Extending SAP Public Cloud by design: how NTIC builds on BTP without touching the core

NTIC, Northern Technologies International Corporation, is a materials science company headquartered in Circle Pines, Minnesota. It has been live on SAP S/4HANA Public Cloud for two years. Circle Pines and Beachwood, Ohio, run it today. Mexico and Dubai are next.

Public Cloud keeps the core current and puts it off limits. That ended the old argument about customization. It also left a practical question. If the core cannot change, where does everything else go? Reporting, automation and AI all needed a place to run outside the core.

Order processing showed what was at stake. On prepayment terms nothing ships until the money lands, and getting there takes four manual steps. A customer service rep holds the order with a manual block. Accounting builds a proforma invoice by hand so the customer has something to pay against. When the payment is applied, a notification goes back to the rep, who returns to release the order. Then the final invoice shows the full amount instead of the balance owed, and the customer calls to ask why.

NTIC and Mindset built one extension path into a core NTIC does not modify. The people who run orders work in Fiori apps on SAP BTP, including the Create and Manage Sales Order apps, and the extension logic lives on BTP, where the rules allow it. Integration goes through SAP's released APIs, with identity carried through once. Underneath sits S/4HANA Public Cloud, standard and current. The cost of that path was paid once.

Mindset started by sitting with the work. We ran design thinking sessions with the people who run the orders, instead of writing a requirements document. Then came reporting and analytics enablement on BTP in 2025, the first thing NTIC put on the platform. Data came before automation and before AI, on purpose. The business stopped debating what was possible and ranked what was worth doing. Prepayment order processing came off the top of that list. It was a problem the business already complained about.

The prepayment build was in flight when NTIC presented in September 2026, with two workstreams in scope. Once it is live, orders on 50 percent prepayment terms will block automatically at completion. The system will generate the first invoice. Accounting will apply the payment and release the order the same way a credit block is released, and the order will flow to shipping. The second invoice will generate on shipment, for the balance owed.

NTIC has a clean core and one path for everything built on top of it. Reporting and analytics have run on that path since 2025, and every build since has landed there with Mindset. NTIC's own view, from the deck, is that putting the data layer first is why each build since has cost less than the one before it.

The prepayment automation was still in flight when NTIC presented, so what follows is what it is designed to change, not a result we are claiming. The rep will no longer set a manual block or come back to release it. Accounting will apply the payment and release the order, one person instead of two. The handoff will go away, and the order will move when the money lands. The customer will get an invoice for half up front and a second for the balance on shipment, both correct. The target is zero proforma invoices built by hand.

Joule was in NTIC's test environment at the time, on the same path. The questions are plain ones: where a sales order stands, which orders are at risk of running late, and which deliveries and purchase orders are sitting unmoved. Moving it to production is one of NTIC's priorities under evaluation, not committed work. It waits until NTIC knows which questions the business wants answered and what an agent may touch.

Enis Baftiu, IT Director at NTIC, presented the journey with Robb Neuenschwander of Mindset at SAP Connect Days for AI + Data Leaders in Chicago in September 2026. The deck is below, as presented.