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I am glad lots of SAPers got something from my previous blog post Beginner Level Understanding on SAP BTP Architectu... - SAP Community Today I want to move on, to emphasize how SAP BTP plays an important role in "Clean Core" strategy.
中文传送门：SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)的中级架构理解 - 清洁核心
Why is Clean Core
One of the reasons I love Apple devices is simple. Each time I updated my device e.g. iPhone or Mac, I don't have to worry about dependencies to my settings and my applications. Just keep enough battery, upgrade and enjoy new functionalities. For enterprise, surely IT managers want to have same experience to their cloud ERP solution although we all know it is not as easy as to iPhone upgrade, as your SAP ERP systems have so many customized applications, dependencies to other systems, data here and there, etc.
Clean core is the right way to solve this problem.
Ultimate goal is, even you are SAP S/4HANA private edition customers who have customized requirements to your system, keep always "fit-to-standard" and enjoy the upgrade smoothly afterwards, as it will not affect your customized objects, whether it is closely coupled using CDS views via ABAP Cloud, or side-by-side extensions on SAP BTP.
With an ERP clean core strategy, your organization can benefit from the latest release with minimal modifications and cloud-compliant extensions and customizations. Result is that, customer is happy as they can get recent innovations and latest features from SAP without bothering customized objects, partner is happy as they can focus on business requirements, SAP is happy as customers can get more money thanks to the benefit from innovations, and finnaly I am happy if SAP is doing great so that I don't have to worry losing my job 😀.
Just take a look the famous success customer story from HITACHI.
"We previously upgraded SAP ERP version every five years, taking about a year and a half from preparation to implementation,” says Yuri Yasuda. “However, we’re now able to perform major upgrades of SAP S/4HANA Cloud for our domestic group yearly and minor upgrades twice a year. We’ve also cut the time from preparation to switchover to around one month.”
Full Customer Story: BTS: Hitachi High-Tech 2-Tier S/4HANA Cloud with Clean Core by BTP
What is Clean Core
I want to talk with six dimensions related to SAP's IT solutions offer, so that you know which SAP service or product maps to which area.
1. Business Process - This is how everything begins. Without business requirements, all IT landscapes and cost has no meaning. As greeenfield customers, it is good opportunity to start completely clean core in the beginning, analyze what detail step each business process has and make it transparent among business stakeholders as well as IT employees. SAP Signavio is the tool to help organizations understand, proactively manage and optimize their business processes to achieve the agility and transparency needed for successful change. SAP LeanIX is the enterprise architect tool to help create a continuous, reliable understanding of your IT landscape to plan technology transformation, including overview of system integrations, project roadmap plan, collaboration with business stakeholders to align target state with evolving business capabilities and processes etc. And of course with S/4HANA as the "core" here, just keep as clean i.e. fit-to-standard as possible.
2. Extensibiliy - Now you have clear mind of your business process and what customized applications are critical e.g. for your external vendors. Next step is how to develep and where to deploy them? If it is closely coupled with your ERP business process and probably you keep the application access within your own organization, then on-stack development via Restful ABAP Programming (RAP) model under ABAP Cloud Environment (ABAP Steampunk) is your choice. Don't try to alter any standard code and directly change underlying data base any more and instead use CDS View i.e. “code-to-data" manner. If it is loosely coupled, and your IT staff has Java, Javascript or Python developers and ABAP is not fully qulified for the business requirement then side-by-side development via Cloud Application Programming (CAP) model under Cloud Foundry is the right way. Leverage APIs from your ERP system and modern CI/CD or open source world, you can have lots of imaginations on your application. And all the above, is the most important and straightforward meaning of "clean core" concept. Besides, there are more and more extension solutions coming out on SAP BTP e.g. low code no code SAP Build, SAP Mobile Service, etc.
3. Integration - Almost every enterprise has more than just ERP systems as their only IT landscape, while SRM, CRM, MES, PLM, WMS, HCM, etc. is pretty common to make business run end to end. This part is quite easy to understand, no one wants point-to-point connections, old way e.g. RFC, SFTP file exchange and enterprise tries to have a central place to design, implement, and monitor all different integration flows including all kinds of event. And SAP Integration Suite is enough to handle all these requests. P.S. here you can see these systems have data and transactions but business process and approvel management can strech across all these systems so tools like SAP Signavio, BPM plays an important role.
4. Data and anlytics - we all know data is valuable and meanwhile we admit it's hard to get clean data and transform it to business value and insights. SAP HANA Cloud is a database for any workload leveraging the powerful capabilities of the SAP HANA Cloud multi-model engine from relational, document store, geospatial, graph, vector, to time series data. Imagine you want to decouple your customzied Java application from your ERP core system to some place and SAP HANA Cloud is quite suitable for this as SAP has an intact methodology CAP to develep modern e2e applicaitons. SAP Datasphere also contains embedded HANA DB while the purpose is the cloud data warehouse e.g. extract transform and load (ETL) data so as to enrich all data projects and harmonize heterogeneous data into a business semantic model of your diverse data landscape including but not limited to SAP systems and non-SAP systems e.g. Google Big Query and Microsoft Azure data lake. With data ready, naturely the next step is to understand data in a human readable way and SAP Analytics Cloud is the BI tool which seemlessly and easily integrate with SAP Datasphere. Besides, it also includes rich planning activites on your finance, sales, transport etc. You can expect new AI capabilities into these products in near future SAP enhances Datasphere and SAC for AI-driven transformation | CIO.
5. Operation - actually this part is not just the tool itself. A leader from customer or partner who is responsible for clean core governance should also keep an eye on operation, so that from discovery to implementation to finally run business iterations there are no "unclean" activites coming out e.g. exceptions as technical debt. SAP Cloud ALM as a free offer attached to cloud offerings is a powerful tool that helps you to implement and operate intelligent cloud and hybrid business solutions. You benefit from an out-of-the-box, native cloud solution, designed as the central entry point to manage your SAP landscape with content-driven guided implementation and highly automated operations. Project management, test management, transport management, monitor and alert e.g. to SAP Integration Suite etc. are all included.
6. Business AI - I am pretty sure you are familiar with GenAI as everyone is talking about this and I believe you are trying it in your daily job such as queries, writting assistant, coding assistant, generating pictures and files, etc and imagine this is bound to your business data as embedded solution to query supply chain issues, to generate customer emails based on CRM data, generate automation artifacts and integration flows via Joule. No doubt this is the revolutionary and fast changing direction for To-B world. Besides the embedded AI capabilites into different LOB products, you still have the ability to build your own LLM AI scenario based on SAP GenAI as service on BTP e.g. right now it is not unusual to combine your own knowledge base as vectors to query against LLM. Check this SAP Discovery Center Architecture - Retrieval Augmented Generation and Generative AI on SAP BTP (clo... for more details.
What is the Role of SAP BTP under Clean Core
You may notice I put numbers and colors for each above pillars and they are draftly mapped to the following diagram. Except for SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, Embedded AI Capabilites, RAP on ABAP Steampunk, all other services are on SAP BTP.
I didn't list everything here still, as more and more solutions are built on SAP BTP even though you didn't find it in SAP Discovery Center. E.g. Sustainability Control Tower, Multibank Connectivitiy. From the above you can see BTP is the future innovations and extensions and that's why SAP announces we want to be the #1 enterprise application and business AI company powered by the leading platform.
The keep short, everything on SAP BTP is following "clean core" strategy as they leverage the secure tunnel to your private landscape consuming modern APIs and events. Imagine you upgraded your SAP ERP system, all you need to test as regression is just the customized APIs. Vice versa, you upgraded your Java/Node.js applications, there is no influence to your SAP ERP system. Pretty simple, right?
OK, in reality, it doesn't look simple as during transformations there are so much to consider, not just IT systems or software services, but the determination to spend money to keep core clean, organization structure, project management, stakeholder governance, CI/CD, etc. Clean core is a journey rather an overnight change.
Coming back to BTP journey, smiliar to the understanding and cognizance to every other things e.g. your new iPhone device, or a game like World of Warcraft, it starts with little and finally you become an expert. Once you tried SAP Integration Suite and your business goes quite well and stable, you may perhaps want to get your procurement department employees life easy via SAP Build Process Automation so that they can delegate manual repeated tasks to robots, then at certain point when your business grow larger and complex you want to discover the capabilites of SAP Datasphere as SAP's cloud data warehouse solution to serve as data fabric center and finally your IT staff become familiar with any other BTP services coming out as they all have same philosophy - this is a platform to help your core clean.
BTP CSP's job is to help you with this journey.
Clean Core Takeaways
- Cloud transformation is a journey, not a destination
- Clean Core is a key quality of transformation
- Cloud and S/4HANA transformations are not an “IT Project”
- Business Goals are the key value driver
- Your people are the key to realizing that value with SAP’s guidance
- Business transformation is enabled by, and requires IT transformation
- Skills, roles, responsibilities and organizations require change
- Approach all implementations with a cloud mindset
- Build empathy into the core of your culture
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