Clean core Guiding Principles are designed to maintain the agility and cost-effectiveness of business-critical systems, ensuring they are primed for adopting innovations that propel business growth. By prioritizing standard processes and selectively incorporating stable extensions and customized integrations, these principles enable customers to quickly and flexibly adapt to changing business needs and take advantage of new capabilities. Let's take a quick look at each of these essential principles:
Business Processes:
A well-designed business process strategy minimizes customization, preserving system integrity and facilitating easier upgrades. By adopting standard SAP solutions and leveraging SAP Best Practices, businesses maintain alignment with objectives and optimize overall performance. Documentation and continuous validation are pivotal for operational efficiency. Customers should consider migrating to standard SAP processes, as available in the SAP Signavio Navigator, ensuring they minimize complexity where possible.
Extensibility:
Strategic assessment of customer extensions is required to ensure compatibility with SAP's standard logic. Extensions should be evaluated for their resilience to updates, prioritizing those that are less susceptible to disruptions. This minimizes adaptation efforts during system upgrades. Extensions should provide a clear business benefit and be avoided when feasible. Regular testing is key to maintaining functionality after SAP updates, supporting long-term stability.
Data:
Principled data management focuses on quality and efficient volume handling, emphasizing high-quality master data crucial for operations and digital transformation. Reliable data prevents operational disruptions and ensures sound analytics. Implementing data quality rules, correcting violations promptly, and continuous monitoring are necessary to meet evolving business requirements.
Integration:
To ensure seamless End-to-End running business processes and operating systems, utilizing SAP's standard integration scenarios is imperative. It focuses on future-proofed and cloud ready integration technologies, such as Odata or SOAP, API-led integration and a Event-driven approach, empowered by an operational excellence. These ensure seamless upgrades and ongoing innovation, optimizing operations to reduce total cost of ownership and development costs. The SAP Business Accelerator Hub offers flexibility in customization with clear SAP guidelines (the model company for SAP Business Suite) to ensure correct interface usage.
Operations:
Clean core operations is a cross-principle framework spanning governance, people, processes, toolchains, and the software stack, enabling agile, cloud-ready IT to drive business transformation and align business and IT strategy. It embeds customer Centre of Expertise and Solution Standardization Board governance, SAP Activate and RISE with SAP Methodology, supported by the integrated toolchain. Operate via an Operations Control Centre, DevOps, test automation, and disciplined release management. Keep S/4HANA current (latest SPS/FPS), align innovations to release planning, and enforce SAP’s security baseline/secure operations map. Define clear roles, monitor across the Business Suite, and manage technical debt through SSB governance and aligning with SAP roadmaps.
We shall explore the details of these principles along with the embedded Governance & Maturity framework in the next two units.