Customer Mandate “Move entirely away from ABAP Dependency”

Customer Mandate

“Move entirely away from ABAP Dependency”

I recently heard a quote for an existing SpinifexIT customer, who recently purchased our Easy Payroll Control Center solution.

The Project Manager involved said ‘We have a mandate now to move entirely away from ABAP dependency’.

Whilst I’ve been an ABAP developer for over 20 years, I also can see the rationale. These days, I see many customers who are looking at what to do with their ABAP customization that they have built over the last few decades.

This is especially the case when customers are taking on a system upgrade to S/4HANA or even Employee Central/Employee Central Payroll. With these migrations, there are often decision points on whether to migrate current custom code, or to leave it behind.

Sometimes the code needs a redesign

Often though, it isn’t just a decision on whether to move the code or not. In many cases, there are scenarios where we see the need for redesign of existing ABAP code. Some common cases we are seeing include:

What are the alternatives?

For many customers, that code that they have built over the years, is also very similar to some of the commercially available products that you see on the SAP store. I would highly recommend checking these out before completely deciding on whether to take on a large project to re-engineer your functionality, or even build new functionality.

I might be biased (I’m a co-founder of SpinifexIT), but after working with building Addon software for the last 20 years, I have seen the value that this can bring to many customers, without them having to take on the IT burden with additional technical debt.

For many of the key tasks around SAP HXM/SuccessFactors, we purposely look to build out robust solutions for many of the most common areas that customers often need additional functionality. More than just solving the problem you might have today, we also take on the responsibility of adding functionality to make our tools work as SAP evolves.

Take for example our Easy Reporter solution. This has now been available for nearly 20 years, but over this time, we have seen constant evolvements as SAP changes. With the constant need for additional data sources inside of SAP, the addition of SuccessFactors, with the Payroll Control Center Decluster reporting, and then working through various Employee Self Service / Manager Self Service solutions over the years, our customers have been able to keep up with this without needing a development team. SpinifexIT simply supplies a new release every 6 months.

As an example: Our latest upcoming release has brought out a complete new Fiori front end for Easy Reporter report execution.

Use your ABAP team to differentiate your business

I’m not saying to go and fire your ABAP team tomorrow. But, having them constantly making small modifications or additional versions of reports to meet the business needs, isn’t the best use of their time.

My suggestion is to keep a core team of developers on hand, we use them in areas that truly can differentiate a customer. Having an ABAP team build reports or other functionality that can be brought off the shelf doesn’t make sense. Not only is it costly and time consuming, in most cases it also won’t have as much functionality.

Using that same team to build functionality that truly differentiates the customer from their competitors or makes them more efficient though, makes sense. For example: A customer who has a unique type of business that needs additional screens or functionality to enhance that business makes sense to build that, as there is likely nothing commercially available.