Embracing SAP Clean Core with SAP Cloud ALM

In today’s blog, we will talk about the clean core in SAP S/4HANA Cloud, which represents a shift towards a more standardised, flexible, and cloud-compliant system architecture. If we consider the definition of this concept we have:

• Clean: A system that is up-to-date, transparent, unmodified, consistent, efficient and cloud-compliant
• Core: Covers the main aspects of an ERP system, namely extensibility, processes, data, integration and operation

By adhering to clean core principles, organisations can achieve better maintainability, lower costs, and enhanced ability to leverage SAP innovations, all while ensuring system stability and security, which will be resilient against changes, but also resilient against impact, and provide a minimal TCO as customers don’t need to take care of all the modifications.

Maintaining a clean core is essential for organisations looking to remain competitive while managing complexity, and SAP Cloud ALM plays a key role in supporting the adoption of clean core principles, ensuring systems remain cloud-compliant and adaptable to changing business needs.

The Classic Extensibility Approach

Before the cloud era (and to a certain extent still happens today) implementing extensions in SAP systems was relatively straightforward. SAP provided some areas at the data and code level, which allows customers to customise their systems. For example, a customer could add a new field to a database table and manage it with ABAP code. This approach allowed for significant customisation but required careful management during upgrades to ensure stability.

Understanding Clean Core

A clean core describes a system that remains as close to the standard as possible while running cloud-compliant extensions and integrations. This approach allows businesses to adapt their systems to changing requirements and adopt new capabilities efficiently. Strong governance is crucial for each technical dimension of the clean core to maintain system integrity and performance.

The evolution from SAP ERP to SAP S/4HANA marked a significant shift. In the cloud environment, all customers use the same base code line, and changes are applied simultaneously. This necessitates the clean core philosophy, which ensures that customer enhancements are cloud-compliant and maintain system stability.

SAP Cloud ALM Adoption

SAP Cloud ALM supports the implementation of clean core principles through a comprehensive set of tools and methodologies:

• Consumption of SAP Best Practice Content.
• Execute Fit-to-Standard Workshops including Requirement management.
• Design custom processes (if they add value).
• Business Process Monitoring and Job and Automation Monitoring to get transparency on business process KPIs and most importantly jobs and automation tasks.
• SAP Readiness Check to remediate simplification items to understand potential technical impacts on changes

Extensibility: Extensions (e.g. custom code and custom code management) should be decoupled from the SAP standard, following an upgrade-stable extensibility model. They can be extended on-stack or side-by-side with the SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and with SAP Cloud ALM you can make use of the below capabilities:

• Custom code analysis and clustering are replaced with standard

• Manual & Automated Testing (with Tricentris Test Automation)
• Agile Build
• Use 'Features' to handle Integration of Cloud TMS and BTP CI/CD DevOps services to consistently manage and deploy ABAP and BTP extensions
• Monitoring of extension
• SAP Readiness Check to remediate custom code to remediate custom code where necessary.

Data: This is related to data volume management, keeping the system and TCO lower, and reducing inconsistencies in the system with the daily operations. Clean data is controlled according to the latest standards, ensuring accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity, and uniqueness and SAP Cloud ALM will provide: 

• Data consistency and data volume.
• SAP Readiness Check to resolve data quality issues
• Additional tasks (e.g., User Stories) can be created from the SAP Readiness Check via the ‘Simplification Items’ to ensure these items are included in the project.

Integration: It should be built flexibly, and in a way that doesn’t break when the system is upgraded and remains stable during operation activities, therefore monitoring checks are key to ensure the integration is running. A clean integration keeps the landscape reliable and flexible, using standard APIs (OData and SOAP) and avoiding traditional APIs (RFC and IDoc). From SAP Cloud ALM, you can ensure this dimension is addressed through the following:

• Integration Documentation to keep all the integration in one place
• Manage Cloud Platform Integration (CPI) deployment
• Interface and exception monitoring to handle most relevant error situations and manage E2E processing of messages, events and business objects

Operations: This is to ensure that the operation of your business is effective and efficient, understanding how these operations support the business that is running on your landscape keeping cost to a minimum level. The monitoring will help to identify which use cases are relevant for operations to plan the latest SAP release. With SAP Cloud ALM you can: 

• Use full-stack monitoring for processes, integration, extensions and data.
• Business Service Management to align SAP maintenance with business downtimes.
• SAP Readiness Check for SAP S/4HANA upgrades to remediate custom code and add-ons.
• Automated regression testing and release management to efficiently manage change or upgrade events.

Clean Core is aimed to help customers stay up to date with their systems, keeping TCO under control and allow to always adopt innovations from SAP and Cloud ALM steps in and helps with through the different functionalities available today and with the future improvement on this product, it will support the Clean Core principle and also to stay clean in the areas of the S/4HANA cloud. Therefore, by leveraging SAP Cloud ALM, organisations can effectively implement clean core principles, ensuring their systems are robust, flexible, and ready to meet future challenges.

In conclusion, maintaining a clean core within SAP S/4HANA Cloud is not just a best practice—it's a strategic imperative for organisations aiming to stay competitive in today's fast-paced digital landscape. By adhering to clean core principles, you can achieve a streamlined, cost-effective, and innovation-ready system architecture.

SAP Cloud ALM provides the tools and methodologies necessary to support this transformation, ensuring your systems remain cloud-compliant, adaptable, and resilient.

If you're ready to take the next step in optimizing your SAP environment and embracing the future of ERP, start by exploring the capabilities of SAP Cloud ALM today. Don’t miss out on the opportunity to enhance your system’s stability and unlock new potential for your business. Contact us today to find out more