The Importance of Clean Core: What It Is and How to Get There

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Standardization Focus: A clean core minimizes customizations, maintaining standard SAP functionality to reduce technical debt and ensure easier upgrades.
• Core Components: The clean core comprises Integration, Data, Processes, Operations, and Extensibility, promoting agility while allowing controlled customizations.
• SAP BTP's Role: SAP Business Technology Platform is vital for creating compliant extensions that enhance core system functionality without disruptions.
• Data Compliance: Clean core involves stringent data quality and compliance, with Syniti helping organizations align their data with SAP's standards.
• Future-Proofing: Embracing clean core practices helps future-proof SAP systems, reducing technical debt and enabling faster, more cost-effective upgrades.

The idea of a "clean core" is gaining significant traction among SAP customers, especially as companies transition to S/4HANA and embrace cloud-based architectures. What does this mean for organizations already using SAP systems to manage their data landscape?

The concept of "keeping the core clean" refers to preserving the integrity of SAP's standard functionality while minimizing the customizations that can create technical debt and hinder future upgrades. As companies increasingly seek agile, cloud-compliant solutions, a clean core becomes essential for maintainability, scalability, and adapting to new business needs. Let's explore the path to a clean core and look at the role of data in making it a reality.

Key Dimensions of a Clean Core

The term "clean core" refers to an ERP system that follows standardized guidelines for all core elements, allowing for smooth upgrades and reducing the risk of incompatibilities. This contrasts with older approaches where extensive SAP customizations were often necessary to meet specific business needs but later became roadblocks during large-scale migrations and system transformations.

The core, or the main aspects of SAP S/4HANA Cloud, has five components that interact with one another to provide organizations the ability to create and maintain an SAP environment that’s quick to adapt and innovate upon. By adopting a clean core model, organizations can make the most of their SAP investments and adopt newer SAP technologies like Business AI and advanced analytics.

These components that form the core are:

• Integration: Communication between extensions and the standard solution as well as communication between solutions.
• Data: Efficient management of the configuration data, master data and transactional data in the system.
• Processes: The sequential actions taken in SAP S/4HANA Cloud to deliver an outcome. Process customizations should complement and enhance standard processes, not disrupt them.
• Operations: The governance responsible for managing infrastructure, upgrade decisions, extension decisions, and any system monitoring and maintenance activities.
• Extensibility: Functionality added to the standard software to address organizational needs that may not be met by the standard processes.

That last component, extensibility, is a key capability because it enables SAP users to customize their business processes and operations to better suit their individual needs.

“But didn’t you say earlier that extensive customizations can create technical debt and slow down innovation?”

Let’s clarify – having a clean core doesn’t mean that your SAP system is running without any core customizations at all! Rather, “clean core” refers to a system that follows standardized guidelines for all components of the core. Extensions are not prohibited in a clean core approach, but the customer’s extensions should be kept separate from SAP’s standard application core to ensure these extensions remain upgrade-stable, even when upgrading to newer SAP versions. With this approach, upgrading your SAP system becomes faster, lower-risk, and less costly, as there is no danger of the system becoming unavailable when a new version of the software is released.

Given that SAP aims to enable customers to build cloud-ready extensions in a clean core compliant fashion, SAP BTP plays a crucial role here, offering a platform for building extensions that interact with the core system without disrupting its integrity. By using SAP's tools such as ABAP for the cloud, SAP Fiori apps, or SAP Extension Suite, organizations can meet their unique needs while keeping SAP S/4HANA Cloud clean and ready for upgrades.

What Makes Data Clean Core Compliant?

A clean core provides numerous advantages, including improved performance, faster innovation, lower downtime, and lower TCO by reducing the costs associated with customization upgrades, testing, and maintenance. Achieving a clean core also involves rethinking how data is controlled in your SAP landscape. As longtime SAP data experts, Syniti helps organizations get their data ready for clean core and keep it clean core compliant. According to SAP, the definition of “clean” data has three main aspects:

• The data should align with the modern (configuration, master, and transactional) data quality requirements of accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity, and uniqueness.
• The data volume needs to be controlled in order to optimize memory and disk consumption. Data should not contain any outdated, unused, or redundant information. The data should also follow efficient data lifecycle management, from its creation, through updates, to end of life.
• Personal master data must only be stored with justifiable purposes to meet data privacy compliance

In a clean core environment, data that meets these specifications can be achieved through analyzing and defining data quality measures for critical data objects. SAP provides data quality measures for several standard data objects. By leveraging these measures and working with Syniti’s data experts, organizations can establish their data quality measures as well as their own continuous “keep clean” process. A solution like SAP Advanced Data Migration and Management (ADMM) by Syniti can streamline this process by providing a validation framework and giving designated users the visibility to see newly created, changed, or deleted data. With capabilities for continuous data quality monitoring as well, ADMM makes it easier for organizations to sustain a clean data foundation to maximize the value of their SAP systems.

Building a Strong Foundation for SAP Transformations

The shift to S/4HANA and the growing importance of cloud-based architectures mean that maintaining a clean core is more critical than ever. By embracing modern extensibility practices and keeping customizations outside the core, organizations can future-proof their systems, reduce technical debt, and unlock faster innovation. When starting to think about clean core, organizations should begin first by starting with an outcome-driven data strategy and planning for the work involved on the data track.

Many SAP customers are already on this journey. For example, organizations in industries with strict regulatory requirements, such as life sciences and energy, have adopted clean core practices to ensure compliance while maintaining the agility to meet evolving business demands. These best practices and SAP ADMM by Syniti provide the framework to achieve this, ensuring that businesses remain agile and ready to face the challenges of tomorrow.