This blog is grounded in official SAP documentation and thought leadership published on sap.com, enhanced with our point of view based on what we see across our customer base in real-life SAP transformation programs.
Over time, many SAP ERP systems accumulate extensive custom code, modifications, and tightly coupled integrations. While often created to meet specific business needs, these changes frequently increase complexity, technical debt, and operational risk. As a result, system upgrades become more expensive, innovation slows down, and organizations struggle to adopt new SAP capabilities.
SAP introduced the clean core concept to address exactly these challenges. A clean core enables organizations to keep their ERP system close to the SAP standard while still allowing differentiation through controlled and upgrade-safe extensibility. This approach supports faster upgrades, lower total cost of ownership, improved system stability, and continuous access to SAP innovations.
Clean core is also a key pillar of RISE with SAP, where the goal is not only a technical conversion, but a sustainable transformation that allows customers to innovate continuously without disrupting their ERP backbone.
According to SAP, the clean core concept is based on keeping the ERP core system standardized, transparent, and upgrade-stable, while enabling innovation through modern extension approaches.
From SAP’s perspective, the “core” includes multiple dimensions:
A system is considered “clean” when best practices are consistently applied across all these dimensions. This does not mean eliminating all customization. Instead, it means:
A clean core ERP remains upgrade-ready and resilient, allowing organizations to adopt new SAP releases and innovations with minimal disruption.
SAP redefined clean core in 2025 and introduced levels from A to D, where A is the cleanest and D is the lowest level of cleanness. See below the overview of the levels.
Adopting a clean core approach delivers tangible business and IT benefits that go far beyond technical elegance. SAP positions clean core as a key enabler for sustainable value realization across the enterprise.
Faster Adoption of Innovation
By minimizing modifications in the ERP core and relying on SAP standards, customers can adopt new SAP releases, innovations, and cloud capabilities more quickly. Upgrade cycles become predictable and significantly less disruptive, enabling continuous innovation rather than large, infrequent transformation projects.
Improved Operational Efficiency
Standardized processes, reduced custom code, and clearer system architecture lead to more efficient operations. IT teams spend less time maintaining legacy customizations and more time supporting business improvements and innovation.
Enhanced Employee Engagement
Clean core environments support more consistent user experiences and enable faster rollout of new functionalities. This improves usability for business users and reduces frustration caused by outdated or overly complex custom solutions.
Reduced Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Lower maintenance effort, fewer upgrade issues, and reduced dependency on custom developments directly translate into lower long-term costs. Clean core helps shift IT spending from technical debt management toward value-adding initiatives.
Lower Risk and Higher Stability
By avoiding deep core modifications and using SAP-released APIs and extensibility mechanisms, organizations significantly reduce operational and upgrade risks. Systems become more stable, resilient, and easier to govern.
Higher Scalability and Future Readiness
A clean core architecture scales more easily with business growth and change. It provides a future-ready foundation for cloud adoption, integration with new solutions, and evolving business models.
Achieving a clean core is not a one-time activity. SAP clearly positions clean core as a journey rather than a binary state. Systems are not simply “clean” or “not clean” – they become cleaner over time through conscious architectural and governance decisions.
Key elements of this journey include:
Assess the Current State
The first step is understanding the existing landscape: custom code footprint, modifications, integrations, data quality, and operational practices. This provides transparency on where technical debt exists and where the biggest risks and opportunities are.
Favor Standardization
Wherever feasible, SAP standard processes should replace custom-built alternatives. SAP continuously enhances standard functionality, and many historical customizations can now be retired without business impact.
Use Modern Extensibility
SAP recommends side-by-side extensibility using SAP BTP, as well as clean extensibility approaches such as ABAP Cloud and released APIs. This keeps innovations decoupled from the core and protects upgrade stability.
Improve Governance Continuously
Clean core requires clear development guidelines, architectural principles, and lifecycle governance to prevent the reintroduction of technical debt.
Most importantly, progress should be incremental. Each step toward a cleaner core delivers value, reduces risk, and prepares the system for future innovation.
Clean Core Is a Journey, Not a Checkbox
Based on our experience, the most successful organizations approach clean core as a long-term transformation journey. There is no single moment where a system suddenly becomes “clean.” Instead, each improvement makes the system cleaner, more stable, and easier to evolve.
Start With an Assessment and a Roadmap
As SOA People, our first recommendation is always to start with an assessment of the as-is situation. This assessment creates transparency across processes, custom code, integrations, and operations.
Based on this baseline, we help our customers build a realistic and prioritized roadmap that defines:
Deliver in Phases
Rather than aiming for perfection upfront, we recommend phased delivery with measurable outcomes. This allows business value to be realized early while steadily improving the cleanliness of the core system.
Partner for the Journey
Clean core is as much about mindset and governance as it is about technology. As SOA People, we support our customers throughout this journey – from assessment and roadmap definition to implementation and continuous optimization – ensuring alignment with SAP’s official guidance while staying grounded in real-world business needs.
Contact us to assess your situation and build a specific roadmap for your clean core journey.