Digital transformation is essential to future-proofing your organization. More than half (59%) of respondents to a survey of the SAPinsider community said that transformation was either very or extremely important to their organization. Forty-nine percent of respondents said that their top action supporting transformation is implementing automation tools and technologies in both new and existing systems. According to SAPinsider’s Transformation in the Enterprise benchmark report, organizations need a clean core to achieve a greater level of automation. “No matter what the business drivers are impacting your strategy and plans around transformation, having a central system with limited customization will help provide the platform you need to address those drivers. Whether you are looking to update systems to provide more insight, leverage automation, or redesign processes, these tasks are more readily completed when there are fewer customizations that need to be considered,” the report recommends. It’s clear from the report that organizations need a clean core for transformation and future-proofing their ERP investment. If organizations are currently using SAP ECC, it’s even more important to move to a clean core to ease the migration to S/4HANA.

Future-Proofing Steps

What can organizations do to future-proof their SAP ERP system? Here are some steps they can take:

• Move existing customizations out of SAP. It’s vital to clean SAP ERP systems of custom code to improve performance and pave the way for SAP S/4HANA. Organizations can use automation-driven solutions to analyze custom code in their SAP systems and then restructure the customization to clean out the core.
• Create new functionality outside of the SAP ERP core. This will help keep the core clean. Over the years, many organizations have hired developers and consultants to customize their ERP code to provide unique functionality for their business and industry, creating code clutter. A clean core will allow organizations to begin their transformation even before upgrading their ERP.
• Adopt a low code development platform. Low-code development can quickly help your organization adapt, scale, and embrace future opportunities. The promise is not to simplify coding but to minimize or eliminate its need, resulting in faster and future-proof development. Low-code development enables a faster and more modern way of building new functions without the technical debt from custom code. A future-proof software development approach can help develop applications that are flexible to change — much needed when the application’s future is uncertain.

ServiceNow Helps with Future-Proofing

ServiceNow, a workflow and process automation software provider, can help SAP customers tackle the challenges of migrating to SAP S/4HANA and future-proofing their SAP ERP system with a clean core. ServiceNow’s approach is to diagnose your SAP core to understand your migration priorities. With those targets identified, it defines the best ways to transform those customized workflows using either an out-of-the-box solution or recreating those functions outside of SAP. The company provides a customization mining tool that lets you view everything down to the business process steps and all the associated SAP transaction codes. Not only can you analyze each step, but you can determine where you have unwanted processes. Once you have those insights in hand, you can focus on the best options to modernize those workflows. For non-core customizations, you can replace many of those with modern ERP solutions, such as out-of-the-box software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions. Where out-of-the-box capabilities may not meet requirements, you can opt to re-platform those with ServiceNow’s Creator Workflows. Your core ERP modules remain in SAP, readily available for easy migration. Creator Workflows provide standardized pre-built experience components and low-code tooling and templates to create new functions as needed without re-creating the clutter that stifles innovation. Quickstart templates and a drag-and-drop development environment of modular building blocks and pre-built components empower your citizen and professional developers to collaborate effectively with your application development team to deliver new innovations with no impact to the core. Citizen developers don’t have traditional coding skills but can help build future solutions either on their own or by teaming up with professional developers — without cluttering the core with custom code. ServiceNow helps businesses transform by automating and optimizing their processes while improving user experience, security, governance, and performance. In addition, ServiceNow integrates artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into its Creator Workflows platform to provide predictive intelligence. With the platform, users have a single full context view of analytics and AI-assisted recommendations to resolve issues quickly.

What Does This Mean for SAPinsiders?

1. Assess your most critical future-proofing needs and secure the assistance needed to satisfy those needs. Spend time understanding your customizations in SAP in preparation for modernizing them on a system of action and make sure that you secure the assistance you need in the required timeframe.
2. Define the success criteria for your future-proofing initiatives early in the process. Identify your success criteria and ensure that you develop key performance indicators to measure success.
3. Deploy low-code app development to future-proof your innovation. To build a foundation for the future, implement low-code development to meet your near- and long-term transformation needs.