Maintaining a Clean Core in SAP S/4HANA While Promoting Cross-Ecosystem Orchestration

The SAP "clean core" strategy has become a central pillar for organizations migrating to S/4HANA, especially those adopting RISE with SAP. The promise is compelling: keep your core SAP system free from heavy customizations to accelerate innovation cycles, simplify upgrades, reduce technical debt, and lower total cost of ownership. Instead of modifying the core, extensions and integrations should leverage SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) services or capable third-party tools.

It's a sound strategy, but achieving its benefits requires looking beyond just scheduling jobs within a pristine SAP environment. The real challenge—and where the clean core principle often breaks down—lies in managing the complex business processes that inevitably weave through S/4HANA and numerous other systems across your hybrid landscape.

The clean core challenge: When processes extend beyond SAP's walls

Think about your critical end-to-end workflows, including order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, record-to-report, and hire-to-retire processes. These processes rarely execute solely within S/4HANA. They routinely involve the following types of tasks:

• Fetching data from or pushing data to Salesforce, Workday, or other SaaS applications.
• Integrating with on-premises manufacturing execution systems (MES) or warehouse management systems (WMS).
• Exchanging files (like invoices, orders, or master data) with cloud storage (such as AWS S3 or Azure Blob).
• Coordinating steps with legacy mainframe applications.
• Calling external APIs for validation or enrichment.
• Orchestrating data pipelines involving extract, transform, load (ETL) tools and cloud data warehouses.
• Integration into Service Catalogs to bring them closer to the business users.

Historically, the path of least resistance to managing this cross-system logic was often to embed custom ABAP code directly within SAP—for example, via user exits, Business Add-Ins (BadIs), custom reports, and interfaces. This home-grown complexity is precisely what the clean core strategy aims to eliminate.

So, how do you handle this complexity while keeping the core clean? Some suggest that it is sufficient to use a modern job scheduler to execute standard SAP transactions cleanly or to do BAPI calls within S/4HANA. While scheduling standard functions correctly in SAP is important, it doesn't address the orchestration of the surrounding cross-system logic, as well a passing information from orchestrated systems into SAP and vice versa.

Suppose your scheduler calls a standard SAP jobs. Where does the logic reside for fetching data from Salesforce first, transforming it into the correct format, handling potential errors during the BAPI call, and then triggering a subsequent action in a separate cloud service based on the result? Pushing all this integration logic into intricate BTP developments can be complex and costly. Relying solely on basic scheduling might inadvertently pressure developers back towards custom ABAP solutions when faced with tight deadlines—undermining the clean core goal entirely.

True clean core enablement: The power of external orchestration

This is where Automic Automation provides a more strategic and robust solution. Powered by AI, Automic enables you to ensure a true clean core by managing the entire end-to-end business process workflow, including all its complex cross-system logic, outside of the S/4HANA core. Automic is available as a customer-managed solution (for on-premises or cloud deployment) and as a comprehensive SaaS offering (Automic SaaS).

Here's how it works:

1. Interaction via certified interfaces: Automic communicates with your clean S/4HANA core using standard, supported, and certified interfaces like BAPIs, RFCs, IDocs, and OData APIs. No custom code is needed within SAP for the integration itself.
2. Externalization of complexity: All the complex workflow logic—sequencing steps across different platforms, managing dependencies (whether job to job, calendars or cross instance), handling data transformations between systems, implementing conditional logic (if-then-else), and governing sophisticated error recovery procedures—is defined and executed within the Automic platform.
3. Unified cross-system management: Automic connects natively to SAP and the vast ecosystem of non-SAP applications, including all the cloud platforms, databases, mainframes, and infrastructure involved in your processes. It orchestrates all the steps cohesively from a single platform.

Automic orchestration versus "clean job scheduling": A critical distinction

It's crucial to understand the difference between orchestration with Automic and so-called “clean job scheduling” tools. Here are some key points to consider about each:

• Clean job scheduling tools. These tools primarily focus on executing predefined SAP tasks (such as standard jobs and ABAP reports calls) inside SAP, potentially adhering to namespace rules. These tools often leave the complex challenge of inter-system integration logic—the primary driver of past core modifications—unresolved or pushed entirely onto BTP or custom code. They schedule the “what” within SAP.
• Orchestration with Automic. This approach focuses on managing the entire business process flow—the “how, when, and why”—across all involved systems. Automic interacts cleanly with S/4HANA via APIs but keeps the integration complexity outside of the core. It enables clean core strategies by providing a robust external mechanism to handle the integrations that would otherwise contaminate the core.

Automic doesn't just help you schedule clean jobs; it actively enables you to maintain a clean core by strategically externalizing the complex orchestration logic required by modern, interconnected cross functional business processes.

Reap the full benefits of your clean core strategy

By adopting an external orchestration approach with Automic, you unlock the full potential of your clean core initiative:

• Truly simplified upgrades: Minimize risk and effort during S/4HANA updates and patches because your core remains standard.
• Enhanced business agility: Adapt and modify cross-system business processes faster within Automic, bypassing lengthy SAP development cycles or complex transport management.
• Reduced technical debt: Avoid creating and maintaining complex, brittle custom ABAP code for integrations.
• Future-proof architecture: Seamlessly integrate new cloud services or applications into your workflows, without destabilizing the SAP core.
• Lower TCO: Reduce the long-term costs of managing customizations and complex upgrade projects.

Don't settle for just clean jobs—demand true orchestration

Achieving SAP S/4HANA agility requires more than keeping internal job definitions tidy. It demands a strategic approach to handling the inevitable complexity of cross-system business processes. By externalizing this complexity with Automic Automation's powerful orchestration capabilities, you can genuinely maintain a clean core, simplify your SAP journey, and accelerate the realization of business value.

Ready to enable a truly clean core with intelligent orchestration?

Externalizing business logic is crucial for maintaining that pristine core during your S/4HANA or RISE transformation, but how do you seamlessly manage those externalized processes? It takes more than basic job scheduling. Our new ebook, Mastering Your SAP Landscape: Intelligent Orchestration For SAP, shows you how unified, intelligent orchestration across the entire business process chain can make all the difference.