloon. Therefore, for a cloud transition like S/4HANA, it’s important to shed ballast to take off.

To be flexible, agile, and resilient, it’s important to develop SAP modifications correctly. The key message here is: “Keep the Core Clean.” While it’s still possible to make adjustments in the SAP system itself in S/4HANA on-premise, it’s preferable not to. The main reasons for this are the agility, flexibility, and agility of your IT system and consequently, your organization.

The SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) is a crucial solution for this. This platform operates at the ‘System of Differentiation’ and ‘System of Innovation’ layers of the Gartner model, whereas the S/4HANA system naturally resides in the ‘System of Records’ layer. SAP BTP allows you to integrate all systems in your cloud or hybrid landscape, extend SAP and non-SAP systems, and develop new apps. Additionally, there’s an innovative pillar with automation and artificial intelligence services to automate manual steps or make process steps even smarter. 

With SAP BTP, you have the tool to embark on digital transformation with a clean core and keep it clean. With SAP BTP, you can start preparing for the transformation by migrating your critical customizations to the cloud, making the transformation itself much faster and smoother. Additionally, you can save costs by subjecting your custom code (the “ballast” for the rising hot air balloon) to a health check. Is the customization still necessary, or can we revert to the standard? And how can we fill the remaining gaps according to the clean core principle? These steps ultimately allow you to continue benefiting from SAP’s innovation and access the latest features.

SAP BTP offers various possibilities to extend your S/4HANA system. These are explained below:

Key-user extensions

Key-user extensions are small adjustments that can often be made in a low-code/no-code manner. These include adjustments such as hiding fields, adding predefined fields, and adapting labels to the company’s business language.

On-stack developer extensions

In S/4HANA public cloud, SAP also provides an ABAP environment. Here, you can make the necessary extensions via the public APIs provided with ABAP development tools. The major difference from classic adjustments possible with S/4HANA on-premise is that all communication with the standard must go through the public APIs. However, you lose the freedom to access non-public APIs and directly read tables or modify records.

Side-by-side extensions

Lastly, SAP BTP also offers a wide range of development tools to create apps that can be connected to your S/4HANA environment. These tools are set up separately on SAP BTP, keeping them detached from the core. App developments are possible with low-code tools from the SAP Build portfolio or pro-code tools such as ABAP in the Cloud via the RESTful Application Programming model (RAP) or via the Cloud Application Programming model (CAP), where you can use tools like node.js.

The range of services and tools SAP offers in this area is too vast to cover comprehensively here, and there’s a suitable way to realize the extension for every situation. The most suitable approach depends on the type of extension, the target audience of end-users, and how independent and/or integrated the adjustment is with the S/4HANA core.