SAP Clean Core: Why It Matters for S/4HANA Upgrades & Supply Chain Optimization
What is SAP Clean Core?
SAP Clean Core is a strategic approach that enables businesses to maintain a standardized, upgradeable, and cloud-ready SAP S/4HANA system. By minimizing heavy customizations, companies can avoid the costly and time-consuming challenges of future upgrades, ensuring that their ERP system remains flexible and scalable.
Why is SAP pushing for a Clean Core?
Historically, many organizations customized their SAP ERP systems heavily to fit unique business needs. While these customizations provided tailored solutions, they also introduced several challenges:
- Upgrade delays – Custom code can make system upgrades costly and risky, often leading to significant delays.
- Maintenance overhead – Non-standard configurations increase the complexity of system maintenance, burdening IT teams.
- Integration difficulties – Extensive customizations can hinder seamless integration with new SAP functionalities and cloud-based innovations.
SAP’s Clean Core strategy addresses these challenges by ensuring that business logic and extensions are managed in an upgrade-friendly, side-by-side manner, keeping the SAP system itself as standard as possible.
Key principles of SAP Clean Core
Adopting a Clean Core approach involves focusing on several critical components:
Extensibility
Adding functionality to standard software to address unique organizational needs without altering the core system.
Integration
Ensuring seamless communication between extensions and the standard solution, as well as between different systems.
Data management
Maintaining consistent, accurate, and efficient data, including configuration, master, and transactional data.
Business processes
Streamlining end-to-end processes to reduce complexity and enhance efficiency.
Operations
Implementing strong governance for infrastructure management, upgrade decisions, and system maintenance.
By adhering to these principles, organizations can maintain a system that is both flexible and resilient, capable of adapting to evolving business requirements.
How ifm aligns with SAP Clean Core
We are proud to be among the first 10 companies worldwide to achieve SAP Clean Core certification for Release 25.0 of our Supply Chain Excellence solution suite. This certification underscores our commitment to delivering seamless, future-proof supply chain planning, execution, and optimization solutions within SAP.
Why this matters for organizations running SAP
- Native SAP integration: Release 25.0 of Supply Chain Excellence is built to work natively within SAP S/4HANA, eliminating the need for disruptive custom code and ensuring real-time data consistency across all supply chain operations.
- Clean core compliance: Our solutions keep custom modifications separate from SAP’s main system. This ensures long-term scalability without the technical debt of legacy customizations and allows businesses to upgrade easily.
- Support for RISE with SAP: ifm’s Clean Core-certified solutions are fully aligned with RISE with SAP, empowering businesses to accelerate cloud transformation and operational efficiency — without costly rework or migration challenges.
