Modernizing and Extending SAP Applications with BTP: Future-Proofing Your SAP Application Investments

This blog is the third in a series dedicated to exploring the role of SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTP) from an Enterprise Architect’s perspective. The first blog in this series, titled “Introduction: The Enterprise Architect’s Mandate in a Rapidly Evolving IT Landscape”, set the stage for this series by giving an overview of how BTP impacts the dimensions of EA. The second entry, titled, “How SAP BTP Empowers Business Capabilities & Drives Value Across the Enterprise”, introduced concepts of BTP in the context of Business Architecture. This blog explores the concepts of BTP’s impact on Application Architecture.

The Enterprise Architect’s Role in SAP Application Modernization

For Enterprise Architects (EAs), modernizing SAP applications is not just about upgrading technology. Modernization is also about ensuring that core business applications remain adaptable, scalable, and aligned with evolving business needs. When evaluating application portfolio health, these characteristics are important elements to consider.

SAP’s core solutions, including products such as S/4HANA, ECC, Ariba, SuccessFactors, Concur, and EWM, deliver robust, best-practice business capabilities. However, every organization has unique workflows, automation needs, and industry-specific requirements that standard SAP solutions may not fully address.

Historically, enterprises modified their SAP ECC or S/4HANA environments with custom code to address these gaps, often creating long-term technical debt that complicated upgrades, increased maintenance costs, and reduced system flexibility.

Enter SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP)

SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) provides an alternative (often more desirable) method to extend SAP applications without modifying the core. This platform allows enterprises to:

  • Extend SAP business processes while keeping the core system upgradeable
  • Automate workflows to improve efficiency and eliminate manual effort
  • Enhance user experience (UX) through modern, intuitive application interfaces
  • Develop scalable, high-performing applications using cloud-native principles
  • Connect SAP solutions to other enterprise applications, enabling seamless data exchange and process extension.

Importantly, BTP works whether an enterprise is running S/4HANA or ECC. While S/4HANA customers gain additional benefits from deep Fiori and AI-powered integrations, BTP is equally powerful for ECC customers looking to modernize legacy applications, integrate cloud solutions, or prepare for a future S/4 migration.

This blog explores how SAP BTP empowers enterprise application architecture, ensuring that SAP investments remain agile, scalable, and future-ready.

The Case for Application Modernization: Why Extend SAP Applications?

While SAP applications provide strong out-of-the-box business functionality, every enterprise has unique processes that require:

  • Custom workflows and automation to reduce manual effort
  • Application extensions to support industry-specific or business-specific requirements that deviate from standard
  • Seamless integrations between SAP and third-party applications that support upstream or downstream processes
  • Improved user experience (UX) for higher productivity or to account for unique usage in specific environments

Challenges of Traditional SAP Customization

While there are worthwhile reasons for extending application architectures, these customizations should be attempted with care. Following are a few of the unintended consequences that might be introduced:

  • Technical debt: Hardcoded changes to ECC or S/4HANA core objects make future upgrades complex and costly.
  • Limited agility: Tightly-coupled, custom ABAP modifications can lock organizations into rigid system designs.
  • Integration challenges: Legacy architectures may struggle to connect SAP with modern cloud services.

How SAP BTP Solves These Challenges

  • Extends SAP applications without modifying the core, ensuring upgradeability.
  • Support hybrid landscapes, integrating on-prem ECC or S4/HANA with cloud-based SAP or other software and platform innovations.
  • Provides cloud-native tools for rapid application development, automation, and UX improvements.

SAP BTP ensures that organizations can modernize SAP applications today without disrupting core ERP stability that will impact their future.

Clean-Core Extensions: How SAP BTP Enables Scalable Application Extensions

A clean-core strategy ensures that custom application extensions are built outside the core SAP system or done in supported methods within the system, maintaining system integrity and long-term agility.

Key SAP BTP Services for Application Extensions

SAP Build Apps: Rapidly create custom business applications without deep coding expertise using drag-and-drop development tools and prebuilt content and connectors.

  • Example: A custom employee travel request app that integrates with Concur.

SAP Build: Build advanced extensions using Java, Node.js, or ABAP in the cloud.

SAP Work Zone: Create role-based workspaces integrating SAP and third-party systems into a single user experience and entry point with federated security.

  • Example: A supplier portal integrating Ariba purchase orders with real-time shipment tracking.

SAP Integration Suite: Accelerates development with hundreds of prebuilt connectors for SAP ECC, S/4HANA, and cloud-based (SAP and non-SAP) applications.

  • Example: Automating order fulfillment by integrating SAP Sales Orders with a third-party logistics system.

SAP BTP enables scalable, modular extensions that work for both ECC and S/4HANA customers, ensuring long-term flexibility and upgradeability.

Automating Business Processes: Workflow and Process Optimization with BTP

Business process automation is a key driver of enterprise efficiency. Taking time and effort out of the manual execution steps drives hard dollar savings and frees critical resources up for more valuable activities. SAP BTP enables enterprises to automate workflows, eliminate manual tasks, and optimize operational efficiency.

Key BTP Capabilities for Workflow Automation

SAP Build Process Automation (BPA): Low-code automation for SAP workflows that can guide process steps and automate backend process execution.

  •  Example: Automating multi-step approval workflows for vendor contracts in SAP Ariba or S/4HANA.

SAP AI Services: AI-powered automation for document processing, fraud detection, and customer interactions

  • Example: AI-driven invoice matching to eliminate manual reconciliation in SAP FI.

SAP Advanced Event Mesh: Real-time, event-driven automation across platforms

  • Example: Automatically triggering a parts order in SAP EWM when warehouse stock falls below a certain threshold.

BTP-powered automation transforms SAP workflows into intelligent, self-operating processes and interactions, reducing manual effort and increasing operational speed while reducing errors and costly rework.

Enhancing User Experience: Modern UI & Digital Experience with BTP

Enterprise applications must be intuitive and accessible for business users. SAP BTP enables modern UX development, making SAP applications more engaging, mobile-friendly, and productivity-driven.

BTP Services for UX Modernization

 SAP Fiori Elements & SAPUI5: Tools to accelerate the development of consistent, intuitive UX for SAP applications

  • Example: A customized Fiori dashboard for procurement teams that consolidates spend analytics from SAP Ariba and S/4HANA.

SAP Work Zone: Personalized workspaces combining SAP and non-SAP content

  • Example: A unified HR portal integrating SuccessFactors, payroll, and benefits management in a single view.

SAP Mobile Development Kit (MDK): Tools to build mobile-first UI for field operations. MDK enables developers to compile code for native deployments to iOS and Android devices, as well as mobile app deployments.

  • Example: A mobile warehouse scanning app for SAP EWM, reducing stock-tracking and goods movement errors.

BTP development tools and services ensure that SAP applications are not just powerful, but also intuitive, user-friendly, reliable, and mobile-accessible.

Ensuring Performance & Scalability in Application Extensions

SAP BTP is built for enterprise-scale performance, ensuring that application extensions remain robust, responsive, and highly available.

Key Capabilities for Performance Optimization

SAP HANA Cloud: In-memory database for ultra-fast analytics and reporting. SAP HANA Cloud’s multi-model engine can be leveraged for a variety of data requirements, supporting relational, document store, geospatial, graph, vector, and time series. 

  • Example: Real-time sales performance dashboards for global business units.

SAP BTP, Kyma Runtime: A fully managed Kubernetes-based runtime, Kyma enables serverless computing for scalable, event-driven applications and extensions.

  • Example: A chatbot for automated customer inquiries that scales during peak usage periods.

SAP BTP, Cloud Foundry Runtime: Platform as a Service (PaaS) for containerized application deployment with elastic scalability. This multi-tenant runtime natively supports development with Java, Node.js and Python.

  • Example: Hosting microservices for AI-powered demand forecasting models.

SAP BTP, ABAP Environment: Cloud-optimized ABAP platform based on SAP HANA Cloud that serves as a development and runtime environment for cloud apps.

SAP Application Logging Service: Enables developers to stream logs of bound applications to a central application logging stack, simplifying monitoring and application management activities.

BTP delivers high-performance, scalable application extensions that grow with enterprise needs. There area a variety of technology choices and deployment options available to meet the needs of a variety of development shops.

Conclusion: Why SAP BTP is Essential for Application Modernization

For Enterprise Architects, SAP BTP is the foundation of modern SAP application landscapes. Whether running ECC, S/4HANA, or hybrid environments, BTP enables:

✔  Extensibility without customization debt (Clean Core Strategy)
✔  Process automation for increased efficiency
✔  User-centric applications with modern UX
✔  Scalable, high-performance application deployments

SAP BTP ensures that organizations can future-proof their SAP investments, keeping applications agile, upgrade-ready, and business-driven.

Next Up in the Series:

“Building a Scalable, High-Performance SAP Infrastructure with BTP”

  • Exploring Cloud-Native SAP Deployments
  • BTP’s Role in Enterprise Scalability

Stay tuned! 

Robb Neuenschwander is a seasoned technology leader with a proven record of driving innovation, strategy and business value. In his role as Principal Architect, Robb partners with Mindset's strategic clients to drive large-scale digital transformation efforts, at the intersection of business and technology strategy. He has a passion for building architectures that scale and enable strategic value and growth, leveraging leading innovation and technology solutions. He is also passionate about Mindset's core values and building capabilities and maturity in a rapidly growing organization.

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