Hoarders: SAP Edition

Every SAP consultant can, in good conscience, advise their clients to “use standard,” leave old customizations behind when migrating to S/4HANA, and so on. And that advice is about as helpful as telling someone to just “live a healthy lifestyle.” Easier said than done. But what if I told you there is a practical solution that can actually set you on the path to a healthier life… err… SAP environment.

I’m sure everyone is familiar with the concept of “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” (or whatever the equivalent is in the metric system). But when it comes to the ERP system, for some reason, this is rarely even considered. Enhancements, user exits, interfaces just keep getting added and added over the years. Sooner or later, your SAP system turns into a hoarder’s den. At some point, even if you want to remove something, you can’t - because there’s a Jenga tower of more stuff piled on top of it. What other blocks might fall if you take out that 10-year-old user exit at the bottom? Who knows. And no one wants to find out in production and then be responsible for the collapse.

Years of dealing with my husband’s hoarding tendencies taught me one thing: you need to get ahead of it, or it will spiral out of control. Therefore, our house is now declared full, and the only way something other than food can be brought in is if something goes out. A complete moratorium on enhancements obviously wouldn’t be realistic for an enterprise. But if you’re after that coveted “Clean Core” you’ve heard so much about, everything that goes into your SAP system needs to have a strategy to possibly go out. For example, set a specific review period for the enhancements. Laws and processes change, but when a BAdI is implemented, it just stays there forever.

There isn’t a nice and easy solution to a pile of random changes that’s been accumulating for many years. But what you can start right now is simply not building another pile. Whoever is doing the next migration to T/5HANA BTP Build Business Suite, AI Edition will thank you. JP