Get more value from S/4HANA with SAP Extensibility options
I will focus on existing and new SAP partners who wish to connect their cloud offerings to S/4HANA customers or migrate their existing add-on to ABAP clean-code code. In this article, I will explain in more depth from a customer’s point of view which Extensibility Options fit the best different use cases for an SAP S/4HANA Cloud system.
As Software vendors like SAP consistently deliver best-practice solutions that should fit multiple customers. This means there will always be a gap between the requirements for your business processes and the software solution delivered to support them. There are several ways to close this gap. You can manage the gap by supporting it with manual procedures, but you can also try to solve it by extending your software solution with other solutions and custom development. In this article, I will focus on the following topics:
- Adopt your system by customizing your business processes
- Add ready-made solutions like SAP cloud products, SAP third-party add-ons, and SAP cloud partner solutions
- Personalize the UI using S/4HANA Personalization Options
- Build your own extensions using S/4HANA Extensibility Options
Customize your business processes.
The best and cheapest option to solve the gap is to customize your business process to fit into SAP’s best practice processes. By using the predefined templates and configuration options of S/4HANA, you can tailor your business processes to your needs. For S/4HANA public cloud, there is a specific cloud application called SAP Central Business Configuration, which enables you to scope, configure, and implement end-to-end business processes for your cloud solution from a central place. After setting up your S/4HANA Cloud public edition, you can use the Implementation Activities app for further configurations, such as in SAP ECC and other S/4HANA editions, using transaction SPRO.
SAP cloud products, SAP third-party add-ons, and SAP cloud partner solutions
When a gap remains between your business processes and the customizing, you should consider SAP cloud products, SAP S/4HANA on-stack third-party add-ons, or side-by-side SAP cloud partner solutions in the SAP store.
As mentioned in my previous article, SAP simplified the supported processes in the S/4HANA Cloud public edition. It moved functionality to other SAP Cloud products, providing even more functionality in their domain. These solutions can provide even more functionality than previously available in SAP ECC. In the last couple of years, SAP has invested a lot in integrating these SAP Cloud products with S/4HANA and has now positioned the complete integrated portfolio as Cloud ERP. However, with the simplification of S/4HANA, customers can also choose products from an SAP competitor to solve the missing functionality in S/4HANA for some domains. This results in some challenges that I will discuss later in this article.
Another way to solve the gap between business processes and SAP software is to install a third-party SAP add-on to the S/4HANA system or connect your system to a SAP side-by-side cloud partner solution. In the past, add-ons were often considered, and for SAP ECC, many add-ons were available. But for S/4HANA Cloud editions, this isn’t the case yet. SAP has previously asked its partners to build their solutions outside S/4HANA, in SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP), and provide this as an SAP cloud partner solution. SAP even set up a partner program to run these solutions as a SAAS offering on BTP, which makes it very easy for S/4HANA customers to consume these partner solutions. The possibility of closing the gap by providing SAAS offerings on BTP by a SAP cloud partner is a crucial aspect of SAP’s strategy to extend its footprint into the market. And from that aspect, I expect many more SAP cloud partner solutions soon.
However, besides the SAAS offering, I expect many more S/4HANA on-stack add-on products soon. SAP has launched the embedded ABAP Cloud stack of S/4HANA Cloud public edition 2023. This allows smaller SAP partners to deliver their add-ons based on ABAP Cloud to customers via a controlled git-based multi-off delivery. A SAP certification for this addon is unnecessary because the code follows the SAP clean core paradigm, which will be checked when you deploy your code. This removes the barrier for many SAP partners, consulting companies, and independent consultants to build and provide add-ons to their customers.
S/4HANA Personalization Options
In some cases, the gap is small and depends on the user of the S/4HANA system. You can influence how users work with the system by providing the proper business role. Authorizations and using default values in the Fiori Launchpad already allow you to influence and limit user entry, but you can go further.
S/4HANA Uis, based on Fiori Elements, can be configured to present data in a personalized way. You can add and remove filters and their values, change how the data is displayed, and store and share this personalized look and feel.
S/4HANA Key User Extensibility – UI adaption
Sometimes, these personalization capabilities aren’t enough, and you want to adapt the UI and change the look and feel of the applications to your needs. You can change or hide titles, buttons, and label names and reorder and hide fields and sections. If the S/4HANA app supports this option and you have the proper authorization, you will find the UI Adapt button in the menu of your Fiori Launchpad profile.
UI adaptation, default values, and personalization are strong capabilities of S/4HANA Cloud that can improve user experiences and reduce users’ knowledge gaps.
S/4HANA Extensibility Options
For some business processes, more than all of the options above are needed, and the only solution is to use the other S/4HANA Extensibility Options. My previous article mentioned that SAP provides eight possible S/4HANA Extensibility Options, as seen in the picture above. Before I elaborate on them, I want to address two topics that are relevant to understanding the S/4HANA Extensibility options:
- On-stack extensions versus Side-by-Side extensions
- Low-code versus Pro-Code
On-stack extensions versus Side-by-Side extensions
On-stack extensions are S/4HANA extensibility options embedded in the S/4HANA system. All capabilities, authorizations, support, and maintenance are directly dependent on the availability of your S/4HANA system, and these extensibility options are included in the S/4HANA licenses. Because these extensibility options run on the same instance as the S/4HANA system, they are tightly coupled. This allows for adopting extensions to standard S/4HANA processes and handling big datasets with excellent performance.
Side-by-side extensions are S/4HANA Extensibility Options, which run on their own instances in the SAP BTP Cloud environment. These extensions are loosely coupled with S/4HANA. These solutions will exchange data with S/4HANA through APIs and events. These extensibility options are primarily suitable when:
- The on-stack extension significantly impacts the available S/4HANA runtime resources;
- Casual or external users must participate. Still, you don’t want to give them direct or full access to S/4HANA;
- you need an extension, which, besides S/4HANA, also needs data from other cloud resources;
- you need solution extensions for multiple S/4HANA systems.
Low-code versus Pro-Code
The S/4HANA extensibility options are split into low-code and pro-code options. The pro-code option is the most flexible and powerful option for realizing your extensions, but you also need a professional SAP developer to build the extension. In many cases, you can realize the extensions by just adopting some slight modifications using applications that do this through minimal coding, supported mainly by a visual approach. In this case, you don’t need a professional SAP developer in the IT department; you can let business users with some coding knowledge build the extension. These types of business users who are using low-code applications are also known as citizen developers.
S/4HANA Key User Extensibility Option.
The S/4HANA Key User Extensibility Option is a low-code extensibility option in the S/4HANA system. It provides a set of Fiori apps to manage the most common changes needed to User Interfaces (UIs) and business processes.
Extend standard SAP UIs, reports, and APIs with custom fields.
With Custom Fields, you can create new custom fields and extend existing SAP data structures with calculated fields. This allows you to customize applications and adapt their UIs, reports, email templates, form templates, and APIs.
This custom fields capability allows storing, calculating, and using additional fields in your S/4HANA applications. It will follow SAP’s Clean Core strategy and is stable for upgrades and future-proof. With this option, you don’t need to improperly use existing SAP fields of SAP applications, which has happened a lot in the past in SAP ECC.
Influence the behavior of a S/4HANA application.
With Custom Logic, you can influence the behavior of standard S/4HANA applications. It will replace all the options we had in the past in SAP ECC, such as user exists, modifications, implicit enhancements, and enhancement spots. SAP has released predefined extension points in its standard SAP code lines, which can be influenced by custom code. Predefined extension points are available as business add-ins (BAdIs), and you can add the logic you need with this app. You can use a limited set of statements to influence the behavior of standard SAP business objects, interact with your custom business objects in the system, and even call services outside the S/4HANA system to create, update, or retrieve data from an external resource. To call services outside S/4HANA, you can use the Custom Communication Scenario app to configure the connectivity.
Implementing released BAdIs is the only future-proof solution in SAP’s Clean Core strategy that can influence the standard logic.
Building simple Custom Business Objects, transactions, and APIs.
With the Custom Business Object app, a citizen developer can develop small custom S/4HANA applications and backend services for new developments in S/4HANA and replace current custom-built applications in SAP ECC. The app allows you to create a custom data model with nodes and fields, add limited business logic such as determinations and validations, and generate the custom business object, the UI, and the backend service. When artifacts like fields, structures, value help, and methods are needed for multiple Custom Business Objects, you can use the Customer Reusable Elements app to build these artifacts.
The custom business object can be used in the custom logic of a standard SAP application. It can also be accessed as a Fiori application by S/HANA users when the object is added as an extension to an existing catalog using the app Custom Catalog Extensions. The custom business object can also be used by applications outside S/4HANA when the object’s backend service is generated and made publicly available after you process it with the app Custom Communication Scenario.
Make external web resources available.
The Custom Tile app allows you to create Fiori tiles in your Fiori Launchpad to access external web applications. Since the user must already have access rights to external web applications, this solution is best for other SAP cloud applications, publicly accessible internet applications, and custom-built and third-party applications running on SAP BTP, which shares the same identity provider as S/4HANA.
Assemble analytical reports and custom data sources.
In the clean core strategy of S/4HANA, you can’t access SAP tables directly anymore, but you should access your data through so-called CDS views. The CDS Views can be a projection layer on top of these tables but can also read data from other CDS views. The CDS views serve as a source for transactional and analytical apps, value-helps, APIs, and data extraction. SAP uses these CDS views to migrate its existing data model slightly to a new Virtual Data Model. The Virtual Data Model of SAP has many CDS views, but only the released CDS views can be used by SAP partners and customers.
The Custom CDS View app allows customers to assemble custom CDS views for analytical and read-only external APIs. They are based on released CDS views and other custom content, such as custom business objects and other custom CDS views. With the app, you can create a CDS View that selects fields from multiple data sources and adds new calculated fields. You can refine these chosen fields’ properties, add filters to refine the result set and add and maintain parameters for the usage within your view.
The Custom CDS View app also allows users to create CDS Views with analytical capabilities, the so-called Analytical CDS View. These views can be used in S/4HANA analytical tooling, the S/4HANA query builder app Custom Analytical Queries, S/4HANA KPI Designer, and APF Configuration Modeling.
Reports and overview page.
In SAP’s Clean Core strategy, SAP Fiori is the only supported UI for custom-built applications in S/4HANA. This means that all UI capabilities of SAP ECC, such as ABAP reports, ABAP dynpro, BSP, and WebDynpro, are obsolete and should be replaced.
However, this is easy for Custom Business Objects or custom CDS views. When these artifacts are exposed as S/4HANA external APIs, these APIs can be used as a source for the Fiori Elements tooling. With this tooling, a Fiori List Reports, Fiori Analytical List Page, and Fiori Overview Page can be generated in a few steps. A frontend developer can take this as a base, add the needed UI capabilities to the generated application, and deploy it to the S/4HANA system as a Custom Fiori App.
Real-time analytic dashboards.
When the analytical capabilities in S/4HANA and Fiori Elements don’t fit your business needs, you can always use a side-by-side tool like SAP Analytics Cloud. This is appropriate when using S/4HANA and other data resources to analyze and predict business outcomes and want to use the outcomes for business intelligence and enterprise planning.
S/4HANA supports this Extensibility Option by providing a live data connection between S/4HANA and SAP Analytics Cloud based on SAP’s optimized InA protocol. This allows SAP Analytics Cloud to query S/4HANA’s data sources in real time and react directly to changes.
The SAP Analytics Cloud Extensibility Option allows real-time dashboarding of business processes. The live data connection, machine learning, and artificial intelligence capabilities of SAP Analytics Cloud will also take the S/4HANA-supported business process to the next level, which isn’t possible with SAP ECC.
Process automation and interaction with occasional SAP users.
In most companies, a business process starts with collecting, checking, and approving information before it is entered into an ERP system. This process is usually manual and supported by unstructured data tools such as email, spreadsheets, documents, and notes.
The market recognized this and developed more structured, low-code solutions to support these processes. SAP entered this market, too, with SAP Build, a citizen development tool for building workflows and simple UIs to collect, check, and approve data for users who do not need access to a S/4HANA system.
When SAP examined these processes, it saw another significant improvement opportunity. Most processes had repeated steps, such as collecting and interpreting data from known sources and manually entering data into applications and unstructured tools, which robotic engines and artificial intelligence can easily automate without interaction with a user. This process automation capability was also added to the SAP Build portfolio.
SAP positioned SAP Build Process Automation as a side-by-side extension possibility for additional customer-specific processes and automation on top of S/4HANA. It will also replace the customer ABAP workflows we know from SAP ECC, which is no longer possible in S/4HANA.
Integrate your business processes in the cloud.
Many companies use software products other than SAP to automate their business processes. They want to work more closely with their business partners and can gain value by outsourcing part of their business processes to them. Companies also want to automate data exchange between ERP and their manufacturing systems.
ERP systems have exchanged data with each other almost from the beginning. In the early days, users had to make manual entries, but nowadays, they can use files and spreadsheets or even connect systems with APIs using EDI or internet-based networks. The data model should be aligned, and integration products should be introduced to map the content and API structures of the connected systems.
Integration becomes even more critical with the simplification of S/4HANA and the move of business functionality to other Cloud products. Traditional integration, as we know from SAP ECC, is not enough. By moving functionality to other cloud products, S/4HANA also loses the tight coupling between the business processes we had in SAP ECC. APIs alone are not enough to solve this issue. S/4HANA needs to provide notification events to connected systems when situations in the supported business processes are changed. The traditional integration architecture needs to shift to an event-driven architecture, precisely what SAP offers with its Cloud Integration Suite and S/4HANA Cloud events and APIs.
Cloud Integration Suite offers traditional EAI/B2B integration options, the capability to connect to non-SAP products using open connectors, and SAP Graph, a fully event-driven unified data model on top of SAP’s Cloud products.
Building your enterprise-grade cloud applications
When do you need a professional developer to build your custom application? As soon as you cannot solve the gap in our S/4HANA business process by connecting other software products, building process automation workflows and UIs, or modifying standard SAP screens and logic with key user extensibility options, you need a professional developer.
Of course, you can build this application on any platform in any language. However, when data from SAP Cloud products is involved, creating applications with SAP tooling is the best solution. From the perspective of S/4HANA, you can develop the application on-stack or side-by-side.
On-stack is the best solution if you need tight integration with your S/4HANA data or users. In this case, you build your application directly with ABAP Cloud on the embedded ABAP environment, and you can use all of S/4HANA’s capabilities. This is also known as SAP S/4HANA Cloud Developer Extensibility.
On the other hand, when you need an application loosely coupled from S/4HANA and mostly runs standalone or heavenly, depending on other SAP cloud products, the side-by-side extension SAP Build Code on BTP is the best solution. With SAP Build Code, a professional developer can build enterprise-grade Java and JavaScript cloud applications fast and with high quality, supported by AI-based code generation.
SAP BTP also offers an ABAP environment for developing side-by-side applications. When you upgrade to the S/4HANA cloud, this environment can be used to build new, future-proof, clean-core ABAP applications while still running SAP ECC. After the upgrade, these applications can later be moved as SAP S/4HANA Cloud Developer Extensibility of the embedded ABAP environment of your S/4HANA. However, you can also move your SAP S/4HANA Cloud Developer Extensibility applications to the SAP BTP ABAP Cloud environment when the applications significantly impact the runtime resources on the performance or cost of your S/4HANA system.
As I will explain in my next article, the SAP BTP ABAP environment can also be a good option for SAP solution partners to provide additional S/4HANA functionality in a software-as-a-service model.
Conclusion
SAP supports many different S/4HANA Extensibility Options described in this article to help customers solve gaps in supporting their business processes with S/4HANA. SAP analyzes customers’ needs by examining SAP ECC and translating this into options, considering their clean-core strategy for S/4HANA. This allows customers to adjust their business processes and offers many opportunities for SAP solution partners and cloud vendors to add value to the SAP ecosystem.
