 | Clean core Mantra: Keep the operations effective and efficient. |
We now turn our attention to the final principle of clean core: operations. In the dynamic business arena, efficient processes drive value, and accentuating the role of IT as a service provider bolsters organizational agility. Clean SAP Cloud ERP operations are a linchpin to achieve this feat. The mantra here is "Keep the operations effective and efficient".
If "clean core" is the what (a standardized system), then "clean core operations" is the how (how you run, manage, and maintain that system).
In simple terms: clean core operations is the principle of managing your SAP landscape in a standardized, automated, and non-disruptive way that preserves the integrity and benefits of your clean core.
It's a shift in mindset from complex, manual, reactive firefighting to a streamlined, proactive, and automated management model.
Operations as a principle plays a key role in supporting all other areas. It helps to transform IT enabling it to support business changes through proper organization, rules, and tools. Operations fosters a cloud-based, agile approach within a company. It emphasizes the close connection between IT and business transformations, ensuring clear communication and alignment of strategies between business and technical solutions.
Why Do We Need Clean Operations?
Clean operations are not just an IT topic – they are strategic capability, they help organizations to run their SAP systems with clarity, control and confidence ensuring technology remains a driver of business transformation rather than a barrier to it.
Here is why it’s crucial to have Clean Operations:
Drive Agility: In today’s digital world, IT can no longer operate as separate island. Clean core approach aligns IT operations with business goals in order to create a seamless and adaptable environment. By shifting toward cloud-native tools and agile methodologies, organizations can react faster to market changes, customer needs and strategic shifts.
Ensure Governance: Without proper governance, SAP systems can quickly become inconsistent, slowing down upgrades and increasing potential risks. clean core promotes standardized governance models that define clear roles and responsibilities, procedures for changes/releases, incident management, and requirements management through a solution standardization board. This ensures that systems remain compliant with SAP upgrade cycles, minimizing the effort and risk involved in staying current.
Improve Efficiency: Efficiency in operations stems from transparency and automation. clean core supports a comprehensive integrated toolchain — including SAP Cloud ALM, SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX — that bridges the gap between business requirements and IT execution. This full integration enables faster detection of issues, better tracking of changes, and more effective collaboration between teams.
Strengthen Reliability: By standardizing processes and leveraging cloud-native operations, businesses can reduce downtime, accelerate patching, ensure system availability, and enhance reliability through rigorous testing and test automation practices.
How To Achieve Clean Operations
Initial Considerations Of Achieving Clean Core Operations
Achieving clean operations initially involves the following pillars:
- Embedding Governance and Agile Practices
To ensure a lasting clean core, it's essential to weave governance and agile practices into your organizational fabric. Establish governance structures like the Operations Control Center which promote transparency and flexibility in decision-making, while methodologies such as SAP Activate and RISE with SAP Methodology guide strategic alignment. Integrating application lifecycle management with DevOps ensures smooth, transparent release management, balancing innovation delivery with stability and security.
- Embedding Proactive Agile Methods
Proactive agile methods accelerate transformation by fostering IT and business collaboration. Strategies such as early security integration or "shift-left" approaches help integrate security considerations into the development lifecycle, ensuring robust protection without stifling innovation. Streamlined operations and boosted collaboration are achieved through end-to-end toolchains across the application lifecycle, enabling consistent information reuse and alignment of strategy, architecture, and post-Go-Live operations.
- Enabling And Adopting An End-To-End Toolchain
Key tools include (but are not limited to):
- SAP Cloud ALM
- SAP Readiness Check
- SAP LeanIX
- SAP Signavio
- Leveraging SAP Innovations
Staying current with SAP innovations helps organizations maximize business value and maintain a competitive edge. Regular updates through Feature Package Stack and Support Package Stacks minimize operational and cybersecurity risks, keeping environments secure and future-ready. By embedding these practices, learners appreciate the strategic alignment of governance, agile approaches, and technological advancements, paving the way for effective execution and sustained success.
Governance Aspects of Clean Core Operations
In addition to initial considerations organizations should also pay attention to governance aspects. there is a Governance & Maturity Framework that SAP highly recommends organizations utilize. This framework has been established as a self-assessment tool for evaluating all principles required to achieve Clean Operations. This framework is broken down into eight key practices, each addressing specific aspects of governance and maturity. As illustrated in the graphic above, these practices provide detailed guidance and measurement criteria that encompass the crucial elements necessary for maintaining clean operations. There are eight categories each of which is briefly summarized below.
- Clean Core Governance
Achieving a clean core governance model is fundamental to ensuring consistency within an organization's approach and fostering the capacity for continuous innovation adoption. This requires establishing robust organizational governance and practices that align with the new operating model, effectively managing implementations and ongoing innovation cycles. Such governance helps maintain a structured environment that supports efficient decision-making and strategic alignment, ensuring the organization remains adaptable to changing business landscapes while safeguarding mission-critical operations.
- Business Transformation Toolchain
The business transformation toolchain plays a vital role in enhancing speed, agility, transparency, and collaboration between business and IT functions. By streamlining implementation and operational processes through integrated tools, organizations can accelerate innovation and focus on realizing value efficiently. This toolchain acts as a bridge, facilitating effective communication and collaboration, thereby driving the organization towards its strategic goals with greater agility.
- Continuous Improvement for Clean Core Adoption
Continuous improvement is essential for sustaining a clean core strategy, especially as business requirements evolve and may incur technical debt due to capability availability and roadmap considerations. Organizations must undertake regular assessments and revisitations of requirements to align them with future innovation cycles and ensure ongoing improvement in clean core adoption. This continuous refinement allows organizations to mitigate technical debt progressively and uphold a streamlined, efficient core.
- Test Management and Execution
Testing management and execution are critical components of any transformative initiative. Agile-based testing approaches and test automation are crucial for enhancing quality while reducing the time required from requirements gathering to deployment. Effective test management ensures that innovations are rolled out smoothly, increasing reliability and reducing potential disruptions.
- Software Delivery Efficiency
Software delivery efficiency is pivotal to attaining business agility. It's crucial to enhance the speed of delivering software solutions that support business needs, while concurrently ensuring quality and reliability. This balance guarantees that business value is realized comprehensively and operations continue seamlessly. Efficient software delivery processes minimize delays and enhance responsiveness to market changes.
- Secure Operations
Secure operations within the enterprise landscape are critical for protecting business interests. By maintaining rigorous security protocols, organizations can mitigate the risks of system intrusions, safeguard the confidentiality of business data, ensure user authenticity, and reduce the risk of business outages caused by unauthorized interactions. Security acts as a defensive layer, allowing businesses to operate confidently in a rapidly changing environment.
- Release Management
Release management is integral to maintaining a stable, efficient, and agile SAP environment, ensuring that enhancements, patches, and upgrades are delivered predictably and with minimal disruption. Effective release management allows an organization to stay current with the latest SAP releases, promoting the adoption of new innovations while reducing risk.
- IT Operations Excellence
Finally, IT operations excellence underpins successful SAP transformations by ensuring system reliability, performance, security, and scalability. It allows seamless business processes and minimizes disruptions, which is crucial for maintaining operational momentum and achieving organizational objectives.
Check out the video on clean core operation APIs
Conclusion
Clean core Operations refers to the day-to-day operational activities and governance processes that ensure an SAP Cloud ERP system adheres to clean core principles. It's not about achieving a clean state once; it's the ongoing discipline of running the system in a way that keeps it clean.
| Organizations must establish integrated monitoring and alerting of all facets of clean core, such as data and extensions. |