S/4HANA for Oil & Gas Downstream Process Optimization Integrated SAP Supply Chain SAP for Exploration & Production Operational Excellence in Oil & Gas SAP for Refinery Operations Real-Time Data Analytics with SAP SAP Environment, Health & Safety (EHS) SAP Field Logistics Energy Trading and Risk Management (ETRM) SAP Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

Innovative Solutions for the Evolving SAP BTP & Clean Core

SAP BTP provides the ideal platform for configuring and utilizing new out-of-the-box SAP solutions by Industry and Line of Business (LoB). It also supports the implementation of innovative custom solutions, addressing gaps not covered by SAP packages. This approach facilitates the adoption of a "Zero-ABAP" mindset, adhering to the clean core principle and treating each SAP product as a pure SaaS solution, regardless of deployment options (on-premises, RISE Private/Public cloud, IaaS on hyperscalers). This is the suggested approach to preparing the successive waves of S/4HANA Public cloud editions.

Clean Core is a broad initiative focused on Apps, Data, and Integrations to achieve a “Composable Enterprise” hybrid-architecture. It aims for modernity, flexibility, agility, innovation, and resilience in addressing clients' business needs in an unpredictable world. Clean Core is a journey towards realizing Cloud promises, transitioning from historical SAP monoliths to a modern Agile architecture. This enables enterprises to renew their solutions, adapt to disruptions, and respond efficiently to mergers, spin-offs, and acquisitions. Clean Core necessitates a new Cloud mindset, supported by architectural best practices, enabling us to address business needs not covered by SAP Packages (mainly S/4HANA) using the SAP BTP Cloud Platform, complemented by Hyperscalers such as Azure, AWS, and GCP. Clean means up-to-date, transparent, unmodified, consistent, efficient and cloud compliant.

SAP BTP and Clean Core empower enterprises to achieve their edge over competition

The SAP Clean Core approach is based on five technical and procedural components that work together to build and maintain an adaptable SAP landscape.

  • Extensibility

    • SAP systems are crucial for the smooth operation of many companies, offering a wide range of software solutions to handle key business tasks. Despite the extensive functionality offered by SAP, businesses may find that the standard offerings don't fully meet their specific needs. Extending an SAP system is often required to adapt to a business's unique processes, requirements, and challenges.
  • Integration

    • For smooth end-to-end business process execution, integrating various IT solution components is a technical necessity. Using a Clean Core approach, these integrations use SAP's standard integration scenarios. These scenarios are designed to map comprehensive business processes using pre-configured best practice content, leveraging modern integration technologies like OData, SOAP, or events.
  • Data

    • The Clean Core strategy ensures that all business and system-related data is consistently accurate, complete, relevant, and accessible. Tools like SAP Master Data Governance can aid in creating a unified master data management approach across various domains to enhance data accuracy.
    • Additionally, SAP Datasphere plays a role in simplifying the data landscape, facilitating access to data across hybrid and cloud environments and utilizing existing SAP BW models. SAP Datasphere keeps the semantics and associations of SAP data intact, which shows the data in its business context.
  • Business Processes

    • Organizations depend on structured business processes for daily operations, management, and strategic planning. These processes can intersect with various IT systems and sometimes require manual intervention. Streamlining these processes and boosting automation can help organizations reduce unnecessary steps and save resources, improving efficiency and quality.
  • Operations

    • In the context of Clean Core dimensions, operational management can be categorized into two primary objectives: "cleaning the core" and "maintaining the core’s cleanliness." When dealing with a brownfield implementation, "cleaning the core" entails thoroughly reviewing custom code to decide whether it should be phased out, reworked, or updated.

Main challenges in adopting SAP BTP and Clean Core

  • Technical Challenges of Clean Core

    • Many organizations are struggling with the Clean Core principle, because they are following the traditional project approach and are treating Clean Core and the SAP BTP as purely technical tasks. When comparing the ABAP Workbench with the SAP Extension Suite with regard to the traditional tasks, development becomes significantly more cumbersome and intricate by Clean Core. The tooling and the API-based access reduce the freedom of the developer and add complexity. These aspects together with the lack of maturity, for example with regard to the range of whitelisted APIs and publicly accessible objects, even raise doubts regarding the technical feasibility of the Clean Core Principle. Furthermore, many core processes such as the application lifecycle management need to be adapted, while clear recommendations on how to do this in detail are still scarce.
  • Change Management Challenges of Clean Core

    • This aspect leads over from the technical challenges to change management aspects. As long as Clean Core is only addressed as a technical task, the change management tasks focus mainly on the development. One challenge of the prevailing approach is that developers are getting involved in transition projects only at a rather late stage. Considering all the aforementioned aspects, it is no surprise that there is limited acceptance of Clean Core on behalf of the developers. In this context, the core challenge is to find a way to ensure the adherence to the Clean Core principle, which cannot be addressed by change management alone, but also is an organizational task.
  • Organizational Challenges of Clean Core

    • As S/4HANA transformation projects are anything but trivial, project managers already face enough organizational challenges without Clean Core. In many cases, the primary goal is to get just the most essential functionality up-and-running. Ambitious project timelines and restricted resources demand a strict focus on the key topics, and especially greenfield transitions are and should be primarily driven from a business perspective. However, when following a technical approach, Clean Core is often perceived rather as an inefficiency also from an organizational perspective, because it appears to require a lot of effort for little benefit, especially in the re-implementation of legacy code.

Splisys helps deliver value for its customers through SAP BTP and Clean Core

Being there in the SAP market and that too actively engaged with customers of varying segments and turnovers Splisys has a deep understanding of any digital transformation nuisances. We know that serving the customers is not just meeting the asks but walk that extra mile to understand the context in which the requirements have come up. With our experience management and delivery teams our capabilities go beyond just technical expertise and include aspects like communication, agility, and customer-centricity.

  • Deep Technical Expertise

    • We have a pool of resources who not just possess specialization in relevant areas but who have also put those ideas and knowledge to practice and help other clients achieve their KPIs. We know that for such cutting-edge technologies one needs to be aligned with the OEM’s vision. To achieve this, we have all our people attend the relevant webinars, seminars, and other relevant assets from SAP and their technology partners to remain at par with the evolution.
  • Customer-Centric Approach

    • With the approach of "listen first and then act," we are a truly customer-focused IT provider, aiming to understand the client's business challenges, goals, and pain points. This enables us to tailor solutions that address their unique needs. By proactively solving the problems at hand and pre-empting potential ones, along with clear communication plans, we help bring desirable transformations.
  • Keep it Agile and Nimble

    • We understand that a System Integrator must be able to quickly adapt to changing business requirements, industry trends, and technological advancements. This is especially important in the fast-evolving IT landscape. With this in mind, while offering industry-standard solutions, we maintain true flexibility to deliver customized, scalable solutions that meet specific customer demands.
  • Security is Foremost

    • Given the increasing threat of cyberattacks, an IT service provider must have strong security protocols in place to protect customer data and systems. We ensure that solutions meet regulatory and industry-specific compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, HIPAA). We also help customers stay compliant with changing laws and regulations. As a holistic approach, Splisys supports businesses in planning for disaster recovery and business continuity, ensuring that systems can quickly recover in case of emergencies.