Introducing extensibility

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

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.

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.

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: