Clean Core is becoming a foundational principle for optimizing your SAP environment, particularly with the shift to S/4HANA and the Cloud. Yet, many misunderstand what it truly is and how to achieve it.
Adopting a Clean Core strategy doesn’t mean sacrificing business-critical customizations or overhauling your ERP systems. You don’t have to choose between control and innovation.
With SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) and Rev-Trac Platinum, you can modernize your SAP landscape without losing what makes your business unique while managing change easily across on-premises and the Cloud.
This blog explores how you can adopt a Clean Core strategy that supports SAP modernization, Cloud adoption, and long-term innovation without disrupting mission-critical operations.
What is Clean Core and why does it matter?
Historically, organizations have heavily customized their SAP systems to meet their specific requirements. While these changes addressed immediate business needs, doing so with restraint or building up over time unintentionally led to what is now commonly known as a dirty core.
And the cost of a dirty core can be high:
- Complex and costly upgrades
- Increased technical debt
- Higher total cost of ownership (TCO)
Clean Core can change that. It keeps your core ERP system lean, stable, and free from dirty code or code that is poorly implemented and maintained. Customizations don’t disappear; they move to the appropriate development layer, giving them a preference to moving them outside the core.
That’s where SAP BTP comes in. Custom applications and extensions are built externally on the BTP, leveraging side-by-side extensibility. However, BTP is not the only way to achieve a Clean Core.
SAP provides a multi-tier extensibility model for creating and maintaining customizations independently from the Core. For example, you can make minor, non-disruptive extensions directly within your S/4HANA core system without directly modifying SAP standard code.
Additionally, SAP’s Clean Core strategy for Private Cloud allows classic ABAP enhancements, done in a Clean Code way. Even in Public Cloud, you can develop on stack if you follow Clean Core development principles and only use publicly released APIs.
Whatever strategy you adopt, Clean Core is all about long-term agility. It establishes a foundation for achieving faster, more predictable upgrades, aligning your ERP investments with your business objectives. It is essential to remember that Clean Core is not the end of the story when discussing long-term agility. There is more to achieving agility than moving custom development outside the core. Maintaining good design and quality approaches to your Clean Core extensions are also crucial.
Supporting a Clean Core strategy with SAP BTP
SAP BTP is a Cloud-based platform that supports application development, integrations, and extensibility outside your core ERP system. You can build new capabilities loosely coupled with your ERP systems, helping to maintain a clean, stable, and upgrade-ready core.
How SAP BTP can help achieve and maintain a Clean Core:
- Side-by-side extensibility: Build and run custom apps on BTP, not directly within your core ERP, so you can tailor applications and workflows without impacting upgrades, performance or future projects.
- Integrations: SAP Integration Suite lets you connect SAP and non-SAP systems, allowing for a unified process without modifying the ccore.
- Advanced capabilities: Access services and solutions like SAP Analytics Cloud and AI/machine learning to enhance decision-making and gain a competitive edge while preserving the integrity of your core SAP system.
Leveraging SAP BTP allows you to innovate faster and build scalable, future-ready applications and extensions that evolve independently of SAP’s upgrade cycle.
Why change management still matters
Clean Core isn’t a switch you flip; it’s a strategic journey of gradually modernizing your core ERP (such as ECC or S/4HANA) to be as close to standard as possible.
Even as you adopt or maintain a Clean Core with SAP BTP, one thing remains unchanged: the need to manage change. You’re still making changes on-premises and in the Cloud, such as configuration changes in your core ERP or new applications on the BTP. These changes must be managed without interruption to daily business operations.
This is where Rev-Trac plays a crucial role. It provides the automation, contorl, and enforcement to manage change across your hybrid landscape efficiently.
How Rev-Trac can support your Clean Core strategy:
- Centralized change management: Manage BTP and on-premises transports in a single request, enforcing consistent processes. Rev-Trac integrates with SAP Cloud Transport Management Service (CTMS) to simplify BTP change management.
- Unified workflows and Governance: Rev-Trac enforces predefined workflows to ensure compliance with external regulations and internal policies and procedures. For example, only approved users can authorize changes to production.
- Complete visibility: Rev-Trac provides transparency into every change, including BTP changes, to ensure accountability and maintain the integrity of the change delivery process.
- Enforce ATC Clean Core checks: Clean core compatibility checks are built into the change delivery process as an enforceable step in the development system. A change can’t progress unless it goes through the ABAP Test Cockpit (ATC).
Bottom Line
As businesses migrate to S/4HANA and explore new ways of working with SAP BTP and RISE, the concept of a Clean Core is gaining momentum. The goal is a leaner, more agile core ERP, ready for continuous upgrades and innovation.
SAP BTP gives you the tools and services to build customizations and extensions outside the core, and Rev-Trac Platinum ensures every change is delivered safely, consistently, and with minimal disruption.
Together, a Clean Core strategy, SAP BTP, and Rev-Trac Platinum help you speed up your digital transformation, move to the Cloud more easily, and future-proof your business.
Visit here to learn how to simplify SAP BTP change, or reach out to one of our SAP change management experts for more details.
