Why Clean Core for your Journey to RISE and AI

As many organizations plan their move to RISE with SAP and S/4HANA, they often fall into a costly trap — skipping the critical step of Clean Core preparation. Influenced by cost constraints, limited internal expertise, or fear of losing custom functionality, many opt for a “path of least resistance” approach to their migration. This approach negates the promises of streamlined upgrades, cloud scalability, and future innovation that are a big part of the S/4HANA experience.

While RISE simplifies the infrastructure and delivery model, it doesn't fix the technical baggage you bring along — years of accumulated customizations, degraded integrations, improperly defined roles, and bloated data volumes. These legacy issues can silently undermine your transformation, inflating cost and complexity while curbing innovation.

That’s where Clean Core — and the Applexus approach to RISE — come in.

What Is a Clean Core?

A Clean Core SAP system is lean, modular, and future-ready. It minimizes custom code, embraces Fit-to-Standard processes, uses secure APIs for integration, and separates business-specific enhancements from the core system.

This approach isn’t just about technical hygiene — it’s about enabling agility, scalability, and continuous innovation, especially in a cloud-first, AI-driven world.

What Happens When You Skip Clean Core?

Organizations that bypass Clean Core in their RISE strategy often face deeper issues after go-live. Here’s how:

1. Escalating Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Migrating excess, outdated, or low-quality data into S/4HANA can significantly inflate your TCO:

• Increased storage and hosting costs from unnecessary historical and duplicate data
• More intensive data migration and testing efforts
• Higher complexity in system performance tuning and monitoring

Excessive technical clutter not only drives up infrastructure costs but increases the burden on ongoing operations — and these costs repeat over time.

2. Slower Innovation Cycles

Outdated configurations and custom logic make your system fragile. Any upgrade or patch requires extensive regression testing and manual adjustments.

This leads to:

• Delays in adopting SAP innovations
• Difficulty implementing automation
• Longer time-to-market for new capabilities

Without a Clean Core, innovation becomes an uphill battle, not a strategic advantage.

3. Access Control Risks and Role Sprawl

Over time, SAP environments accumulate roles that evolve without oversight. Common issues include:

• Legacy SoD (Segregation of Duties) violations
• Inactive or overly privileged users
• Roles that don’t align with actual job functions

This creates compliance challenges and increases licensing costs through unnecessary Full User Equivalents (FUEs). Clean Core helps resolve this by streamlining roles and reinforcing governance.

4. Data Quality Challenges

Bringing in low-quality data — duplicate records, incomplete fields, or inactive master data — compromises the integrity of your business processes. It also results in:

• Poor analytics and reporting reliability
• Higher migration and validation effort
• Non-compliance with data privacy or retention mandates

A Clean Core strategy mandates data cleansing and archival, ensuring you move only what adds value.

5. Integration Breakdown Over Time

Legacy integrations degrade as SAP releases new versions, patches, and internal table changes. These can break custom logic and require frequent manual fixes.

This hampers your ability to:

• Integrate new apps and services
• Scale with modular solutions
• Leverage SAP BTP and cloud-native workflows

Clean Core eliminates outdated integration logic in favor of modern APIs and SAP-supported connectors.

6. Curbing Your AI and Automation Potential

AI thrives on clean, structured, and well-governed data. When your SAP system is filled with noise — from duplicated records to patchy processes — it becomes nearly impossible to unlock intelligent insights.

Skipping Clean Core means:

• Inconsistent data sets for analytics and prediction
• Lower trust in automated processes
• Difficulty in deploying agentic or generative AI solutions

Clean Core lays the foundation for trustworthy, scalable, AI-enabled operations.

Clean Core: Your Launchpad to RISE and AI

This isn’t about limiting flexibility — it’s about reclaiming control. Clean Core makes your ERP smarter, faster, and safer to evolve. When done right, it enables:

• Faster, less disruptive upgrades
• Cost-effective operations through process simplification
• Stronger compliance via secure, role-based access
• AI readiness built on clean, connected data
• Modular, extensible architecture aligned with SAP’s roadmap

Clean Core isn’t a technical side task — it’s a strategic business enabler.

Common Clean Core Challenges (And How to Solve Them)

Implementing Clean Core can seem complex, but the right tools and approach to remove the friction. Here's what typically stands in the way:

1. Resistance to Standardization

Teams familiar with custom workflows may resist standardization. This requires strong change management and leadership alignment to shift mindsets and expectations.

2. Custom Code Cleanup Complexity

Many systems are overloaded with outdated custom code. But with automation from tools like CeleRITE, identifying and retiring unused code becomes efficient, not burdensome.

3. Cloud Extensibility Skill Gaps

Moving from classic ABAP to cloud-native models like SAP BTP can pose learning curves. Training and guided enablement ease this transition.

4. Siloed Ownership

Clean Core needs cross-functional collaboration. Without alignment between business, IT, data, and compliance teams, the initiative stalls. Early stakeholder engagement is key.

5. Data Migration Risk

Data is often the biggest unknown. Cleansing and de-duping before migration ensures you don’t carry the mess into your new environment — a process made smoother by CeleRITE’s data tools.

Operationalizing Clean Core with CeleRITE

Applexus’ CeleRITE is a powerful automation suite designed to assess, score, and transform your SAP system — quickly and with minimal disruption.

It targets six key transformation areas:

1. Custom Code Optimization

Retire unused code, eliminate clones, and align development practices with SAP's clean extensibility model.

2. Integration Modernization

Replace fragile point-to-point connections with scalable APIs and leverage SAP Cloud Integration tools for robust connectivity.

3. Data Quality & Migration Readiness

Cleanse and archive legacy data to establish a trusted, AI-ready foundation for analytics and advanced insights.

4. Access Control Optimization

Remove outdated roles, resolve Segregation of Duties (SoD) conflicts, and minimize licensing overhead.

5. Landscape Rationalization

Consolidate systems, retire obsolete components, and streamline data sources to support a modern digital core.

Process & Configuration Alignment

Adopt Fit-to-Standard practices to standardize workflows, reduce system drift, and improve overall operational consistency.

Real Business Impact: From Assessment to Action

A leading organic and natural food retailer partnered with Applexus to prepare for RISE. Using CeleRITE, they:

• Reduced custom code by 70%, simplifying upgrades and maintenance
• Shrunk their database footprint by 65%, cutting infrastructure cost
• Achieved 100% resolution of data quality issues, enabling better decision-making
• Transitioned 75% of integrations to secure, scalable APIs
• Streamlined access control with 45% fewer roles, improving compliance and reducing FUE cost

These improvements didn’t just inform change — they enabled it.

Clean Core scorecard – Before vs After:

Applexus CeleRITE generated the below scorecard before and after. You can see significant improvement on all six dimensions.

What to Expect: The CeleRITE Two-Week Assessment

Applexus offers a structured, low-disruption engagement to kickstart your Clean Core journey with CeleRITE:

Week 1

• SAP landscape discovery
• Data validation
• CeleRITE tool execution across dimensions

Week 2

• Stakeholder workshops
• Final Clean Core Scorecard
• Transformation roadmap aligned with your RISE and AI goals

You walk away with clarity, a quantifiable system health check, and a fact-based plan to modernize.

Final Thoughts: Don’t Just Migrate SAP — Modernize It

RISE with SAP is your opportunity to reimagine ERP — but only if your core is ready. Clean Core isn’t a checkbox. It’s the foundation for innovation, compliance, and intelligent automation.

And CeleRITE doesn’t just diagnose the gaps — it helps close them. Before, during, or even after your migration.

Ready to clean up your SAP core and future-proof your business?

Schedule your Clean Core Assessment with Applexus now!