CoreALM Product

Clean Core for SAP S/4HANA and BTP: A Practical Guide and Resource Hub

Clean Core is one of SAP’s most important strategic principles for S/4HANA and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP). It is the foundation that enables faster upgrades, stable operations, extensibility, and innovation at scale.

Request Live Demonstration >

Clean Core

What Is Clean Core?

Clean Core is SAP’s recommended approach for keeping your S/4HANA and BTP environments stable, upgradeable, and free from unnecessary customization.

SAP’s Clean Core Approach provides five key principles:

Business processes

Keep competitiveness while reducing complexity.

Extensibility

Decouple extensions from the standard core.

Data

Control data according to the latest solutions.

Integration

Keep the system landscape reliable and flexible.

Operations

Keep the operations effective and efficient.

In practice, Clean Core is not only a technical concept. It requires process discipline, governance, and aligned delivery practices across both SAP and non-SAP systems.

Profits

What Is Clean Core?

Clean Core delivers the stability, governance, and agility needed to upgrade faster, reduce complexity, and innovate without risking core integrity.

Faster SAP Upgrades

Stable digital core + externalized innovation = upgrade cycles measured in weeks, not quarters.

Lower Technical Debt

Standard processes prevent unnecessary custom code, reducing future rework.

Higher Agility

When SAP is stable, teams can innovate through BTP and connected applications without risking system integrity.

Better Governance Across the Enterprise

Clean Core provides a foundation for unified governance, testing, and lower risk release cycles across all applications and divisions.

Solution

How CoreALM Enables Clean Core

CoreALM unifies processes, enhances visibility, and ensures safer SAP releases – accelerating upgrades, strengthening governance, reducing technical debt, and enabling innovation without compromising stability.

Align Processes with SAP Standards (SAP Signavio)

Clean Core begins with standardized business processes. Start by leveraging the SAP Best Practices process models in SAP Signavio, and integrate with SAP Cloud ALM and your agile tools.

Validate Clean Core with Testing and Monitoring

Clean Core requires continuous validation, including:

automated regression testing
impact analysis
process monitoring
readiness dashboards in SAP Cloud ALM

CoreALM integrations maintain traceability, so every change is validated end-to-end.
Services:
Automated Testing with Tricentis Tosca
Change Impact Analysis with Tricentis LiveCompare
Application Lifecycle Management is SAP Cloud ALM

Govern Change Through SAP Cloud ALM

SAP Cloud ALM becomes the orchestration layer linking process design, testing, operations, and deployments. CoreALM extends Cloud ALM with deep integrations for Jira and Azure DevOps.

Products:

Jira Connector for SAP Cloud ALM
Azure DevOps Connector for SAP Cloud ALM

Integrate Agile Delivery with SAP Transports

Agile teams work in Jira or ADO, but those tools don’t directly manage the deployment of SAP Transports. CoreALM fills this gap by embedding transport management directly into Jira, Azure DevOps, and ServiceNow.

Products:
SAP Transport Management for Jira
SAP Transport Management for Azure DevOps
SAP Transport Management for ServiceNow

In practice, Clean Core is not only a technical concept. It requires process discipline, governance, and aligned delivery practices across both SAP and non-SAP systems.