Introducing Extensibility

Objectives
After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

  • Explain the significance of SAP S/4HANA extensibility for optimizing business process

Describing the evolution of extensibility

Extensibility is evolving to help customers gain competitive advantage while reducing cost of upgrades. Watch this video to know how.

Introducing the two faces of extensibility

SAP proposes an extensibility concept inclusive of two extension types to support the development of powerful and life-cycle stable extensions:

  1. In-app extensions

    This includes extensions that can be performed in the S/4HANA application. Only a limited set of extensions are allowed, which should not affect the core application integrity when a software upgrade happens.

  2. Side-by-side extensions

    These are separate applications, which run on a separate platform (ideally the SAP Business Technology Platform). They interact with S/4HANA Cloud using a set of standard SAP APIs.

The spectrum of functions used in extensibility

Extensibility covers a broad spectrum of topics that allow customers and partners to adapt standard business software to their business needs. It ranges from business configuration, layout adaptation of UI, forms and reports, custom fields and logic, integration, custom terminology and translation, to customer-specific applications.

Describing extension use cases

With the side-by-side and in-app extensibility features, you can build additions to SAP S/4HANA that significantly increase the reach and scope of the system. SAP S/4HANA can be connected with processes that engage internet users, such as, online store users on mobile devices, or through experimental UI technologies. Furthermore, you can extend existing processes or invent new processes while easily combining SAP S/4HANA data with data from other systems. This has resulted in several typical extension applications:

Planning the extensibility activities based on SAP Activate

The Deployment Experience with SAP Activate

The overall deployment experience with SAP Activate is based on:

SAP Activate methodology

It is an agile implementation methodology with role-based detailed implementation tasks.

The Roadmap Viewer website contains the full documentation for all the flavors of the SAP Activate methodology.

In particular, the SAP Activate Methodology for SAP S/4HANA Cloudis dedicated to the RISE for SAP S/4HANA Cloud implementation.

SAP Best Practices

it is the set of ready-to-use business processes, available in all SAP S/4HANA Cloud tenants. Such processes are documented at https://rapid.sap.com

SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM is SAP's Cloud-based application lifecycle management offering, designed to manage hybrid-Cloud solutions. Further information at https://support.sap.com/en/alm/sap-cloud-alm.html

The extensibility activities in SAP Activate

The SAP Activate metodology forsees a collocation of extensibility activities in the overall implementation project:

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