When Delivery Stalls at the Finish Line
SAP changes processes still lag behind because they weren’t designed for DevOps.
At first glance, enterprise change efforts seem better supported than ever. SAP teams have free access to Cloud ALM—a cloud-native platform that spans the full SAP delivery cycle. Digital teams guide feature delivery in Jira or Azure DevOps and manage incidents and change approvals through ServiceNow. On paper, these tools promise transparency, velocity, and structure.
And for small, well-contained changes, they usually deliver.
Routine updates and minor enhancements tend to flow through the pipeline with minimal friction. They’re scoped clearly, tested locally, and deployed predictably. But that’s not where most organizations are feeling the pressure today. Customers now expect a consistent experience across every touchpoint.
That’s why business leaders are demanding more frequent process-level improvements—changes designed to improve integration, unlock new business models, or improve efficiency. These aren’t full-scale transformations, but they go well beyond maintenance. And increasingly, clean core principles require that these changes combine SAP standard capabilities with side-by-side extensions that live outside the core system.
That’s where the real challenge emerges. These changes don’t just affect how systems function—they affect how the business runs. They span teams, tools, and platforms. Yet in many organizations, the delivery approach is still scoped by application boundaries. As a result, integration issues and misalignments aren’t caught until testing—when it’s often too late to adjust without delay or compromise. In these cases, changes may be rejected for rework or accepted despite falling short of the intended outcome. Either way, confidence erodes.
The governance required to protect SAP’s core integrity can then feel like a bottleneck. But in reality, the slowdown was inevitable—baked into the plan by a lack of cross-application alignment from the start.
Why Process-Centric Change Breaks Siloed Delivery
Breaking ownership down by application or function may simplify responsibilities—but it doesn’t reflect how business processes operate.
Most organizations assign business process ownership by functional area—such as finance, procurement, or supply chain. This structure works well for operational clarity and domain expertise. But business processes don’t stop at function boundaries. An enhancement to a procure-to-pay or order-to-cash process might touch finance, logistics, vendor portals, middleware, and customer-facing channels—all of which span SAP and non-SAP systems. SAP may anchor much of the logic, but it’s rarely the only application involved. That’s where the cracks begin to show.
1. Local Optimization Creates Downstream Disruption
Teams often try to accelerate delivery by scoping changes tightly within their own domain. They simplify workflows, modify logic, or fast-track enhancements—believing that speed in their area equals speed overall. But without full visibility into upstream and downstream impacts, these local changes create problems elsewhere. These issues usually surface during end-to-end testing—when time is short and rework is costly.
2. Governance Tightens Down Instead of Shifting Left
When late-stage issues slip through, governance often responds by adding more reviews, stricter controls, and longer checklists—especially in areas where problems have occurred before. But this reactive tightening rarely addresses the root cause: key stakeholders weren’t engaged from the start. Effective governance isn’t just a sign-off at the end—it should shape how requirements are scoped, who gets involved, and how much control is appropriate for each change. A one-size-fits-all approach rarely works.
3. Delivery Moves Forward Before Business Decisions Are Finalized
Many cross-functional changes hinge on business decisions that are complex and slow to resolve. While those decisions are delayed, delivery teams—under pressure to meet deadlines—move forward based on assumptions. But when the final decision arrives, it often breaks those assumptions, forcing rework, delays, or compromises. The result isn’t just lost time—it’s frustration, and often a less effective solution.
Breaking ownership down by application or function may simplify responsibilities—but it doesn’t reflect how business processes operate.
Clean Core Raises the Stakes on Coordination
Keeping the core clean doesn’t simplify delivery—it makes alignment more essential.
While most organizations conceptually embrace the value of a clean core, the delivery implications are often underestimated. Deciding whether to enhance SAP’s standard capabilities or build a side-by-side extension introduces a new layer of design complexity. And as the number of extensions grows, so does the scope, fragmentation, and coordination effort required to make even modest changes.
Maintaining a clean core doesn’t eliminate complexity—it redistributes it. What once lived entirely in ECC or S/4HANA may now span BTP services, third-party apps, or custom-built APIs. The result is a modular but highly interdependent landscape. That’s why cross-functional governance becomes even more important under clean core. Without strong alignment across SAP and non-SAP delivery teams, changes risk being misaligned, delayed, or compromised.
Keeping the core clean doesn’t simplify delivery—it makes alignment more essential.
Integrated Delivery Models for Cross-Platform Change
To move fast without breaking things, teams need full alignment around business processes.
To deliver change effectively, teams must start by looking at business process flows and ensuring that all cross-functional requirements are captured early. Those requirements need to be documented and linked to the related business processes, the work items driving system changes, and the test cases that will validate them. And those linkages must span application boundaries.
That’s where CoreALM’s integration suite comes in. Our connectors for Jira, Azure DevOps, and ServiceNow bring SAP changes into the tools teams already use—while maintaining traceability back to process models, Cloud ALM, test artifacts, and the actual changes and transports in SAP. This creates a more connected SAP change management workflow across systems.
For example:
- Cross-functional teams can attach SAP transports, BTP extensions, front-end digital code, and middleware updates to a single user story in Jira or Azure DevOps.
- Change requests in ServiceNow can trigger change impact analysis and automated testing for high-risk areas.
- Transports can be managed at the release level, taking into consideration all dependencies and potential conflicts across parallel landscapes.
To move fast without breaking things, teams need full alignment around business processes.
Conclusion: Speed Comes from Structure—Not Shortcuts
SAP teams don’t need to work faster. They need to work smarter across systems.
What’s slowing delivery isn’t the lack of tools or talent—it’s the mismatch between how change is planned and how processes actually run. When ownership is divided by platform and governance kicks in too late, even well-intentioned changes stall at the finish line. Clean core principles and modular architectures don’t reduce complexity—they push it out to the edges. That means coordination across systems isn’t optional—it’s foundational. If your delivery model isn’t aligned to your process model, you’ll keep hitting the same walls.
To fix it, organizations must:
- Start with process outcomes—not system boundaries – Scope work around what the business needs, not what each platform owns.
- Tailor governance to the impact—not the intake – Apply the right level of coordination based on the degree of the change and the frequency of use in production.
- Integrate SAP into the enterprise delivery rhythm – Use tools that connect SAP change to your existing planning, testing, and release workflows—without forcing teams to switch contexts.
Because speed in SAP isn’t about cutting corners. It’s about making smarter decisions earlier—and giving every team the visibility they need to get it right the first time.
