In today’s fast-paced digital economy, organizations are under constant pressure to innovate, remain agile, and reduce complexity—all while ensuring business continuity and operational excellence.
As enterprises increasingly move toward intelligent, cloud-based ERP landscapes, the concept of a “clean core” in SAP S/4HANA has emerged as a critical enabler for sustainable transformation. The clean core approach promotes a standardized, upgrade-stable, and extensible system by minimizing custom modifications and adhering to SAP’s best practices and extensibility frameworks. By aligning business processes, extensions, data, integrations, and operations under clean core principles, organizations can unlock faster innovation, lower total cost of ownership (TCO), and ensure long-term system resilience.
This article explores the essential elements of SAP S/4HANA clean core and outlines how adopting this strategy can help businesses future-proof their digital core. Additionally, it will outline the benefits of accelerating the cloud journey and driving the transition toward becoming an intelligent enterprise, as well as consolidating data from disparate sources, transforming it into usable formats, and loading it into target systems. In SAP environments, efficient ETL processes enable seamless integration between SAP modules and other enterprise applications, ensuring data consistency, accuracy, and accessibility.
Clean core is a framework of best practices that results in keeping both the SAP S/4HANA Cloud solution and its extensions upgrade stable. It aims to create modern, flexible, and cloud-compliant ERPs. This concept is applicable to SAP S/4HANA Private Edition as well as the Public Edition.
Below are the benefits of the SAP S/4HANA Clean Core approach:
The figure below illustrates the key guidelines of the SAP S/4HANA clean core approach, emphasizing a zero-modification policy, minimizing extensions through the extensibility framework, adopting an API-first strategy, leveraging SAP BTP for innovation, and questioning deviations from the standard.
Let’s now discuss the key elements of a clean core in SAP S/4HANA:
In the SAP S/4HANA journey, adopting a clean process approach aligned with clean core principles is essential for future-proofing business operations. This begins by establishing a strong organizational structure with clearly defined roles and responsibilities to ensure accountability and efficient governance across teams.
It is equally important to align the to-be process designs with technical realization by adopting SAP best practices, maintaining strict governance over business requirements and designs, and involving business users early for validation.
Embracing a "Why not standard" mindset (adopting SAP’s standard processes first and allowing deviations only with strong justification) minimizes customizations and preserves system integrity. Altogether, this strategy ensures streamlined operations, reduced TCO, faster innovation adoption, and a smooth path toward becoming an intelligent enterprise.
In the context of SAP S/4HANA extensions aligned with clean core principles, the primary objective is to decouple custom extensions from the standard system to maintain system integrity, operational efficiency, and ensure seamless upgrades.
Extensions must be avoided whenever possible by first evaluating whether standard ERP features or configurations can fulfill the business need. If extensions are necessary, they must be developed using only released local or remote public SAP APIs, BAdIs, or ABAP RESTful application programming model business object (BO) extension points.
Extensions can be created as on-stack (within SAP S/4HANA Cloud), either as key user extensions (type 1) or developer extensions (type 2), or as side-by-side extensions on SAP BTP (type 3). Typically, type 1 and type 2 extensions are used when a tight integration with SAP S/4HANA Cloud is required, whereas type 3 extensions are preferred when a more flexible, loosely coupled approach is suitable.
To comply with clean core guidelines, all extensions must be cloud-compliant, strictly using officially released extension points and avoiding any reliance on non-released or internal SAP objects, thus preserving system flexibility and upgrade readiness.
Customers have three options for adopting SAP S/4HANA, depending on their needs (called the three-tier extensibility model due to three tiers/options available):
The SAP extensibility framework enables organizations to adapt and enhance SAP S/4HANA functionality while preserving the integrity of the core system. By following the extensibility framework, businesses can innovate flexibly without impacting future upgrades, ensuring compliance with clean core principles like zero modifications, use of released interfaces, and cloud readiness.
In a modern SAP S/4HANA clean core environment, high-quality data is foundational to operational excellence and strategic decision-making.
Ensuring accuracy, completeness, consistency, timeliness, validity, and uniqueness of data is paramount. Organizations must implement proactive validation mechanisms, enforce robust data governance, and standardize collection and maintenance processes.
Real-time data integration, automated monitoring, and reconciliation frameworks ensure information remains current and actionable. By eliminating duplication and upholding integrity standards, businesses create a trusted data landscape that drives agility, innovation, and sustained competitive advantage.
In the context of integrating SAP S/4HANA Cloud with external systems, it is strongly recommended to utilize standardized application programming interfaces (APIs), specifically OData and simple object access protocol (SOAP).
You can also leverage SAP Integration Suite, an integration platform-as-a-service (iPaaS), to provide a comprehensive and standardized solution for middleware-based integration scenarios. The suite efficiently handles routing, message mapping, and connectivity, ensuring that incoming messages are processed and forwarded to target systems in a compatible format. As an out-of-the-box integration solution, SAP Integration Suite adheres to standardized APIs, reinforcing the clean core principles by minimizing customizations and facilitating smooth, scalable integrations.
SAP Event Mesh, part of SAP BTP, enables seamless communication between applications through asynchronous events, supporting the design of event-driven business processes within the SAP S/4HANA clean core framework. This architecture allows event providers to raise events, which are then consumed by event consumers that react accordingly.
SAP S/4HANA clean core integrations benefit from the application interface framework (AIF), which provides business users with a centralized platform to monitor and manage interfaces across various technologies, including OData and SOAP. AIF enables users to configure alerts for errors and resolve issues without the need of IT involvement, streamlining error handling and improving operational efficiency.
You can also use secure, consistent, and maintainable data transfer methods instead of file-based interfaces for importing or exporting data.
In SAP S/4HANA clean core integrations, it is recommended to avoid older technologies like remote function call (RFC) and intermediate documents (IDoc), favoring modern, flexible approaches such as OData and SOAP to ensure reliable, agile, and efficient integrations
A key aspect of SAP S/4HANA clean core operations is maintaining the system on the latest release to ensure stability, innovation, and compliance. For SAP S/4HANA Cloud Public Edition customers, this is inherently managed, as updates are automatically and simultaneously pushed to all tenants. However, customers using SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition or SAP S/4HANA (on-premise or hosted environments) are not subject to automatic updates and have the flexibility to adopt product-based innovations according to their own schedules. When this approach is taken, you should perform these items:
With the clean core in mind, let’s discuss what traditional RICEFW mapping would look like.
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SAP’s clean core extensibility levels classify custom developments into four levels (A-D) based on upgrade safety, API compliance, and architectural decoupling from the core system. This framework helps organizations minimize technical debt while ensuring system stability and future readiness.
Level A developments are fully compliant and are built using released SAP APIs (on-stack via ABAP Cloud or side-by-side on SAP BTP); fully upgrade-safe and recommended.
Level B are conditionally acceptable and use classic but supported APIs; they are generally stable but require governance.
Level C are partially compliant and access internal SAP objects (direct use of internal functional modules/classes); these have a higher upgrade risk and increased maintenance needs.
Level D are not recommended and relate to core modifications, implicit enhancement, direct write access to SAP Tables, or noAPI usage; these violate clean core standards and create severe upgrade risk.
The clean core dashboard helps customers monitor compliance and is accessible via SAP for Me via Systems & Provisioning > Systems > Clean Core Compliance. The dashboard displays key metrics such as software stack version, custom code volume, business modifications, and tier 1 extensions. The dashboard is currently available only for SAP S/4HANA Cloud Private Edition systems, and metrics are collected only for productive systems to reflect operational environments.
The SAP S/4HANA clean core approach is more than just a technical strategy; it is a foundational pillar for building a future-ready, intelligent enterprise. By adopting a zero-modification mindset, leveraging standardized extensions, and aligning with SAP's best practices across business processes, integrations, data, and operations, organizations can achieve greater agility, scalability, and innovation readiness. Clean core not only simplifies upgrades and reduces technical debt, but also empowers businesses to seamlessly embrace cloud technologies and continuous SAP innovation.
As enterprises continue to evolve in a digital-first world, embracing the clean core principles will be essential to maintaining operational excellence, reducing total cost of ownership, and unlocking the full potential of SAP S/4HANA. With the right governance, tools like the clean core dashboard, and a disciplined extensibility approach, companies can confidently drive transformation while keeping their core clean, compliant, and cloud-ready.