Unlocking Clean Core with SAP Advanced Event Mesh: A Guide to Decoupling and Scalability

The article discusses the SAP Clean Core Principle, which is a foundational principle for enterprises looking to future-proof their SAP landscape. It emphasizes the importance of decoupling custom logic from the application server to external APIs, ensuring agility, scalability, and reducing upgrade complexity. The article highlights SAP Advanced Event Mesh (AES) as a powerful enabler of this Clean Core approach, enabling event-driven architectures and real-time communication across hybrid landscapes. It also provides an example of how AES can be used to achieve Clean Core in action, by decoupling BP onboarding in SAP S/4HANA from custom ABAP enhancements and direct API calls.

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital transformation, enterprises are increasingly seeking strategies to future-proof their SAP landscapes. The SAP Clean Core Principle stands out as a foundational approach, emphasizing the importance of decoupling custom logic from the application server to external APIs. This strategy ensures agility, scalability, and reduces upgrade complexity, making it essential for enterprises aiming to stay competitive.

One of the most powerful enablers of this Clean Core approach is SAP Advanced Event Mesh (AES), an enterprise-grade event brokering solution. AES supports real-time, event-driven architectures across hybrid landscapes, facilitating asynchronous communication and loose integration. By decoupling the source of truth (such as S/4HANA, SuccessFactors, or C4C) from consumers (external apps, extensions, and APIs), AES enables a Clean Core strategy that minimizes extensions and decouples them from the standard, keeping the core ERP clean and easily upgradeable.

A practical example of Clean Core in action is BP Onboarding in SAP S/4HANA. Without Clean Core, custom ABAP enhancements in S/4HANA trigger BP Creation/Change Events and direct API calls to downstream applications. This approach can lead to new code or regression testing with each new consumer or change. However, with Clean Core and AES, S/4 HANA triggers the BP Creation Event via the Event Enablement Cockpit. AES captures the events and routes them to all subscribers, allowing consumers to perform the required logic without modifying the core system. This results in no enhancements, no code in the core, and just events and clean extensions.

The benefits of Clean Core and AES are numerous. They enable side-by-side extensibility using SAP BTP, ensuring that the core ERP remains clean and easily upgradeable. This approach reduces Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) and accelerates innovation cycles. Additionally, AES supports multiple consumers with minimal configuration overhead, making it scalable across hybrid landscapes.

In conclusion, embracing SAP Advanced Event Mesh as the foundation of your integration and extension strategy ensures that you're not only building for the present but also for the future. With AES, you unlock a Clean Core architecture that is upgradeable, extensible, decoupled, and scalable.

References:
[1] https://community.sap.com/t5/technology-blog-posts-by-members/clean-core-by-design-using-sap-advanced-event-mesh-aes-as-the-first/ba-p/14171238
[2] https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/sabre-sabr-q2-revenue-falls-1