E3 cover story
Successfully completing an S/4HANA migration with brownfield or greenfield lift-and-shift approaches rarely creates lasting value. Nova Intelligence takes a holistic Cleanfield approach: business-driven analysis that prepares SAP customers for S/4 conversion and downstream Composable ERP.
Explain why pure code conversion can fall short of its strategic potential.
Describe SAP technical debt as decades of unused custom code, modifications, and Z programs.
Frame Clean Core as an ongoing discipline, not a one-time migration milestone.
Brownfield and greenfield lift-and-shift programs can move an SAP estate, but they rarely unlock the full strategic value of transformation. Even code conversion under Clean Core guidelines can preserve unnecessary complexity if it is treated as a technical translation rather than a business analysis.
Inside long-standing SAP customers, decades of ABAP freedom created massive webs of technical debt. Z programs, custom modifications, and highly specific in-house developments once looked like competitive advantage. Today, millions of lines of customer-specific code often remain unused, while still increasing maintenance cost, system instability, and security risk.
"SAP landscapes are never finished," explains Professor Alexander Zeier, co-inventor of SAP HANA and co-founder of Nova Intelligence. Regulatory requirements, new business models, functional extensions, and release changes keep raising the question of how custom code stays clean, maintainable, and close to standard - every quarter, over years.
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