SAP Digitalization Strategies That Go Beyond the Clean Core Hype

The road to SAP S/4HANA is paved with good intentions but marred by legacy complexity for many enterprises. In a recent industry panel with Neptune Software, IT leaders from Saint-Gobain and Vodafone shared how they navigated this tension and moved from what they termed “Excel fatigue” to streamlined mobile apps without disrupting their critical systems.

From Excel Nightmares to 40+ Apps

The transformation at Saint-Gobain, a 360-year-old manufacturing giant, began with a simple frustration. Florent Nouveau, Head of the Neptune Competence Centre at Saint-Gobain, described a finance and supply chain environment dominated by manual work, which led the company to work with Neptune on this project.

“I was a bit tired of working on Excel,” Nouveau admitted, describing a landscape where price updates took two weeks, and forecasts took a month.

Leveraging Neptune Software, Nouveau’s team built a Competence Centre that bridged the gap between complex SAP code and business users. The results were immediate:

• A custom One Price application reduced the time required to update prices in SAP from two weeks to just two days.
• The team now has over 40 applications in the pipeline, covering everything from RFQ follow-ups to complex claim management.
• By masking SAP’s complexity behind a user-friendly interface, user adoption typically takes less than two weeks.

According to Nouveau, crucially, these apps read and write directly to SAP, maintaining Saint Gobain’s data integrity without forcing sales or operational staff to navigate transaction codes they don’t understand.

The Clean Core Reality Check

While Saint-Gobain focused on agility, the broader panel discussed the architectural implications of modernizing SAP and the role of a Clean Core approach.

Maansi Kala, Engineering and Integrations Manager at Vodafone, described the company’s Big EVO migration to SAP S/4HANA to illustrate her point. She noted that for Vodafone, maintaining a clean core is a non-negotiable principle to ensure future upgrades are safe. However, Kala highlighted the unpredictability of costs, a critical challenge with standard SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) models.

“Vodafone utilizes Neptune as a side-by-side extensibility framework to keep the core clean while ensuring predictable OpEx costs, avoiding the utility purchasing complexity often associated with cloud consumption models,” she said.

Warren Eiserman, Director at VMG Labs, echoed concerns about consumption-based pricing. He noted that many customers feel SAP BTP washed—defaulted into an architecture where they only realize the cost when the bill arrives.

Eiserman advised that Clean Core should be viewed as a direction rather than a rigid end state. The goal is not just compliance but delivering a competitive advantage through localization and innovation.

Don’t Wait to Innovate

The panelists concluded that organizations should not wait for a perfect SAP S/4HANA implementation to start improving user experiences.

“Start as soon as possible,” Vincent Kruse, Global Head of Consulting at Neptune Software, advised. “By identifying simple, high-friction processes, companies can deliver immediate value and habituate users to new digital tools long before the massive ERP migration is complete.”

What This Means for SAPinsiders

Decouple user experience from backend complexity. While the SAP backend is powerful, the frontend complexity often alienates the average business user. As Nouveau highlighted, many employees don’t use SAP because they don’t know their transaction number or feel lost in the interface. Therefore, instead of retraining users on complex GUIs, effective digitalization masks complexity. In the case of Saint-Gobain, by moving processes like price updates out of Excel and into a Neptune app, the company reduced processing time from two weeks to two days. Users adopted the new tool in under two weeks because it presented data in a way that made sense to them, not just the system.

Side-by-side Extensibility is key to a clean core. As organizations move to SAP S/4HANA, keeping the core clean is critical for future upgradability. However, distinct business needs still require customization, making it imperative to adopt a side-by-side extensibility framework. Thus, while SAP BTP is a core platform, diversifying with Neptune provides a predictable cost model and faster delivery for specific use cases. This approach allows IT teams to innovate and build custom functionalities outside the core ERP without dirtying it. Moreover, it prevents the technical debt trap of the past while avoiding the unpredictability of consumption-based cloud pricing models.

Don’t wait for the perfect migration to innovate. A common paralysis in the SAP ecosystem is waiting for a massive SAP S/4HANA migration to be 100% complete before improving business applications. The solution lies in starting to digitize immediately. By identifying low-hanging fruit, teams can deliver quick wins that build momentum. Saint-Gobain, for instance, didn’t wait for a complete migration but built apps on its current stack that will seamlessly transition when it eventually migrates in 2027, ensuring continuity and immediate ROI.