Retrospective editorial — prepared in September 2026 and filed under 2025 for the IntVerse archive.
An SAP modernization program changes more than the application at its center. It can affect the order that arrives from a commerce platform, the shipment confirmation returned by a warehouse, and the customer record used by a service team. A migration plan needs to account for those dependencies before deciding which interfaces to rebuild.
Start with one business process
Choose a process with a clear beginning and end, such as order fulfillment. Trace the information it needs across SAP and adjacent applications. Record where each business event originates, which system owns the record, and what confirms successful completion.
The useful deliverable is an inventory that an operations team can act on. For each interface, capture its owner, business purpose, data contract, frequency, authentication method, recovery procedure, and dependent processes. Include spreadsheets and manual handoffs. They often explain how people compensate for gaps in the formal design.
Separate business requirements from inherited implementation
An existing interface may contain valuable business rules alongside workarounds that no longer serve a purpose. Review those separately. Ask whether the receiving system still needs every field, whether the timing requirement remains valid, and whether the rule belongs in the source application, the integration layer, or a downstream workflow.
SAP’s clean-core guidance emphasizes supported approaches to extending and integrating the ERP environment. The appropriate approach depends on the deployment and available interfaces; a design should be checked against the documentation for the actual system version.
Sequence change around recoverability
Begin with a bounded integration whose behavior can be compared with the existing process. Define reconciliation checks before cutover: expected record counts, business totals, processing delays, and exception queues. Assign someone to decide when a discrepancy requires a pause.
Document how to return to the previous path. A rollback plan needs to address transactions already processed, not only how to restore a connection. Duplicate orders and missing acknowledgments can outlast a technically successful rollback.
Make the inventory an operating asset
Keep interface ownership and recovery instructions current after migration. A useful modernization outcome is a landscape that the next team can understand, change, and support without depending on undocumented knowledge.
A practical next step: select one important process and review its integration inventory with both its business owner and support team. Their disagreements usually reveal the questions the migration plan still needs to answer.
Reference: SAP guidance on clean-core extensibility.
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