Clean Core Extensibility: Balancing Standardizatio...

NataliaSoltau

Unlock Agility and Stability with a Clean Core

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, organizations need both agility to innovate and stability to grow sustainably. The key to balancing these goals is a clean digital core — an ERP foundation that stays standardized, upgrade-stable, and ready for innovation.
But keeping your core clean doesn’t mean giving up differentiation. It means being deliberate — extending only where it creates true business value and competitive advantage.
This is the essence of Clean Core Extensibility.

Clean Core Extensibility: Balancing Standardization and Differentiation

The SAP Business Suite brings this vision to life by unifying ERP and line-of-business applications on a common data foundation with embedded AI and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) for extensibility. Together, these capabilities enable organizations to connect and optimize every function across the enterprise, ensuring that innovation remains upgrade-stable and grounded in reliable, trusted data.

SAP’s clean core strategy is built on five guiding principles — Processes, Extensibility, Data, Integrations, and Operations. In this blog, we focus on the Extensibility principle, exploring how organizations can innovate safely and strategically while maintaining a standardized, upgrade-stable foundation.

The five guiding principles of a clean core

1. Why You Need a Clean Core – and the New Extensibility Model

A clean core is the foundation of a modern cloud ERP strategy. It runs on standardized, upgrade-friendly configurations that minimize technical debt and maximize agility.

A clean core ensures:

Faster innovation through seamless cloud updates
Lower TCO and reduced complexity
Business agility through modular, composable extensions

While the clean core provides stability, extensibility defines how you tailor the system to your needs — without losing upgradeability. To enable innovation without sacrificing stability, SAP introduced an evolved Extensibility Model — separating standard ERP capabilities from custom innovations.

This cloud-first, modular approach allows extensions to live outside the core while connecting seamlessly to it.
It enables organizations to:

Build innovations safely on SAP BTP
Adopt continuous updates without disruption
Keep systems clean, stable, and flexible

The goal is simple: empower business differentiation while maintaining standardization at the core.

2. Strategic Extensibility in Practice: Extending and Applying the Model

Not all extensions add value — and not all differentiation requires custom code. True extensibility is strategic: focus on what drives growth, efficiency, or customer experience. Adopt best practices for core business processes, and customize only when it creates measurable advantage.

SAP’s evolved Extensibility Model emphasizes decoupling extensions from the standard. By leveraging SAP Build, organizations can implement both on-stack (ABAP Cloud) and side-by-side (BTP) extensions, enabling key users and developers to innovate without modifying the SAP core. This approach ensures easier upgrades, better maintainability, and preserves upgrade stability.

Follow SAP’s extensibility levels to maintain a clean core:

Adopt a BTP-first mindset – Use SAP Build on SAP BTP for custom logic, integrations, and innovation.
Prefer Level A/B extensions: Level A - on-stack or side-by-side via released APIs, Level B - Making use of Classic APIs
Use Level C (utilization of SAP-internal objects) only when absolutely necessary and apply the changelog.
Avoid Level D and continuously refactor legacy code – Move unused extensions out of the core.

This structured approach helps organizations balance standardization and differentiation, ensuring a clean core that is robust, adaptable, and ready for innovation.

Guidance for SAP’s extensibility levels

3. Measuring Your Clean Core with RISE with SAP Methodology: The Clean Core Measurement Framework

Maintaining a clean core is an ongoing process. The Clean Core Measurement Framework helps organizations assess their governance and maturity, define target actions, and track progress through clean core KPIs.

The Governance and Maturity assessment evaluates the tooling, governance, and know-how required to get and stay clean. It calculates a current score for each clean core dimension and can be performed at any stage — before, during, or after transformation. Based on this, customers can define a target score aligned with their strategic goals. These criteria and assessments are fully embedded in the RISE with SAP Methodology.

Clean core KPIs complement this by measuring adherence during both implementation and operations. Derived from system data, these KPIs provide automated, transparent insights — fully visible in the RISE with SAP Methodology Dashboard.

Together, these measurements create visibility and accountability — helping organizations stay on track toward a truly clean core.

4. How to Get Started

Begin your journey toward a Clean Core with Extensibility by reading our White Paper: Clean core extensibility White paper
It outlines a six-step path to achieving a clean core — from defining your strategy and analyzing custom code to adopting extension guidelines, establishing governance, and building upgrade-safe extensions.

And don’t miss the video Achieving Clean Core with the Updated Clean Core Extensibility White Paper for an expert walkthrough of the key concepts and updates.

Start today — and turn your clean core into a foundation for continuous innovation.

5. Customer Example: CAP Group – Growth Through Clean Core

CAP Group modernized its ERP by moving custom logic to SAP BTP, achieving:

Simplified upgrades and operations
Faster innovation delivery
Improved scalability and flexibility

Their success shows that a clean core enables innovation and control to coexist — driving growth with less complexity. For more details, explore the CAP Group Clean Core Story on SAP.com.

Conclusion

A clean core isn’t about avoiding customization — it’s about making it count.
By standardizing your foundation, extending only where it drives advantage, and continuously measuring your progress, you build an ERP that’s agile, efficient, and future-ready.

Balance standardization for efficiency with extensibility for differentiation — that’s the essence of a clean core.