SAP Clean Core is Key to Optimizing Cloud Success for the Near and Long Term

Previously in this Insights Series, we have touched on a wide range of topics that are important for enabling companies to cost-effectively move to cloud-based ERP implementations. These have included migration tools such as SAP RISE and GROW, reducing Digital Debt, and fast-tracking Subscription Billing with Public Cloud Packaged Solutions. In this new Insights post we focus on SAP Clean Core to explore how it can lay a solid foundation for streamlining the transition to SAP Cloud Public or Private Edition, while also providing an extensible future-forward framework to support both fit-to-standard and company-specific extensions.

What is SAP Clean Core

SAP Clean Core is a strategic approach that enables organizations to adopt cloud ERP solutions more effectively. By focusing on standardization and minimizing customizations, companies can benefit from reduced costs, faster implementation, and enhanced adaptability, positioning themselves for success in an increasingly digital business landscape. Basically, Clean Core provides a standardized, simplified version of the SAP S/4HANA ERP system that minimizes customizations and focuses on leveraging the out-of-the-box functionalities provided by SAP.

Key Features:

• Reduced Customization: Organizations are encouraged to limit custom code and heavy customizations, making the core system cleaner and more manageable.
• Standardization: It promotes the use of standardized processes and best practices, allowing companies to benefit from the latest innovations and updates from SAP without extensive rework.
• Modularity: SAP Clean Core supports a modular approach where companies can integrate various SAP and third-party solutions without affecting the core ERP system.
• Extensibility:  Clean Core also provides guardrail mechanisms for adding company-specific extensions to implement tailored functionality that is integrated with the core but preserves the the ability to make core updates without breaking the custom code.

Importance for Transitioning to Cloud ERP

• Faster Implementation: By minimizing customizations, organizations can transition to cloud ERP solutions more quickly, as they do not need to develop and test extensive custom code.
• Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): With fewer customizations, maintenance and support costs are reduced. Organizations can allocate resources more effectively to innovation and growth.
• Easier Upgrades: A clean core makes it easier to implement updates and upgrades provided by SAP, ensuring that businesses can take advantage of new features and improvements regularly.
• Enhanced Agility: Organizations can respond more quickly to changing business needs or market conditions, as they are less tied to complex customizations that can slow down changes.
• Improved Compliance and Security: A standardized system can better support compliance with regulations and security standards, as it is easier to monitor and audit a clean core environment.
• Integration Capabilities: With a clean core, integrating additional SAP products and third-party solutions becomes more straightforward, facilitating a seamlessly interconnected business environment.

How Does Clean Core Enable Both Standardization and Extensibility?

Over more than fifty years of leading the industry in comprehensive ERP software for enterprise-wide ecosystems, SAP has also supported customization by customers through a variety of well-defined code development and integration parameters. This enabled customers and partners to create custom code that accessed database tables, user interface (UI) screens, menus, objects, etc., through ABAP code or other mechanisms. Proven across thousands of customization projects over many decades, this approach allowed companies to tailor their SAP systems for virtually any specific requirements.

However, a key reason that this approach has been successful was that the SAP systems were almost always located in customer data centers and thus were 100% maintained by customers themselves. What one customer was doing in their system was completely separate from what other customers were doing in theirs.

Now, SAP S/4HANA Cloud runs in the cloud, which presents a different set of challenges. All customers use the same baseline code and changes are applied to all customers simultaneously. As a result, there is no realistic way to allow each individual customer to implement enhancements in the same way that they could in earlier on-premise environments. Customer enhancements are still necessary, but the rules and processes by which they are done have been completely rethought and redesigned for the cloud world. 

Clean Core encompasses the main aspects of SAP S/4HANA Cloud. These aspects can be thought of as dimensions or components and they are oriented around the following:​

• Processes: The series of actions or steps taken within SAP S/4HANA Cloud that cover the end-to-end (E2E) experience of delivering an outcome or accomplishing a result.​
• Integration: Connection of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to other solutions for the purpose of sending and receiving data to support process execution.​
• Extensibility: Functionality added to SAP S/4HANA Cloud that extends it to address organizational needs that are not met by the standard processes.​
• Data: The data contained within and used by SAP S/4HANA Cloud processes, commonly categorized as configuration, master, and transactional data.​
• Operations: Necessary maintenance activities performed within SAP S/4HANA Cloud such as release management, background job management, authorization management, monitoring, and alerting.​

Clean core extensibility is the key to maintaining a balance between software flexibility for customer adjustments and system stability in the cloud environment. It results not only in faster software deployment, but also easier adoption of software changes, since the core starts off clean and is kept that way using non-disruptive, regularly scheduled upgrades. As shown below, Clean Core provides multiple paths for extensibility by either key users or developers. In addition to low-code, no-code, and drag-and-drop capabilities, SAP also supports creating extensions in ABAP that provide side-by-side "services" which can be integrated without disrupting the Clean Core environment.

Recommended best practices for using Clean Core extensibility include:

• Adopting a policy of zero modifications​
• Eliminating enhancements that are redundant to standard code and functionality and also eliminating copies of SAP objects​
• Using released APIs only ("upgrade-stable interfaces")​
• Leveraging the key user (in-app) extensibility of SAP S/4HANA Cloud to its full extent​
• Employing the capabilities and services offered by SAP Business Technology Platform to build larger extension applications​
• Using SAP Integration Suite​

Summary

One important bit of advice to keep in mind is that any customization project under consideration should meet one of two objectives - to either make you money or save you money. Customization is not inherently "bad" but should be proven "necessary" before spending the time, staff effort and expense to implement. Assuming a project passes this greenlighting test, Clean Core provides a simple, proven and supportable way to make it happen.

Clean Core is both a concept and an approach to achieve a modern, flexible, and cloud-compliant SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation. Clean Core is achieved by integrating and extending SAP S/4HANA Cloud in such a way that it is cloud-compliant, with optimal master data quality and perfected business process governance. With a clean core, customers experience better maintainability, along with lower total cost of ownership (TCO) for SAP S/4HANA Cloud.​

For More On Clean Core and SAP Public Cloud, Register Here for Webinar on October 31, 2024