Steady as She Goes...Clean Core and GenAI

With the recent updates to the Clean Core Guidelines for ABAP development for Private Cloud and On-premise S/4HANA customers, I thought it would be a decent time to jump in and offer some commentary and point of view around what is happening around the world of ABAP Extensibility and future transformation.

At Sapphire this year, GenAI was all the rage. In fact, we talked with partners and customers who were only interested in solutions based on GenAI. I have to say the advancements being made are quite impressive and will be heavily integrated into our automation over the coming year, but leveraging LLMs for ABAP development still has a lot of challenges.

Based on my LinkedIn feed and all the messages I get, the new Clean Core ABAP guidance with SAP has made quite a splash. The same people who were telling you a year ago that Clean Core meant moving your entire custom repository to BTP are now out there jumping on to the latest SAP guidance and telling you they can now help you get to a Clean Core.

As the title of my article states, sometimes the most worthwhile thing to do is to take a steady, well-thought-out approach to the ABAP Clean Core challenge.

Let's first talk about where the SAP Guidance gets it right:

• It provides clear guidance on how to address one of the biggest value points related to Clean Core ABAP - upgradability. By classifying things into the new A,B,C,D framework and providing more detailed guidance, customer now have a path to improving their classic code base
• SAP has provided some guidance in mapping classic ABAP development patterns with their new BTP, ABAP Cloud extensibility patterns, so you know what to move where

For the last three years, we have been advising this approach, and it is built into the Clean Core Analysis we provide as well as the first round of automation we are building to address this problem. This approach has been discussed and validated with some of the top SAP Customers around the world.

However the topics above just begin to scratch the surface of the innovation potential that exists. If you are an SAP customer, ask yourself a question:

Are you willing to continue the same general approach to your classic code, or do you want to completely think about your repository in a different way?

Take a step back and think about the approaches being offered:

• ATC is still at the foundation of all of the analysis - ATC results for ABAP Cloud produce millions of rows and sometimes lack the necessary context necessary causing developers hours to interpret and fix those issues
• Are we perpetuating the same patterns that created the level of technical debt accrued over the last 20+ years of customization? Do we continue to only address priority 1 issues and leverage 30-year-old frameworks like SAPscript that are long overdue for replacement?
• Are the GenAI or Agentic AI solutions being talked about rooted in a foundation of data and thought necessary to produce good architectures and a future? Or are they simply being used as hype to show the latest thing?

Steady as She Goes - As an SAP customer, don't get caught up in the latest hype. My best advice:

• Define what Clean Core means to your Organization. Additional clarity has been provided by SAP and the answer is nuanced.
• Define your ABAP Extensibility and BTP Strategy - Become familiar with the new extensibility patterns and what is available in BTP, and set the standards for your future
• Begin to consider your ABAP Technical Debt - consider if you still want the same classic approach or whether it is really time to re-imagine and modernize your processes. Do you really want to fix the same non-released API across three different Open Order Reports that were written because 3 different users required a different field that the others couldn't see? Or do you want to take advantage of modern reporting technologies based on Standard SAP functionality?
• Understand what you are getting when you consider GenAI or Agentic solutions. If partners are claiming efficiency gains, custom solutions, challenge them on what they have. Measure them on their claims.

When you are ready to think about your approach to Clean Core in a different way, come talk to us. We would love have a in depth discussion and tell you more about the smartShift approach and what we are working on.

To give you just a sneak peek: What if you were able to replace up to 80% of your most common legacy SAP table reads with released CDS Views? What if you were able to analyze your entire repository and understand the recommended SAP target extensibility architecture in hours? What if you were able to map your classic repository back to SAP standard applications?

What if you could think about and re-architect your repository in a completely different way, leveraging years of software IP, a strong foundation of deterministic AI and innovations with GenAI and LLMs to give you confidence that your future SAP Customizations will serve you for years to come? Steady as she goes....